Event Description

Kurt Elling is a two-time GRAMMY Award winner who is renowned for a signature, rich sound and an inventive and individualized body of work. With a one-of-a kind brand of contemporary beat lyricism and vocalese-writing ingenuity, the Chicago-based musician has extended the parameters of vocal jazz and enlarged its vocabulary. The New York Times called Kurt Elling “the standout male jazz vocalist of our time.” The Guardian (UK) pronounced him “a kind of Sinatra with superpowers.” Over a twenty-five year career of touring and recording, Elling has won three Prix du Jazz Vocal (France), two German Echo Awards, two Dutch Edison Awards, and has been nominated for a GRAMMY Award 16 times. He has had a 14-year run atop the DownBeat Critics and Readers polls, and has won twelve Jazz Journalists Awards for “Male Vocalist of the Year.” Currently, Elling is on Broadway, starring as Hermes in the Tony Award-winning musical Hadestown.

Elling’s work with other leading figures in the jazz world has included important collaborations with Branford Marsalis, Danilo Perez, Fred Hersch, Charlie Hunter and Stefon Harris. He has also performed as a featured soloist with many of the world’s leading large ensembles, including the NY Philharmonic, The BBC Concert Symphony, The Count Basie Orchestra, The WDR Big Band and Orchestra, The Clayton-Hamilton Orchestra, and The Village Vanguard Orchestra.

A member of jazz’s piano pantheon, Fred Hersch has been an influential creative force for more than three decades as an improviser, composer, educator, bandleader, collaborator, and recording artist. He has been proclaimed “the most arrestingly innovative pianist in jazz over the last decade” by Vanity Fair and “a living legend” by The New Yorker. A seventeen-time Grammy nominee, Hersch has garnered jazz’s most prestigious awards, including a Doris Duke Artist (2016), Jazz Pianist of the Year from the Jazz Journalists Association (2011, 2016, 2018), and the Jazz Magazine (France) International Artist of the Year (2021). The Fred Hersch Trio was voted the #1 Jazz Group in the 2019 DownBeat Critics Poll.

An acclaimed and influential solo pianist, he has twelve solo recordings in his catalog including the 2024 release, Silent, Listening which is a collaboration with legendary producer Manfred Eicher for the ECM label. The New York Times calls him “a master who plays it his way.”