I'm one of the culprits who keeps turning stuff around, shaking up original tunes and trying to stand the canon on its ear. But sometimes, you just need to sing the song.
Interpretation
Creativity involves both experimentation and tradition; sometimes it's necessary to embrace the original.
In this quote, Kurt Elling reflects on the dual nature of artistic expression, where one often feels compelled to innovate and rework existing pieces to create something new. However, he acknowledges that there are moments when it is equally important to honor and simply perform the original creation, highlighting the balance between creativity and respect for tradition in art.
In practice
A musician might use this quote when discussing their approach to covers and remixes at a concert.
It helps me to learn things in different languages, even if it's just phonetically, and to make myself vulnerable to other audiences by trying to reflect back to them the genius of their own cultures, and to do that, oftentimes, in new jazz settings, new arrangements. It's a way to show respect.
That's the thing: There are so many art songs in jazz. It's a much more rich experience for the singer than people think.
I try to stick with things that I can sing with honesty.
One doesn't have to scat to be a jazz singer.
Martial arts, like any art, is an unrestricted athletic expression of an individual soul.
You can't expect someone born into a family with no music...to understand when I'm conducting the Schönberg Variations.
Photography has become so fundamental to the way we see that 'photography' and 'seeing' are becoming more and more synonymous. The ubiquity of photography is, perhaps ironically, a challenge to curators, practitioners, and critics.
It is not my job to compare my movies. I don't like to compare my films with other movies because I don't really have that perspective. It is an intellectual exercise, but it doesn't intuitively come to me.
You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.
To make music means to express human intelligence by sonic means. This is intelligence in its broadest sense, which includes not only the peregrinations of pure logic but also the "logic" of emotions and intuition. My musical techniques, although often rigorous in their internal structure, leave many openings through which the most complex and mysterious factors of the intelligence may penetrate.
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