Kenny Burrell

The original Savoy jacket carries five names and no leader, which is the honest way to bill it. This is the Detroit pipeline caught at the exact moment it emptied into New York: Burrell and Tommy Flanagan had been in the city a matter of months, Paul Chambers had just turned twenty-one, and it was only Pepper Adams's second session of any kind. Kenny Clarke, the one established New Yorker in the room, sits behind them like a man who knows what he is listening to.

Ozzie Cadena supervised, Rudy Van Gelder recorded it in Hackensack across two dates in the spring of 1956, and the results have the loose confidence of players who had already spent years working out this music together in another city. Adams is the surprise. The baritone was still an unusual front-line voice in 1956 and he plays it with a dry, muscular attack that gives the quintet a bottom-heavy weight most guitar dates never get. Burrell answers him with clean, unhurried lines that never crowd the horn.

Two more masters from the same sessions, a Gershwin and Oscar Pettiford's "Tricrotism," were held back and scattered across other Savoy and Vogue issues; the complete eight only came together decades later on a Fresh Sound reissue. What made the original LP is enough. If you want to hear what the Detroit scene sounded like the week it arrived in New York, this is the record.

The title is a small lie that Blue Note told for good commercial reasons. Burrell had already cut two sessions for the label that year, in February and again in March, and Alfred Lion shelved both. The May dates were the third attempt and the first one anybody heard, so they became the debut by default. The February session eventually surfaced as K.B. Blues, twenty-two years later.

What Lion finally liked is easy to hear. Burrell was twenty-four and already fully formed: a warm hollow-body tone, a habit of building solos in long clean paragraphs rather than bursts, and a blues sensibility that never tips into showmanship. Three of the seven tunes are his own. "Delilah" is the one people remember, the Victor Young theme taken at a deliberate pace that lets the melody do most of the work, and "Blues for Skeeter" is the clearest early statement of the plainspoken blues playing that would define him for the next fifty years.

Flanagan and Chambers were Detroit men too, so the rhythm section already knew the vocabulary; Kenny Clarke and Candido Camero supply a rhythmic undercurrent that keeps the date from settling into politeness. "Rhythmorama" hands the floor to Clarke and Candido alone, which in 1956 was still an unusual thing to put on a guitarist's record. A strong first release, and a better one than the two Blue Note buried to get here.

The jacket says only Kenny Burrell; the discographies added the volume number to keep it straight from the label's other self-titled Burrell records. Either way it is not really an album so much as a well-assembled drawer. Five tracks come from the shelved March 12 quintet date with Frank Foster and Oscar Pettiford, two are leftovers from the May sessions that produced the debut, and one, "Mexico City," is a live Cafe Bohemia performance from Kenny Dorham's band where Burrell is the sideman.

Judged as a compilation it holds up better than it has any right to. The March quintet material is the real find: Foster's tenor gives Burrell a foil he did not have on the debut, Pettiford pushes harder than Chambers does, and "Phinupi" and "Cheeta" are Burrell originals with more angular shapes than his blues writing usually allows. "Moten Swing" is the best thing here, a Kansas City riff tune played with the unforced swing that Shadow Wilson brought to everything.

The cover illustration is by Andy Warhol, then still a New York commercial artist taking Blue Note work, several years before anybody outside the trade knew the name. Sources disagree on whether the first pressing came out in 1956 or 1957. The music is worth hearing; the sequencing is the reason this sits a notch below the records built as records.

Look at that band and then look at the release date. Burrell, Hank Mobley, Horace Silver, Doug Watkins and Louis Hayes cut this in Hackensack in February 1957, and Blue Note let it sit in the vault until a Japanese pressing in 1979. It did not get an American vinyl release until the Tone Poet edition in 2023, sixty-six years after the fact.

There is no musical reason for the delay. The most persuasive explanation is the least flattering to the label: Blue Note was in the middle of the Jimmy Smith boom, pushing organ records out at a rate that left no room on the schedule, and a quintet date by a guitarist who already had two albums in the racks was easy to postpone and then forget. Silver had just launched his own quintet and Mobley was between his best Blue Note leader dates, so nobody was short of work.

The playing is direct hard bop with no orchestral ambitions. Silver's "Nica's Dream" gets a nine-minute reading built on his own comping, which is a particular pleasure, and the two takes of the title blues show Burrell working the same twelve bars from different angles without repeating himself. "D.B. Blues" nods to Lester Young. If it had come out in 1957 it would be spoken of alongside the Prestige jam dates. Instead it arrived as a curiosity, which is not the same as being one.

John Jenkins recorded almost nothing as a leader and then walked away from music altogether, which makes the handful of dates carrying his name worth more attention than they usually get. This is the best of them. The Chicago altoist wrote three of the six tunes, and "Sharon" and "Chalumeau" show a writer with real ideas about form, not just a blowing vehicle with a head stuck on the front.

Burrell is billed second and plays like it, in the best sense. He spends most of the record comping behind Jenkins with the kind of attentive, harmonically alert accompaniment that guitarists on hard bop dates rarely bother with, then takes his solos without trying to reclaim the session. His one contribution as a writer, "Blues for Two," is the shortest thing here and the most relaxed.

The rhythm section is the sleeper attraction: Sonny Clark at the piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Dannie Richmond, who would spend the next two decades as Charles Mingus's drummer, playing straight-ahead time with none of the volatility that made his name. Ira Gitler wrote the notes and Francis Wolff shot the cover. A quietly excellent record about a musician who did not stay.

One day at Manhattan Towers in May 1958 produced two LPs, and they are the high point of Burrell's Blue Note years. The format is the studio jam session, which usually means a good band playing at half attention. Not here. Alfred Lion booked a three-horn front line of Louis Smith, Tina Brooks and Junior Cook, put Sam Jones and Art Blakey underneath, and rotated two pianists, Duke Jordan on one stretch of the day and Bobby Timmons on the other.

Blakey is the reason it catches fire. He plays a sideman date exactly the way he plays his own, which forces everyone in front of him to commit, and four of the eight cuts run past nine minutes without sagging. "Yes Baby" and "Rock Salt" are Burrell blues lines that exist mainly to start the engine, and they work. "Chuckin'" is Sam Jones's tune and the longest thing on either record at over twelve minutes.

Tina Brooks is the other reason to hear this. His own Blue Note leader dates were shelved almost to a man, and the sessions where he turns up as a sideman are most of the evidence that he existed; he plays here with a bruised melodic directness that nobody else on the date matches. Burrell steps back for "Autumn in New York," a quartet feature with Timmons and no horns, and it is the most beautiful four minutes of his 1950s. Andy Warhol drew the covers for both volumes.

A word of warning before anything else: this is not a 1950s album and it never was. Swingin' is a vault release Michael Cuscuna assembled for the Japanese market in 1980, gathering Blue Note material that had sat unissued for between twenty-one and twenty-four years. It carries a 1950s cover aesthetic and a Blue Note logo, and plenty of discographies file it under 1956, but the record did not exist before 1980.

Once that is clear it is a genuinely useful collection. "My Heart Stood Still" is the only issued survivor of the shelved March 1956 quintet date with Frank Foster and Oscar Pettiford, the session that otherwise fed Volume 2. "I Never Knew" comes from the Manhattan Towers day that produced the two Blue Lights volumes, with Louis Smith and Duke Jordan. The remaining three are live outtakes from the August 1959 night at the Five Spot Cafe with Art Blakey, Ben Tucker and, on the title tune, Tina Brooks.

As a listening experience it is exactly what a compilation of leftovers from three unrelated dates sounds like: five good performances that were never meant to sit next to each other. The Five Spot material is the strongest, and all three tracks have since been absorbed into the complete edition of that night, which is now the better way to hear them. Worth owning if you are working through the Blue Note years properly. Not the place to start.