Kenny Burrell

Twelve years after A Night at the Vanguard, Burrell walked into Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs room to make a Creed Taylor record, and the whole apparatus of early-1970s CTI came with him: Don Sebesky orchestrating, Freddie Hubbard and Ron Carter on the payroll, Billy Cobham on drums, and a section of five cellos where a rhythm section used to be.

The CTI house style is easy to be snobbish about and this is one of the better arguments against the snobbery. Sebesky writes for cellos rather than the usual wall of violins, which keeps the textures dark and stops the record sliding into the syrup that sank so many of its labelmates. Three of the five tracks are Burrell originals, unusual for CTI, where the brief normally ran to standards and pop covers. "Do What You Gotta Do" gets nine and a half minutes and earns most of them.

Where it falls short is exactly where you would expect. Thad Jones's "A Child Is Born" and the Billie Holiday title tune are handled with enormous care and not much risk, and Burrell, who spent the 1950s sounding like the most relaxed man in any room, occasionally sounds like a guest on his own record. Hubbard is barely used. Worth hearing, particularly for the writing, but it is a producer's album more than a guitarist's.

The first record of the Fantasy contract, cut in Berkeley in April 1972, and the beginning of a run that would occupy most of the decade. It is a ballad album almost from end to end, which suits Burrell's temperament and does not always suit the listener's attention.

The quartet is Richard Wyands, Reggie Johnson and Lennie McBrowne, the working band of these years, with Joe Sample and Paul Humphrey stepping in for the title track alone. Randy Newman's "I Think It's Going to Rain Today" is the most interesting choice on the record and the one place where the program stops behaving itself. The closing "Blues in the Night" is unaccompanied guitar, three and a half minutes of the thing Burrell could do better than almost anyone.

Scott Yanow's verdict was that it is a typically tasteful Kenny Burrell record where no real sparks fly and the results border on sleepy, and that is fair without being the whole story. Rudy Van Gelder mastered it, which is a curious detail given it was recorded three thousand miles from him. Pleasant, well made, and unlikely to be the Burrell record you reach for twice.

Burrell produced this one himself and hired Benny Golson to write the charts, which turns out to be the single best decision of his Fantasy years. Golson had spent the previous decade writing for film and television and came back to a jazz date with the craft intact and none of the rust.

The band is twelve pieces, and the reed section is the tell: Jerome Richardson, Ernie Watts and Jack Nimitz between them cover piccolo, flute, bass flute, clarinet, alto, tenor and baritone, so Golson can shift the colour underneath Burrell three times in a chorus without changing the personnel. Bob Brookmeyer turns up for one track on valve trombone. Mike Wofford plays acoustic and electric piano, sometimes in the same tune.

The Brazilian strain is the other surprise. Moacir Santos plays congas and contributes the opening "Nana," and Francis Hime's "Minha" sits two tracks later, so the record keeps drifting south without ever announcing itself as a bossa album. Burrell arranged "Good Morning, Heartache" for himself. The best of the big-ensemble records he made in this decade, and the one where the writing is worth the price on its own.

The funk record. Two sessions a month apart, one in Los Angeles and one in Berkeley, same six musicians throughout, electric piano on most of it and Mayuto Correa adding percussion over the top. If the previous album was Burrell hiring an arranger, this is Burrell hiring a groove.

The two best tunes come from Onaje Allan Gumbs, then a young pianist and arranger a long way from famous, including the title track that opens the record. Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue" gets a reading that is more Santamaria than Coltrane, and Richard Evans's "Soulero" runs past nine minutes and closes the album on its strongest footing. Burrell whistles on "A Little Walking Music," which is either charming or not depending on the hour.

It works in the way that competent 1970s soul jazz works, which is to say it is enjoyable and it does not require much of you. Jerome Richardson is the most valuable player, moving between flute and two saxophones to keep the textures from settling. Not the record to argue Burrell's case with, but a good one to put on.

Two housekeeping notes before the music, both of which matter. First, this is a 1974 session, not a 1978 one: Burrell cut it over three days in June 1974 and Fantasy left it on the shelf for four years while issuing records made after it. Second, the title track is the Billy Eckstine and Earl Hines "Stormy Monday Blues," not T-Bone Walker's "Call It Stormy Monday," which is a confusion worth heading off.

What was shelved is one of the better small-group records of his Fantasy period. The format keeps shifting: quartet on most of it, trio on the closer, and "Why Did I Choose You?" is under two minutes of unaccompanied guitar. Richard Wyands is on his usual quietly excellent form and John Heard's bass gives the ballads more spine than Reggie Johnson tended to.

The nine and a half minutes of Ellington's "I Got It Bad" that close the album are the reason to own it, a slow unhurried reading that gives Burrell more room than anything else in his 1970s catalogue. Why this waited while the orchestrated projects went out first is a question only Fantasy could answer. It has since been paired with Sky Street on CD, which is a sensible way to hear both.

Four tracks, all of them long, and not one of them written by the leader. Two are Jerome Richardson's, one is Kirk Lightsey's, one is Thad Jones's. That is an unusual way to make a record under your own name and it tells you what Burrell wanted from this date, which was a band rather than a showcase.

The timing is the strange part. He cut this on January 29 and 30, 1975, then walked back into the same Berkeley studio five days later to convene the twelve-piece all-star orchestra for Ellington Is Forever. Fantasy released the Ellington set that year and held this one until 1976, so the quintet record arrived sounding like a follow-up to something it actually preceded.

Kirk Lightsey is the find here, another Detroit pianist, moving between acoustic and electric instruments with more curiosity than Wyands brought to the same job. Eddie Marshall pushes harder than Lenny McBrowne did. It is a looser and more modal record than anything else in this stretch, and it has aged better than its total obscurity would suggest, though four long tracks with no leader compositions is a thin premise to hang an album on.

Ellington died in May 1974. Nine months later Burrell booked two days at Fantasy Studios, hired an orchestra, and made the record he had probably been carrying around since the 1950s. Duke reportedly named him his favourite guitarist; whether or not that story is exact, this double LP is the sound of a man discharging a debt.

The cast is remarkable and, more to the point, correctly chosen. Thad Jones, Snooky Young and Jerome Richardson had all done time in bands that played this repertoire for a living. Jon Faddis was twenty-two. Joe Henderson is the wild card and takes the record somewhere Ellington's own saxophonists would not have. Jimmy Smith is on organ, which sounds like a gimmick and is not: on the fifteen-minute "C-Jam Blues" he supplies exactly the weight the arrangement needs.

What keeps it from being a mausoleum is Burrell's refusal to put himself at the front. He comps, he sets tempos, he takes short solos, and he sits out "Take the 'A' Train" entirely so Jimmy Jones can have it. The Penguin Guide put it in its core collection and the four and a half stars it drew from AllMusic are not generous. His best record of the decade by a distance.

Not outtakes. Burrell went back into Fantasy Studios in November and December 1975, nine months after the first volume, with a substantially different cast: Nat Adderley, Quentin Jackson, Gary Bartz, Roland Hanna, George Mraz, Monk Montgomery and Philly Joe Jones all new to the project. Fantasy then held it until 1977, which is why the two volumes look like a split release and are not one.

The second volume is the more varied and the less monumental of the two. Where the first ran to full-orchestra readings, this one keeps breaking into smaller units: "Azure" is Burrell alone, "Solitude" is guitar with Jimmy Smith's organ and drums, "Orson" is Jimmy Jones solo piano, and a twenty-one-second fragment of "Satin Doll" links two sides. Burrell is more present throughout than he was on Volume One.

The moment everyone remembers is Quentin Jackson's vocal on "Prelude to a Kiss." Jackson had played trombone in Ellington's orchestra for a decade and was near the end of his life; it was his last recording, and it is frail in a way that no amount of production could have improved. Burrell had intended to make one of these every year. He made two. That this is the lesser of them says more about the first than about this.

After six years of orchestras, electric pianos, cello sections and twelve-piece Ellington tributes, Burrell signed with Carl Jefferson's young Concord label and made a guitar trio record. No piano, no horns, no arranger. It is the same instrumentation as A Night at the Vanguard eighteen years earlier, and the comparison is the most interesting thing about it.

What changed is the temperature. The Vanguard trio was three men taking risks in front of an audience; this is three men in a San Francisco studio playing well within themselves. Reggie Johnson and Carl Burnett are unobtrusive to a fault. What you get in exchange is Burrell's chord-melody playing recorded with a clarity nobody managed in 1959, and on the Chano Pozo title tune and Erroll Garner's "La Petite Mambo" he sounds genuinely engaged.

Tadd Dameron's "If You Could See Me Now" is the highlight, taken slowly and with real care. Scott Yanow's line was that Burrell is in above-average form and that nothing here surprises, which is exactly right and not a complaint. The first of the Concord records and the better of the two.

A New York trio date produced by Helen Keane, who had spent the previous fifteen years managing and producing Bill Evans and knew as much as anyone alive about recording a quiet musician without smothering him. Five tracks, three of them long, with Burrell alternating between electric and acoustic guitar across the program.

The acoustic tracks are the reason to hear it. Burrell rarely recorded on nylon or steel strings and the two he plays here, his own "So Little Time" and "It Could Happen to You," have a directness the electric tracks do not. The ten-minute reading of "All Blues" is the centrepiece and the least necessary thing on the album, a tune that by 1978 had been played into the ground and does not find anything new here.

Ron Wynn's assessment, that there is nothing exceptional here but the breezy pace and bluesy feel are nice, is about as much as the record asks for. It disappeared almost immediately and stayed out of print until Joel Dorn reissued it on CD in 2000. Pleasant, well recorded, thin on ambition.

The second Concord trio record, back at Coast Recorders with Larry Gales replacing Reggie Johnson on bass and Carl Burnett still on drums. The program is Benny Carter, Johnny Green, Neal Hefti, Fats Waller, Ellington, and two Burrell originals pointed at Basie and the blues. On paper it is the ideal late-career Burrell album.

On record it is the most comfortable thing he made in the decade, and comfort is the problem. Scott Yanow gave it two and a half stars and wrote that the session is so relaxed and tasteful as to be rather dull, and that Burrell's concern with every note being appropriate had made the playing overly safe. Having said that about a record I still enjoy, I have to concede he is not wrong.

What survives the criticism is the chord-melody work, which is as good here as anywhere in his catalogue, and "Blues for Basie," where the band finally leans into something. Hefti's "Li'l Darlin'" is taken at the tempo it deserves. If you want to hear Burrell play beautifully while risking nothing at all, this is the record. Some evenings that is the correct thing to want.

Nineteen years after A Night at the Vanguard, Burrell went back to the Village Vanguard with a trio and the same thing happened: put him in front of an audience without a piano to lean on and he plays like a different musician. The whole 1970s argument about safety and tastefulness evaporates in about eight bars of Sonny Rollins's "Pent Up House."

Larry Gales and Sherman Ferguson are the band, and Ferguson in particular pushes in a way that no studio drummer of these years was asked to. "Bags' Groove" is under four minutes and swings harder than anything on the two Concord records combined. "Love, Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere" is an odd, almost forgotten 1929 song and gets the most searching playing on the record.

Two housekeeping notes. Muse recorded the whole night of December 15, 1978 and split it across two LPs, this one and Live at the Village Vanguard, which is not reviewed here; and despite the 1978 session date, this volume did not appear until 1981. AllMusic called it among the finest Burrell recorded in the 1970s and that is right. If you take one record from this decade, take the Ellington set. If you take two, take this.