Kurt Elling: A Restless Soul Heads to Broadway

Interview, From the Magazine, Kurt Elling

By Phillip Lutz I Sep. 9, 2025

“Think of all the creative people I’m going to meet and a whole other way of thinking about music and a challenge of singing completely different material than I would have sung otherwise to my highest level in dedication to the moment,” Elling says about his Broadway run.
(Photo: Elliot Mandel)

Kurt Elling was back at home in Chicago, grabbing some family time in a late-June window between gigs. Sporting a smile and a baseball cap emblazoned with “FUTURE” in big red letters, the singer was allowing himself a moment of repose following the majestically hip take on Weather Report he and a quartet of jazz stalwarts — including drummer Peter Erskine, a veteran of the fusion supergroup led by Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter — had just delivered for the hometown crowd at the Ravinia Festival.

If Ravinia found Elling literally on the road — albeit a traffic-clogged one — he would in a few days be in the air, departing O’Hare Airport for a series of July dates in Europe at which Weather Report would again be the subject at hand, this time in concert with the Yellowjackets. Already, some of the material had been adapted for his Wildflowers duo and the WDR Big Band. With all the repurposing, the Weather Report project was becoming a major element in his oeuvre and a key source of satisfaction.

Yet, at 57 years old, Elling’s soul was as restless as ever, compelling him to ruminate about future endeavors even as he immersed himself in present ones. And one upcoming project in particular — his Broadway debut in the musical Hadestown — had lodged itself in his consciousness. So, despite Weather Report’s emerging status in Elling’s world, he couldn’t quite say that the European run would command his presence in every sense of the word.

“Physically, yes,” he said, adjusting his cap. “But I’ve got to put this Hadestown show in my head. I’ve got to come in hot on that. I don’t want to waste anybody’s time not being overprepared.”

Starting in August, when he would be rehearsing, and stretching from Sept. 2 through Jan. 25, when he would be onstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre, Elling would be taking over the central role of Hermes, the narrator around whom this phantasmagorical retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice revolves. Though the music is rooted in a kind of raw New Orleans folk sound with jazz influences, he would be the first of the 10 or more people who have played the role in New York to come from the jazz world.

“He will be a pioneer,” said David Lai, the show’s Emmy- and Grammy-winning music coordinator.

Lai said he first grasped the depth of Elling’s talents while producing a 2014 PBS holiday special and the accompanying album on which soprano Renée Fleming was the star and Elling a guest artist. This past January, Lai, bowled over by an Elling set with the Ulysses Owens Big Band at Birdland, approached the singer about appearing in Hadestown. He told Elling that he would probably be cast as Hades, the villain of the piece, but his club act pointed more toward Hermes, the mentor and master storyteller.

“‘That’s what you do,’ I said to Kurt. ‘When you do your Birdland show, you’re telling a story, either speaking it or singing it. I feel like in some ways that might be the better role.’ And that’s what he was cast as, Hermes.”

For Elling, taking the role meant rescheduling jazz dates and being away from his wife and children. But for a self-described “pimple-faced, 12-year-old choir nerd from Rockford, Illinois,” the chance to expand the scope of his artistry in a highly collaborative, intensely competitive new arena was, he said, too good to pass up. “Think of all the creative people I’m going to meet and a whole other way of thinking about music and a challenge of singing completely different material than I would have sung otherwise to my highest level in dedication to the moment.”

Elling said he understood skepticism about a Broadway novice stepping into such a coveted role. “I’m kind of an interloper,” he said. “There are people who, for them, Hermes is the No. 1 dream in life, and I’m going to saunter in and do six months of it. Do I deserve this opportunity? Yes, as a musical professional, sure. Do other people also deserve it? Absolutely. But I am going to honor that moment and take it seriously.”

Elling’s biggest New York stage role to date was as the protagonist in a self-written radio drama, The Big Blind, a “jazz musical” mounted for two nights in 2019 at Jazz at Lincoln Center. A hit on its own terms, it nonetheless was relatively thin as experience for Broadway.

But Lai was undeterred, focusing on Elling’s potential for bringing new meaning to the show’s score. “As great a singer as Kurt is — he’s got that incredible range; when he sings down low it sounds like a baritone with great round richness, but he can also sing really high — the thing that struck me is his perspective on things. I like to hear him take a song I might know really well but interpret it in a way I haven’t heard before. Even though he hasn’t done Broadway, necessarily, I think that would translate well to the right role.”

In auditions and work sessions, Elling’s ability to render the music and advance the narrative without giving short shrift to either recommended him for this largely sung-through musical. “What music director wouldn’t be excited to have Kurt Elling in his cast?” Lai said. “You don’t normally get that kind of musician in any Broadway show. You have great actors, and sometimes when they sing, a lot of the great acting chops get channeled in a way that you don’t see it because they’re just focused on singing. I don’t think Kurt ever has to think about his voice. The singing and the speaking, I think, are the same to him.”

In taking over the role, Elling fills some big shoes. New York theater legend André De Shields, who originated the role on Broadway in flamboyant style, won a Tony award for it — one of eight the show has won in its five-year run. Lillias Thomas and Stephanie Mills demonstrated that the role was not gender specific.

Like them, Lai said, Elling should enjoy “a lot of latitude” in interpretation. “Obviously, you have to sing the notes and sing the words and there’s some basic staging, but they will adapt it very much to the strengths of the person.” Beyond his ability to affect a certain swagger in a sharkskin suit, Elling’s jazz roots should facilitate interaction with the onstage players, a seven-piece band with strings, brass and a rhythm section integrated into the action. “He’s such a good musician, he’ll hear the orchestration and that will inspire in him colors to play with that it might not with some others.”

Add to that his ability to inhabit a song and draw people in. “He doesn’t sing at you,” Lai said. “It’s not as if he’s not projecting, but he makes you listen to what he’s saying. He doesn’t let the melodic line dictate the line reading. The line reading is from the line, from the words. It just happens to be set to music. He’s not singing along; he’s in it.”

Elling’s way with a word — sung, spoken or written — reflects a sensibility that harkens back to the days of dark coffee houses, according to Erskine. The drummer, who first worked with Elling on a 2001 album consisting largely of standards, Flirting With Twilight, vividly recalled a Disney Hall gig that involved the reading of beat poetry. “That’s when I got a true appreciation of what a hipster Kurt Elling could be,” Erskine said.

That sensibility runs through Elling’s Weather Report material. Dubbing Elling a “genius,” Erskine, who played with Weather Report from 1978 to 1982 and last performed with Elling on that June date at Ravinia, said the singer’s lyrics turned out to be “much hipper and more profound than I would have imagined.”

Erskine said he was “quite moved” by the singer’s “in-between-song preaching” — so much so that after their gigs, he would repair to his hotel room to meditate. Elling brings a seminarian’s zeal to his work — he studied for the priesthood — but he is so conscious of keeping the audience entertained that he naturally avoids crossing the line from preaching to preachy. “He’s very deft.”

Erskine, whose theater experience includes writing for or performing on stages from the Pasadena Playhouse to the Royal Opera House, said Elling’s vocalese was relevant to his Broadway venture: “When Kurt would talk about this stuff, he used two words that are very near and dear to my heart: specificity and intention. These are really theatrical terms of art. They are a big part of his awareness and mentality.”

Though Elling can appear acutely self-aware in clubs, concert halls or, for that matter, interviews — making light of his innate theatricality, he at one point laughingly remarked on his tendency to “goof around and make faces and noises” — he is, according to longtime friend and manager Bryan Farina, “more subdued” when traveling, channeling his creative energy into writing.

That process can yield deeply theatrical moments. Erskine cited Elling’s take on Zawinul’s “Current Affairs,” a ballad on which Elling, finding “there was nothing in the title that suggested anything usable,” turned to the specific — addressing, with great intent, a poignant paean to innocence directly to his daughter:

You were just a child/You were just a tiny soul — a little bit/ How were you to know the truth — the whole of it?

One treatment of the song, a masterful exercise in lyrical restraint executed solely with pianist Joey Calderazzo, was released last November on Wildflowers Vol. 2. An expansion of the material, by turns mystical and ecstatic, will appear in February 2026 on In The Golden Palace, with saxophonist Bob Mintzer arranging the material and conducting the WDR Big Band.

Calderazzo and Mintzer are veterans of Elling’s takes on Weather Report in multiple formats, including combos — the pianist most recently at Ravinia in June and the saxophonist with the Yellowjackets in July. But whatever the format, both attest to Elling’s adherence to the jazz ethos of interpretive freedom, Calderazzo citing the “leeway” and Mintzer the “latitude” they were given.

By all accounts, Elling has been a creature of jazz. His scatting is singular, as is his standing as a 21-time winner of Male Vocalist of the Year in the DownBeat Critics Poll. All of which raises the question: Does his foray on Broadway represent a momentary diversion or a new direction?

Lai, who has produced jazz for Sony Masterworks and hires the Hadestown musicians, noted that while Elling had the capacity to do most anything, “I hope we don’t take him away from jazz audiences. I hope this is a fun detour for him. But there aren’t too many vocalists in our jazz world right now at his level who are so magnetic — and not just singing the American songbook but doing new stuff, encouraging new arrangements of things. He’s still very much an innovator.”

For his part, Elling said that he was content being “multifarious.” He elaborated: “Being a jazz singer, you can go so many different directions. There are so many influences just within that family, so many resources just there upon which to draw, and avenues to explore. If there’s more that comes of this, then I will investigate that.”

Broadway, he added, “is just another extension of really good music that deserves great treatment, that will require its own self-discipline and its own technical specificity. And I hope that it will enlarge my capacity and my ability to bring the message of the day to people.”

Should he decide to convey his message more broadly through theater, further development of The Big Blind might be a place to start. But for the moment, less ambitious activities await. Ever the restless soul, he will, the day after his Broadway run ends, be back on the road — or, more literally, in the air — headed to Fort Lauderdale, where he will set sail on a jazz cruise.

“I’ve got to keep moving,” he said. DB