Kurt Elling – November 25-26 at City Winery Chicago

Kurt Elling is set to perform for two nights at City Winery Chicago on Saturday, November 25 and Sunday, November 26 with sets at 5:00pm and 8:00pm in support of his 2016 Christmas release The Beautiful Day (OKeh Records). Elling will be joined by pianist Stu Mindeman, guitarist John McLean, bassist Clark Sommers and drummer Christian Euman.

When Kurt Elling embraced the meaning, the spirit and the word “Christmas” in creating his new album The Beautiful Day, he also wanted to make a holiday album that celebrated the promise and magical energy of the Christmas season that touches people of all beliefs. Inventive and fresh, The Beautiful Day reimagines the sounds of Christmas, mixing traditional carols decked out in new arrangements with songs that are revelations and rediscovered treats.

While its vibrant pedigree is jazz, the album allowed Elling’s imagination to range far and wide in finding the right songs to hit what he called “a sweet spot.”

“In the Western world, whether you’re a Christian or not, Christmas has some kind of seasonal relevance to you,” Elling said. “You can’t really escape the holiday — even if it’s just coming at you on television … For me, the holiday comes enriched with a lot of beautiful personal memories. It also comes freighted with the knowledge that millions of other people around the world carry their own such memories; and not all those memories are of happy occasions. So it was daunting to take on something with so much history and resonance. I hope that with this material I found a sweet spot.”

Included on The Beautiful Day are traditional carols — “Little Drummer Boy” and “We Three Kings” — in striking new arrangements, as well as the wistful folk-rock of Dan Fogelberg (“Same Old Lang Syne”) and the jazz-and-gospel-influenced soul of Donny Hathaway (“This Christmas”). A trio of popular contemporary Christmas songs — Terre Roche’s “Star of Wonder,” Alfred Burt & Wihla Hutson’s “Some Children See Him,” and Claude & Ruth Thornhill’s “Snowfall” — are heard, as well as a recent arrival, “The Snow is Deep on the Ground” by John Hollenbeck & Kenneth Patchen. Elling also created a new song (“The Michigan Farm”), writing lyrics to a melody by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg.

A charming rediscovery on The Beautiful Day is a handful of songs — including the album’s title track, with a vocal by Elling’s daughter Luiza — from Leslie Bricusse’s Oscar nominated but often overlooked score for the film musical Scrooge (1970), based on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Throughout The Beautiful Day, the beloved Czech carol “Wenceslas” — with its tale of Christmas love and generosity of spirit — appears three times, the basis for strikingly different musical impressions of the atmosphere of Christmas.

“It’s a funny thing, going in to make a Christmas record — a strange, exhilarating, challenging
thing — especially when your father was a church musician, as mine was, and so much of your childhood was based around the church calendar and preparing music for religious observances,” Elling said. “The music on this album has meaning; it’s inclusive; it’s seasonal, by which I mean the actual season of winter in North America; and it has a little bit of searching weight to it – avoiding, I hope, the usual seasonal cliché.”

 

Kurt Elling · The Beautiful Day

 OKeh Records · Release Date: October 28, 2016

 

For media information, please contact:

DL Media · 610-667-0501

Matthew Jurasek · matthew@dlmediamusic.com

Gabrielle Howarth · gabrielle@dlmediamusic.com

 

For the Preferred Artist

 

Information and press materials (including album covers, promotional photos 

and bios) on all DL Media artists can be found at our website: dlmediamusic.com

 

###