Kurt Elling: The Gate

"Towards the end of his recent Birdland stint ... he delivered a spoken riff that explained, though obliquely, the method behind his divine madness. Beginning by coining a word I loved -- 'prioritagiousness,' I suppose it could be spelled -- he eventually waxed imaginative by chatting about the effects of remaining awake beyond twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours. He observed that carrying on in that way creates an entirely fresh sense of what constitutes a day. In other words, he's talking about reorienting time, and that, of course, is just what he does with songs. He revises their time signatures, elides them, elongates them, derives incomparable pleasure from ignoring them, suggesting as he does that melodies are blueprints for a different kind of improvisation, for a different kind of deconstruction. ... For the week's gig, Elling included material on current CD release, The Gate -- as in, he points out, the phrase 'swinging on...'" (David Finkle, "Kurt Elling Fools Around with Time at Birdland," Huffington Post, 3/9/11).
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