Kurt Elling on collaborating with the SNJO: 'They're an excellent, excellent big band'

Kurt Elling performing with the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra at the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, in December 2017 | Getty Images

Don’t you wonder what we’ll find

Steppin’ out tonight …

That rhetorical question, posed by Joe Jackson’s 1982 top-ten hit, will be answered in no uncertain manner by the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra, when they renew their celebrated creative partnership with the multi-Grammy-winning American singer Kurt Elling at the end of this month, in a Steppin’ Out tour that will take them to Elgin, Perth, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Directed as ever by saxophonist Tommy Smith, the SNJO and Elling will vividly re-imagine an intriguingly diverse and cross-genre repertoire spanning seven decades of jazz and popular music, ranging from Duke Ellington to The Police, Rodgers and Hart to Weather Report, and not forgetting that titular Joe Jackson number.

Elling has allied his rich, octave leaping-baritone with the formidable instrumental forces of the SNJO numerous times over the years, as he recalls, speaking from his native Chicago.

“I’ve been so fortunate to have had so many occasions with Tommy and this excellent, excellent big band, and we’ve tried out a bunch of different things, a lot of experimentation and a lot of challenges for ourselves and for our audiences.

“This time we really wanted more to have a kind of family reunion. The world is in such a state, it’s a crazy time and sometimes you just want to swing, have some laughs and be together and enjoy each other’s company.”

The programme, he agrees, is an engagingly diverse one, although Elling has never been a singer to stick purely to one strand of jazz, as demonstrated by projects as varied as his Frank Sinatra tribute and his more recent, funk and R&B suffused Superblue project with guitarist Charlie Hunter.

“What’s going to make it all hang together,” he says, “is the quality of the charts, the quality of the playing – and, of course, everything will be pitched into the jazz idiom. It’ll be a swinging night and we’ll make it work in the best possible way.”

In fact, songs from these two aforementioned projects feature among the tour programme: Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me and, from Superblue, Carla Bley’s Endless Lawns as well as Steppin’ Out itself. Other disparate song styles rubbing shoulders in the programme include Ellington’s I Like the Sunrise, Tea in the Sahara by the Police and the Rodgers and Hart standard You Are Too Beautiful.

Instrumentals will vary from the silky glide of Count Basie’s Lil’ Darlin’ to more contemporary classics such as Weather Report’s Three Views of a Secret and Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil. Bearing in mind his penchant for vocalese – artfully shaping his own or borrowed lyrics to established jazz instrumentals, the Shorter number, among others, may well morph into song, Elling suggests, laughing: “I continue to go down the road of my uninvited task, drawing or at least trying to draw instrumental compositions into the bag for jazz singers.”

During a long and happy relationship with the SNJO, Elling and Tommy Smith have shared a certain philosophical questing which has informed previous joint projects such as Syntopicon or Apparition Bridge and seems likely to manifest itself again in lyrics he says he’s planning to append to the Weather Report material.

For the SNJO’s artistic director, Elling is simply “a phenomenon.”

“Since 2012 he has collaborated with us on a series of captivating and diverse programmes, says Smith. “From honouring the legendary Frank Sinatra to crafting the seasonal spiritual experience of Spirit of Light and delving into profound philosophical themes, his artistic vision knows no bounds.”

Smith regards the forthcoming tour as an exciting way to open the big band’s 2024-25 season. “Steppin’ Out promises both the reassuringly familiar and, as jazz was once famously described, the sound of surprise.”

The SNJO with Kurt Elling play Elgin Town Hall on 26 September, Perth Concert Hall on the 27th, Glasgow Royal concert Hall on the 28th and the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, on the 29th. See www.snjo.co.uk