ALBUM REVIEWS

KURT ELLING

“Close Your Eyes”

Blue Note

* * 1/2

Vocalist-lyricist Elling’s new CD is a throwback to the days when jazz and the beat poets found a common emotional bond. Singing in a dreamy, direct style that at times recalls Mark Murphy, Elling creates prose poems in the style of Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Gregory Corso, then puts them to music. “The white electric skillet of a day threatened to sear us,” begins his vocalese lyric to Wayne Shorter’s “Dolores Dream” before it plunges through a bop rant that spins on coffee, jazz jams and uptown car rides to stolen kisses.

And the literate touches don’t stop there. Elling recites Kenneth Rexroth’s “Married Blues” above a free-form improvisation from pianist Laurence Hobgood. He tags a rendition of Jule Styne’s “Never Never Land” with a quote from Marcel Proust. He adapts a tale from poet Rainer Maria Rilke and swings it against the Dave Brubeck-Paul Desmond theme “Those Clouds Are Heavy, You Dig?”

All of which makes “Close Your Eyes” a bit too heavy at times, but Elling gives this involved program the kind of intelligent airs most of today’s pop lyrics sorely miss. This disc should be big with the late-night coffeehouse crowd and anyone who loves the marriage of words and music.

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four (excellent).