© Sergio Cabanillas, 2007
PABLO SANZ: Cassandra Wilson told me once that instead of choosing songs, songs chose her. Which is your working method, how and why do you choose the songs?
KURT ELLING: Every record comes after another period of time, of touring with the band, so let’s say that there’s two years between a record. Over two years you’re playing the record you’ve just put out and you say: “hey, I’ve got these three other ideas for a record”. Or you sit down and you have an idea for a song. So over two years there are too small intuitive decisions. You follow your ideas, you follow what’s pressing you here, and over one year or two years you’ve made many decisions: this doesn’t work, or you need to change this, or this makes the audience really happy in this way. So any idea that I have, and as much as I can put it down on paper we can start to play it right away and find out if it fits or not. So a record, in its best way, is the culmination of many small decisions. It’s one big decision that comes of many small, small decisions.
Leer: Kurt Elling: portrait of the artist as a jazz man, by Arturo Mora and Pablo Sanz. Publicado originalmente en septiembre de 2007.
