I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the concert, “Kurt Elling & Richard Galliano: Passion World” on May 14, at the Jazz at Lincoln Center concert series. It was a sold out event and rightfully so. Richard Galliano and Kurt Elling reached out through their music and touched the heart and soul of everyone lucky enough to be in the audience, a mixture of all ages and types of people with a common love for jazz and the accordion.
Kurt Elling introduced Richard Galliano: “Richard Galliano joins me tonight. He is a most respected jazz musician whose reputation spans the globe. This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Their backgrounds are very different. Kurt Elling, 41, son of Scandinavians who settled in the Midwest, developed his unique style in Chicago before relocating to New York several years ago. He is a recent winner of the 2010 GRAMMY award for the Best Vocal Jazz Album and eight time GRAMMY nominee. He has spent the last nine years at the top of the Down Beat critics poll and the last four years topping the Jazz Times readers’ poll. Ellings baritone voice spans four octaves and displays an amazing technical ability and emotional depth.
Richard Galliano, 59, learned in Nice, France and developed his style in Paris during the 1970’s establishing an international reputation for bringing the accordion into the modern jazz world. In the past, there never seemed to have been one great artist associated with the accordion, an instrument that, because of its connotations, seemed as far removed from swing as it is possible to be. Then along came Richard Galliano, fired by an unrivalled determination to share his conviction that the accordion was worthy have a place at the heart of jazz alongside the saxophone and trumpet. Inspired by the admiration he felt for his friend, Astor Piazzolla, creator of the Tango Nuevo, Galliano succeeded not just in doing this, but with his “new musette” style managed to breathe new life into a thoroughly French tradition.
Galliano is an exceptionally versatile musician, able to make his mark in all kinds of musical contexts, from solo appearances (like the Paris Concert from the Châtelet, which came out in 2009), to playing with a big band like the Brussels Jazz Orchestra, in 2008. His exceptional abilities as a soloist are now well-recognized all over the world. He continues to explore a vast range of music, without ever losing that lyrical quality that infuses the ballads on Love Day that he recorded with Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Charlie Haden and Mino Cinelu, or the French Touch which allowed him to make the link between Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf, with the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis.
Eager to pass on his wealth of experience, he is the author, together with his father Lucien, of an accordion method that won the SACEM prize for Best Pedagogical Work in 2009.
This Lincoln Center concert represented their collaboration for the very first time at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Their program consisted of a multicultural suite of love songs, songs from Brazil, France, Italy and composers Dizzy Gillespie, Rogers and Hart, etc. Other instruments in the ensemble were piano, bass, guitar, drums and percussion.Hopefully, there will be other collaborations in the near future. Richard has a new live recording and DVD which will be available on June 22nd in select retail stores and ITUNES. It is called,” The Wynton Marsalis Quintet & Richard Galliano”. You can pre-order now at Amazon.com. If you have the chance to hear a CD of Richard Galliano or Kurt Elling or, even better, attend a concert, you are going to have a musical experience that will be thoroughly enjoyable and unique.
