Kurt Elling and SuperBlue with Guitarist Charlie Hunter, plus the granting of the JazzLive Legacy Award from BNY Mellon Jazz Live
Grammy-winning vocalist Kurt Elling returns in style with a new album, SuperBlue - with indelible beats, roisterous funk and unforgettable new lyrics in collaboration with co-producer Charlie Hunter

Elling has never made an album like this – and he’s never made any album in the way that SuperBlue took shape. To this day, he has yet to meet the members of Butcher Brown in person: with travel confined by the COVID-19 pandemic, their collaboration happened across a distance of roughly 1,000 miles, with Hunter acting as go-between. In their Virginia studio, Fonville and Harrison met with Hunter to hammer out an assortment of grooves and colors; at his home in Chicago, Elling took the rhythm tracks and determined whether they called for new melodic narratives or were better suited to existing compositions. Once the groundwork was complete, Elling and Hunter got together at a converted horse barn in Urbana, Illinois, where they recorded the vocal and solo guitar tracks and mixed it all down.

“Since the mid-1990s,” hails the Washington Post, “[Elling] has come to embody the creative spirit in jazz.”