Kenny Burrell

The original jacket reads The Prestige All Stars, not Kenny Burrell, and that matters for understanding what this is. Bob Weinstock's house method was to book Van Gelder's Hackensack room, assemble whoever was in town, hand out a blues line and let the tape run. Burrell wrote the title tune, a forty-four-bar blues figure that fills all of side one at better than seventeen minutes, which is how his name ended up attached to the record in every subsequent reissue.

Long jam sides are usually where good bands go to repeat themselves. This one does not. Hank Mobley and Donald Byrd were both at the point of their careers where they had more to say than session work required, Jerome Richardson doubles on flute for tonal relief, and Mal Waldron comps with the dark insistence that made him such a specific accompanist. Burrell takes the third solo on the title track and quietly delivers the most coherent statement on it.

Nat Hentoff gave it four stars and wrote that Burrell struck him increasingly as the most important of the newer guitarists, while suggesting the title cut could have used an editor. Both halves of that read fairly. Note the date: this was cut on December 28, 1956, not in 1957 as the release year implies, which makes it the earliest of the Prestige jam dates.

A week after All Night Long, Prestige ran the format again with three of the same men and three new ones. Byrd, Doug Watkins and Art Taylor carry over; Mobley, Richardson and Waldron are replaced by Frank Foster on tenor and Tommy Flanagan at the piano, and the horn section drops from three to two. The result is leaner and, to my ear, the better of the pair.

Flanagan is the difference. Where Waldron plays dark and pushes from behind, Flanagan lays out long-lined, elegant lines that give the soloists more air, and he and Burrell had been playing together since Detroit. The eighteen-minute title blues occupies side one again, and again it earns the space. Foster's "A.T." is a tribute to Art Taylor, and Ira Gitler's notes explain that Byrd's "Say Listen" takes its title from a phrase Byrd used constantly in conversation.

Dan Morgenstern described the title tune as having a simple but effective structure that controls the whole performance, which is the right way to put it: nothing about these dates is complicated, and the discipline is in the pacing. A fifth title from the session, Foster's "C.P.W.," was left off the vinyl and turned up on later issues. Along with its companion this is the record that made Burrell's reputation with the jazz press.

The third of the Prestige All Stars dates and the odd one out. Where the December and January sessions drew on the hard bop circuit that Byrd, Mobley and Foster were working, this one reaches into a different New York: Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, Al Cohn and Ed Thigpen were studio players with cool school credentials, and Teddy Kotick had spent time with Bill Evans and Charlie Parker. Apart from Burrell and Mal Waldron, nobody carries over.

The mix is interesting on paper and only intermittently interesting on record. McKusick and Cohn blend beautifully with each other and somewhat awkwardly with Farmer's harder attack, and Waldron's two originals, the title track and "What's Not," are written for a rhythm section that pushes rather than one that floats. The result is a session where everyone plays well and nothing quite ignites.

Burrell comes off best, partly because a guitar sits comfortably in either idiom, and his fourteen-minute "Dayee" that closes the record is the one performance where the band settles into a single shared feel. Ron Wynn's assessment of dazzling stints over otherwise standard material is about right. Worth hearing after the other two, not instead of them.

After three sessions where he was one name among seven, Burrell finally got a Prestige date of his own, and the contrast is instructive. The jam records are about accumulation; this one is about a working band. Five tracks, a quintet, and a rhythm section of Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins and Elvin Jones that had more collective drive than anything Weinstock assembled for the All Stars dates.

Elvin Jones is the story. This is 1957, four years before he joined Coltrane, and he is already playing with the rolling, polyrhythmic pull that would change jazz drumming; on "Drum Boogie" he simply takes over. Cecil Payne, one of the genuinely underrated baritone players of the period, sits out "All of You" and gives the other four tracks a low-end weight that suits Burrell's mid-range tone. Bud Powell's "Strictly Confidential" is the most demanding thing on the record and gets the most careful reading.

Burrell's own "Perception" closes it and is the clearest statement of what he wanted from a small group: no jam-session sprawl, just a well-made head and room for four people to say something. Prestige repackaged the album as Blue Moods in 1964, which is why the same music turns up twice in the catalog. Under either title it is his best Prestige leader date.

Teddy Charles supervised this one and the concept is right there in the title: put the two most stylistically opposed guitarists in New York in the same room and see what happens. Burrell came out of Detroit with the blues in everything he played. Jimmy Raney came out of the Tristano and Stan Getz orbit with a cooler, more linear, more harmonically abstract approach. On paper it should not work.

It works because neither of them tries to win. Raney plays the way Raney plays and Burrell does the same, and the contrast reads as conversation rather than contest. The producers were also smart enough to give each man a feature: "Close Your Eyes" is Burrell without Raney, "Out of Nowhere" is Raney without Burrell, and hearing them isolated makes the difference between the two obvious in a way the shared tracks do not.

The supporting cast is worth the price on its own. Jackie McLean brings his characteristic acid tone, Donald Byrd is in the middle of the best year of his early career, and Mal Waldron wrote three of the seven tunes. McLean's "Little Melonae" is the highlight, a crooked line that both guitarists handle with obvious pleasure. Doug Watkins contributed "This Way," the longest cut here at better than eleven minutes.

Four names on the cover and Burrell is third, which is the correct billing for what this is. The Cats is really Tommy Flanagan's record: he wrote four of the five tunes, his trio holds the center, and the horn players are guests on his material. New Jazz sat on it for more than two years and put it out in 1959, by which point John Coltrane's name was the reason anybody picked it up.

April 1957 places this in the most interesting month of Coltrane's early career. He had just been fired by Miles Davis over the heroin, he had not yet gone to Philadelphia to get clean, and Blue Train was five months away. He plays here with the searching, slightly overloaded quality of that period, spilling more notes than the tunes strictly want, and it is fascinating precisely because it is unresolved.

Flanagan's writing is the reason to return to it. "Eclypso" became a standard of his book and "Minor Mishap" is a genuinely good tune that too few people play. Burrell mostly comps and takes measured solos, content to let the horns carry the weight, and his restraint is what holds the front line together. Track two is a Flanagan trio feature with the horns and guitar sitting out. Note that the record is often reissued as a Coltrane and Burrell album, which is marketing rather than history.

Coltrane recorded with a guitarist almost never, and this is the one date where the pairing is the point rather than an accident of the personnel. It was cut in March 1958, eleven months after The Cats and a world away from it: he had gone home to Philadelphia, gotten clean, come back to Miles Davis, and arrived in Hackensack playing with the ferocious clarity that would define the next two years.

Burrell does not try to match him and the record is better for it. On "Freight Trane," a Tommy Flanagan line built on rhythm changes, Burrell plays a solo of almost conversational calm directly after Coltrane has finished tearing through the same form, and the contrast is the most instructive thing on the album. His own "Lyresto" is a blues that gives both men something plain to work with. "Why Was I Born?" is a Burrell feature with Coltrane sitting out entirely.

"Big Paul" closes it, fourteen minutes named for Paul Chambers, whose bowed bass is one of the record's real pleasures and drew particular praise at the time. New Jazz held the tapes until 1963, when Coltrane's name would sell them, and Prestige reissued the same music in 1967 as The Kenny Burrell Quintet with John Coltrane. Delayed release, uncertain provenance, and still one of the best records either man made in the 1950s.

Burrell's first live album, recorded over two nights at the Village Vanguard in September 1959 for Argo, the Chess jazz subsidiary. No piano, no horns, nobody to hide behind: guitar, bass and drums, with the entire harmonic load sitting on the guitar. It is the most exposed setting he ever recorded in and the record where he sounds most completely himself.

The trio is extraordinary. Richard Davis was two years into a career that would take him from Sarah Vaughan to Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, and he plays with an enormous sound and a willingness to move against the beat that keeps Burrell honest. Roy Haynes does what Roy Haynes always does, which is to imply four times as much as he states. The three of them breathe together in a way that studio bands rarely manage in one afternoon.

The program is mostly standards, played fast and lightly, plus Erroll Garner's "Trio," Monk's "Well, You Needn't" and a compact reworking of Burrell's own "All Night Long," cut down from seventeen minutes to five. Most of the two nights stayed in the Chess vault for decades and dribbled out across compilations before a complete edition finally collected all fourteen surviving performances. The original eight-track LP is still the way to hear it. His best record of the decade.