Jim Trageser's CD and book reviews, musician and author interviews, weekly opinion column from the North County Times (San Diego) and ongoing Reading Diary. http://trageser.com Kurt Elling is a jazz singer in the purest sense of the term. Like a Billy Eckstine or Sarah Vaughan, the jazz characteristics of Elling's art come from his singing more than his song selection. Like those two singers, Eckstine can improvise a vocal line, placing himself in rare company: the singer who is as much an instrumentalist as the guy on a horn. And while there is no shortage of those who can caress the standards of the Great American Songbook, Elling has always moved beyond the classical canon, bringing rock, pop, rhythm and blues and more into the jazz fold through his interpretations. http://www.nctimes.com/entertainment/music/article_d600ec17-e5cf-5182-ab4f-c4adc4194bb9.html Folks as varied as Dan Hicks and Kinky Friedman cite him as an influence. The Who, Van Morrison, Elvis Costello and the Clash have covered his songs. Alt-rocker Frank Black and folkie Greg Brown have both written songs about him. And yet, were you to be looking for a Mose Allison album (and if you aren't, you should be), you'd find him slotted in "Jazz." When asked why he thinks he's long been labeled a jazzman rather than a singer-songwriter (like Randy Newman, who writes and performs in a similar mode), Allison said he doesn't really know. "They've always tried to determine where to put me!" he said last week by phone from his winter residence in South Carolina (he summers on Long Island). "That's one of the drawbacks ... to sell somebody, they need to say he's the best at something. I do all these things, so they haven't known where to put me. I'm just doing the same thing I was doing when I was 13 years old! Writing songs and singing them and playing piano." http://www.nctimes.com/entertainment/music/article_ef1c30ce-ec8a-5c51-a4f7-15115b171373.html Jorma Kaukonen may be most famous for a particular summer in San Francisco, but the one-time Jefferson Airplane guitarist grew up in Washington, D.C., lived in upstate New York for a while and for the past couple of decades has lived on a farm in southeastern Ohio. The man knows winter. So his tour with his longtime blues band Hot Tuna makes sense with its swings through Florida, and next, California. "Right now, it's about 75 degrees, blue skies, palm trees, water," Kaukonen said by phone from Jacksonville on Sunday. "The kind of weather that makes snowbirds want to go here." http://www.nctimes.com/entertainment/music/article_3849670f-0b4c-591b-a5c0-4da7148fec2e.html It's only four years that Maren Parusel has lived in the States. And this was the first year she spent Christmas in California, instead of returning home to her family in Tubingen, Germany. "It was too cold!" she said of her trip home in 2009 for the holidays. "So, this year, I'm going home in the summer." Not that Parusel won't admit to being homesick this year. "It's a little more traditional over there still," she said in a recent phone interview during a break from her day job at a local spa. "When I'm home, the family comes together. We play games. Instead of Christmas Day, we have the Holy Night, the night before Christmas. We give the presents then." http://www.nctimes.com/entertainment/music/article_dd0211fc-0704-5777-ba40-72610e1b50b9.html China Mieville returns to the epic form with glorious results. http://trageser.com/books/reading-2011.php#kraken