Kenny Burrell

The 1970s ended with Burrell on Concord and Muse making small, careful records. Heritage opens the next decade by doing the opposite: a nine-track survey of jazz history for a tiny audiophile label nobody remembers, cut over two days at Ocean Way in Hollywood with a cast that reshuffles on almost every tune. W.C. Handy, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Ellington, Strayhorn, Gillespie, Monk, Thad Jones, Coltrane. That is the whole idea, and the title says it plainly.

What makes it work is that Burrell does not treat the older material as a costume. "St. Louis Blues" gets him on acoustic guitar with Snooky Young and Marshall Royal, two Basie men who actually played this music, and it swings without a wink. Then "Naima" arrives with Oscar Brashear on flugelhorn and Patrice Rushen on piano and the room changes completely. Nine tracks, eight different lineups, and it somehow holds together.

Two things to know before you go hunting. AudioSource was an audiophile outfit and this looks to have been catalog number one, cut with Soundstream digital gear at a time when almost nobody was. And it has been reissued twice, once by Voss in 1987 under the same name and once in 1995 by Exhibit under the title Gifts, which is the same record. Scott Yanow called it worthwhile if not innovative. That is fair, and it undersells the solo track.

Seven months after Heritage and about as far from it as you can get. Guitar, bass, drums, no piano, eight tunes, a New York studio in December. Rufus Reid and Ben Riley are the band, and Riley had spent 1964 to 1967 in Monk's quartet, which tells you something about how much space he is comfortable leaving.

Three of the eight are Burrell originals, and that is a higher share than he usually gave himself in this period. The title tune is the one to hear. It is a slow, unhurried thing that takes five and a half minutes and never sounds like it is filling time. "Papa Joe" closes the record and is the only place anybody digs in hard. The rest is Burrell doing what he does better than almost anyone, which is play a ballad without decorating it to death.

Note the dates, because they matter and most listings get them wrong. This was cut in December 1980 and Muse sat on it until 1983. AllMusic still prints 1980 as the release year, which is the recording year. Helen Keane produced, the same Helen Keane who managed and produced Bill Evans for two decades and who had already done Burrell's Handcrafted in 1978. She would be back for the next one seven months later.

The matched pair to Listen to the Dawn. Same producer, same engineer, same room, same drummer, recorded seven months later, and shelved for almost exactly as long. The only change is Larry Ridley in Rufus Reid's chair, and Ridley is a stiffer, more grounded player, which pushes the whole record a little closer to the ground.

The other change is the book. Where the earlier record had three Burrell originals, this one has none. Seven tunes, all borrowed: a Gillespie bebop head for the title, J.J. Johnson's "Lament," Horace Silver's "Peace," a Jobim, and three from the songbook. Taking "Groovin' High" in a piano-less trio is a real choice. Burrell has to carry the harmony and the line at once, and for a guy who came up in Detroit playing this music when it was new, he sounds like he is enjoying the test.

It is the least documented record of this stretch. AllMusic has no review and no rating for it, and Howard Mandel's liner notes are about all the contemporary writing there is. Correct the year while you are here: the session is July 1981 and the release is 1984, not 1983. Vlado Meller mastered, which is a strange credit to find on a Muse jazz trio date.

In 1984 Grover Washington Jr. was the guy who made Winelight and Burrell was a fifty-two year old guitarist whose best known record was twenty years behind him. On paper this should be a crossover cash-in. It is not. Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette are the rhythm section, three of the eight tunes are Burrell's, and nobody involved is aiming at radio.

Washington plays tenor and soprano and sounds like a different musician on each. On "Asphalt Canyon Blues," a Burrell tune that runs past six minutes, the saxophone is big and blunt and completely unpolished. Then "Sails of Your Soul," his own tune, is soprano only, Burrell switches to acoustic, and Ralph MacDonald walks in on percussion. Those two quintet tracks are the only places on the record where the production gets any gloss at all, and they are sequenced apart so you never settle into one mode.

The jacket still carries the Manhattan Records manufacturing line. Helen Keane produced again, at least her fifth Burrell date. Michael Nastos put it well: this is both of them showing their true colors past the commercialized work. Burrell is billed first on the jacket, which is worth saying because half the internet reverses it.

Three guitars across the front, bass and drums behind, no piano and no horn. Burrell got the idea from a 1985 night at Joe Segal's Jazz Showcase in Chicago called The Guitar Explosion, then built a working band out of it with Bobby Broom and Rodney Jones, both young, both very good. The band's first public performance was this recording. He hired them, told them Blue Note was rolling tape, and took them into the Village Vanguard.

Scott Yanow's complaint is the obvious one and it is not wrong: with three players raised on the same vocabulary it can be next to impossible to tell who is soloing. Whether that bothers you depends on what you came for. If you want a cutting contest this is the wrong record. If you want to hear three guitars actually voice a chord together, which almost never happens on a jazz record, "Mark I" runs eleven minutes and is worth the trip.

Buy the CD, not the LP. The vinyl holds seven tracks; the CD adds the spoken announcements and a sixteen minute four-part medley of "Dolphin Dance," "Naima," "Star Crossed Lovers" and "Just Friends" that is the most interesting thing the band recorded. And note the year: this is an October 1986 date issued in 1987, not a 1986 album, whatever AllMusic says.

Same band, same two nights at the Vanguard, released two years later. This is not a follow-up session, it is the other half of the tape, and the split was made on mood: Generation took the faster material (and, on the CD only, the guitar medley), and this one took the blues. Three of the seven titles say so outright.

It is the better of the two, and the reason is that the younger guys write here. Bobby Broom's "No Hype Blues" closes the record and Rodney Jones's "Blue Days, Blue Dreams," which he says came out of listening to Wes Montgomery, runs almost eight minutes. On Generation they were sidemen who soloed. Here they are contributors, which makes the whole generational idea in the band's name mean something instead of just being a title.

Two odd details. Burrell is credited with six-string banjo, though a 2022 interview with Broom and Jones has Jones playing a guitar-banjo in the band, so who is actually on it is unresolved. And Bob Ludwig mastered it with Malcolm Addey engineering, a serious pair of names for a record this overlooked. These two albums are the band's entire output, both from its debut engagement.

Nothing on the cover tells you this is a live album, and it is: two August nights at the Village Vanguard, the fourth time Burrell recorded in that room, after 1959, 1978 and 1986. The new element is Jay Hoggard's vibraphone. Burrell spent forty years working with organ, with piano, in trio, and almost never with vibes, and the pairing does something to his sound. Guitar and vibraphone occupy nearly the same register, so instead of comping for each other they end up braiding.

The book is the strongest he had put together in a decade. Two Ellingtons, Coltrane's "Moment's Notice," Monk's "In Walked Bud," Mal Waldron's "Soul Eyes," and, out of nowhere, Bob Telson's "Calling You" from Bagdad Cafe, a song two years old at the time. Opening a mainstream jazz set in 1989 with a contemporary film ballad and giving it nine minutes is a nervier move than it sounds.

Yanow called it one of Burrell's better sets of the previous decade and that is right. Helen Keane produced again, Malcolm Addey engineered again. Get the CD for "A Gift for You," which is not on the LP. Recorded 1989, issued 1990, and AllMusic prints the session year as the release year, so ignore it.

Three days in a New York studio with Cedar Walton, Rufus Reid and Lewis Nash, plus Ray Mantilla on percussion so the whole thing sits a little wider than a piano quartet. Nash was in his early thirties and about to become the most in-demand drummer in mainstream jazz; Walton was the veteran. Between them they get Burrell moving faster than he usually chooses to. Yanow's line is that he swings harder here than he normally does, and that is the fairest short description of the record.

The program is song-first and unusually wide: Kern, Weill, Bernstein, Ivan Lins's "Love Dance," and Chaplin's "Smile." The title tune is credited to Norman Mapp alone on the CD listing at Discogs; AllMusic credits it to Burrell and Mapp together. Walton brings "Roni's Decision." Nothing runs past eight minutes and nothing is padded.

That last part is the great small fact about this album. The notes are by Tony Bennett, and the cover illustration is credited to Antonio Benedetto, which is the name Bennett signed his paintings with. It is also a fully digital production, Sony multitrack and digital mix, mastered at Fantasy in Berkeley, which is a real break from the Van Gelder analog rooms where most of Burrell's catalog lives. It sounds like 1991 and that is not a criticism.

Do not call this a trio record. Thirteen tracks, and six of them are Burrell completely alone. Four more are duos with Ray Drummond. Only three have a drummer. He sequences them so the textures keep alternating, and the effect is that the record gets quieter and more private the longer you sit with it.

The Ellington and Strayhorn content is the point. "Satin Doll," "Warm Valley," and the Strayhorn title tune. Anyone who knows the story knows "Lotus Blossom" is the piece Ellington sat down and played by himself while the band packed up their horns at the end of the And His Mother Called Him Bill session. Choosing it as the title track of a mostly solo album is a knowing move from a man who taught the first college course on Ellington and made two double LPs about him in the 1970s.

The reviews split hard. Yanow found it overly tasteful and said it rarely rises above background music, which is the standard complaint about late Burrell and the one worth arguing with. The Los Angeles Times and Newsday heard it the other way, and Newsday's line about Ellington's music being a living presence rather than a museum is closer to what is actually happening on the solo tracks. Burrell wrote his own notes. Recorded in June, out in October, and Wikipedia's "May 1995" is wrong.

Burrell sings on four of these. He was sixty-nine and had been running the jazz program at UCLA for four years, and somewhere in there he decided to sing on record again, as he had on Weaver of Dreams for Columbia in 1960 and 1961. The voice is small, unshowy and slightly dry, and if you have spent decades noticing that his guitar phrasing breathes like a singer's, hearing the actual singing is less of a surprise than it should be.

The band does not indulge him. Onaje Allan Gumbs is the find here, a pianist with a Wynton Kelly lightness who keeps the record moving on the instrumentals, and Rufus Reid is back for his third Burrell date across this stretch. "Bass Face" is a Burrell original that he liked enough to play again live on Be Yourself in 2008.

It is a late-night record and it knows it. Nothing here will change your mind about Burrell, and the vocal tracks will divide people who otherwise agree about everything. Recorded September 2000, released May 2001, and this is one of the rare Burrell titles where AllMusic prints both dates correctly.

This one is barely a record in the commercial sense. It came out on UCLA Ethnomusicology Publications, a university imprint, which is why so few discographies carry it. It is an extended concert work Burrell wrote for Ralph J. Bunche, the UCLA alumnus who in 1950 became the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and UCLA describes it as a musical letter of gratitude.

The context makes more sense than the recording does on its own. Burrell had joined the UCLA faculty in 1978 teaching Ellingtonia, the first college course in the United States on Duke Ellington. He became founding director of the jazz studies program in 1996. In 2004 he established the Kenny Burrell Archive of African American Music inside UCLA's Ralph J. Bunche Center. Writing the suite was the next step in a relationship he had been building for more than twenty-five years.

The soloists are real: Hubert Laws on flute and piccolo, Charles Owens, Bobby Rodriguez, with the UCLA jazz studies orchestra behind them and Charley Harrison conducting. There was a premiere performance at UCLA involving dancers, later issued on DVD in 2007. Honest caveat: we could not verify the recording date or the hall from any published source, so neither is printed here. Track it down for the ambition, not the audio.

Seventy-seven years old, in front of a full room at Dizzy's, and the tempo does not sag once. This is the best late Burrell on record. Benny Green is on piano and pushes, Peter Washington and Clayton Cameron do not let anything drift, and the ringer is Tivon Pennicott, a tenor player in his early twenties making his first recording (AllMusic says twenty-four; All About Jazz gives a December 1985 birth, which makes him twenty-two). Burrell put a kid nobody had heard of in the front line and gave him room.

The set list reads like a career. "Tin Tin Deo" and "Bag's Groove" reach back to the Gillespie work at the start of the 1950s. "Listen to the Dawn" is the title tune from the 1980 Muse trio date near the top of this page. "Mark 1" came off Generation. "Bass Face" and "In a Sentimental Mood" both carry over from Lucky So and So. He is not doing a greatest hits, he is playing the tunes he still likes, and almost all of them are his own history.

Todd Barkan produced for Joe Fields at HighNote. Note the gap: this is a September 2008 performance that sat until the summer of 2010, so the "2010" on the spine is the release year and he was seventy-eight by the time anyone heard it. If you only take one record from the last twenty-five years of his career, take this one.

Two nights at Catalina's in Hollywood, May 30 and 31, 2015. He was eighty-three, still running the UCLA program he had directed since 1996, and this appears to be the last album he released. Nobody has said so in print, so treat it as very likely rather than certain, but nothing later has surfaced.

It plays like a man enjoying himself. Clayton Cameron gets a feature called "Brush Magic" and earns it. Burrell goes acoustic on two pieces, one of them Ellington's "Single Petal of a Rose," which is about as exposed as solo playing gets. Barbara Morrison comes on for three tunes at the end and Marvin Smith takes the drum chair for the title track. B.B. King had died sixteen days before these sets and there is a nod to him in the program.

The tunes keep looping back again. "Salty Papa" and "Confessin' the Blues" both come from the 1986 Vanguard nights issued as Pieces of Blue and the Blues. "Listen to the Dawn" is here for the third time on this page. "Someone to Light Up My Life" goes back to Groovin' High. George Harris at JazzWeekly called it jazz comfort food and meant it kindly, and that is about right for a last record: nothing to prove, a good band, a full room, and thirty-five years of his own material to choose from.