Kurt Elling - Bonita Cuba (Official Music Video)

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"Bonita Cuba," was born of a fortuitous ocean-liner booking. On the last evening of a recent Caribbean jazz cruise, Elling heard Arturo Sandoval playing this melody from his adjacent cabin. "I said, 'Arturo, that's so sad. Is that a tradition of yours, to play down the sun?' But he said, 'No, I was thinking about Cuba, and about friends back home I haven't seen in decades. I was thinking about my mother and father. I got them out, and they always thought they were going to go home – but they're buried in America.'" Elling asked if he might put lyrics to this melody, and "Bonita Cuba" took shape.

“Bonita Cuba”
Music by: Arturo Sandoval
Lyrics by: Kurt Elling & Phil Galdston


Just ninety miles / over the sea
Another life / is calling to me
Another world / I lost to fire and to ashes
The sky may grow light / but the smoke cloud never passes

Mi madre died / longing for home
But you can’t fly when you’re tied to a stone
Mi padre died / and he lives now with Jesus
Su corazón in a million pieces

I cry for them / and for all my family
The friendships of my youth / and for all my country

If I could / I’d make a boat out of my heart
And sail to my home / Bonita Cuba / in the dark
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I’d go insane / but I live in music
I play through the pain / and pour songs on my bruises

If I could / I’d make a boat out of my heart
And sail to my home / Bonita Cuba / in the dark.

PASSION WORLD IS GRAMMY®-WINNING VOCALIST KURT ELLING’S MOST AMBITIOUS PROJECT YET

Recording features Arturo Sandoval, Sara Gazarek, Till Brönner, Richard Galliano, the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and the WDR Big Band and Orchestra

Passion World, the fifth Concord album (and eleventh overall) from vocalist Kurt Elling, lives up to its title on both counts. Kurt's latest is indeed his most “worldly” album to date, as Elling casts his net far and wide, from Brazil to Ireland, Germany to France, Scotland to Cuba to Iceland. And it is indeed all about “passions” – the forces that shake our souls. As one of the busiest touring jazz artists, Elling has encountered these passions around the world; he has observed how the same depth of feeling is shaped in different ways by each unique culture through which it is filtered. The result is an album vibrant with diversity and variety, and at the same time a singular celebration of what makes us all human. In terms of its conceptual scope and its breadth of influences, Passion World is the most ambitious project yet from the preeminent male vocalist in jazz.

It is also Elling’s most star-studded album, featuring a small battalion of guest collaborators working in tandem with the singer’s much-traveled quintet (keyboardist Gary Versace, guitarist John McLean, bassist Clark Sommers, drummer Kendrick Scott). The guests include the brilliant veteran trumpeter Cuban émigré Arturo Sandoval; the widely lauded young vocalist Sara Gazarek; German trumpet star Till Brönner; French accordion virtuoso Richard Galliano; the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and its founder-leader, saxophone savant Tommy Smith; and the world-renowned WDR Big Band and Orchestra from Germany, featuring pianist Frank Chastenier.

For most of us, “passion” conjures up love, at its most dramatic and exotic. “These are by and large compositions about romance,” says Elling, a GRAMMY winner in 2009 (and ten-time GRAMMY nominee during his career). "Romance is one of the things that most countries share, and I've noticed how different communities have their own ways of singing about love and heartbreak. So the nature of songs I have performed in France, for instance, reflects being cool when romance is done. In chanson, the French teach us the value of nonchalance. In lyrics from Cuba or Latin America there is an overwrought, almost threatening response to a broken heart, while in Brazil they sing of the love that remains after the object of love has gone. They mix happiness and sadness together and call it saudade. In Italy or Germany, the lyrics reveal the kind of statuesque and heroic, almost operatic, nature of the broken heart.”