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. 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. There is even a new version of a Tom Waits tune.Įlling has never made an album like this – and he’s never made any album in the way that SuperBlue took shape. Thanks to newly sprung melody and lyrics from Elling, along with Hunter & Co.’s fresh grooves, SuperBlue features all-new songs, innovative takes on compositions from jazz lions Wayne Shorter and Freddie Hubbard, and a raw and stripped-down treatment of “The Seed,” a still-dynamic, decades-old riff on immortality written by Cody Chestnutt. Elling has always been a master of grooves, ranging from bebop to pure pop and progressive jazz to neo-soul, but he’s never filled an album with grooves quite like these. SuperBlue boasts the talents of producer-guitarist Charlie Hunter and two stars of the hip-hop generation: drummer Corey Fonville and bassist-keyboardist DJ Harrison (both of the genre-hopping band Butcher Brown).
After scoring his second Grammy Award (and 14th nomination) in March 2021, vocalist Kurt Elling hangs an unexpected left turn with SuperBlue for Edition Records.