Kenny Burrell

The jacket calls it "The Vocal Artistry of Kenny Burrell," which tells you everything about what Columbia was hoping for and most of what actually went wrong. John Hammond signed Burrell, put him in a New York studio across four dates spread over seven months, and had him sing. Nobody had asked for this. Burrell had spent the previous five years becoming the most in-demand guitarist in New York without opening his mouth once.

He is not a bad singer. He is a pleasant, low-key, slightly stiff singer with obvious affection for the material, which runs to standards like "A Fine Romance" and "Like Someone in Love" plus two of his own blues. The problem is that every time he sings, he stops playing guitar, and the guitar is the reason you put the record on. Tommy Flanagan is here. Bobby Jaspar is here, on tenor and on flute. They are given very little to do.

What saves it is that the band is too good to be dull and the sessions are unmistakably Detroit: Flanagan, Wendell Marshall, that easy mid-tempo feel nobody in New York could quite fake. "Afternoon in Paris" is four minutes of instrumental John Lewis and it is the best thing on the record by a distance. "The Blues Is Awful Mean" is the one vocal that sounds like it belongs to him. If you already own twenty Burrell records this is a worthwhile oddity. If you own two, it should not be the third.

Columbia recorded these four sessions in 1961 and 1962, listened to them, and put them on a shelf for twenty-one years. Bob Porter finally got them out in 1983. It is hard to work out what anybody was thinking, because this is the record the singing album should have been.

Three different bands, all of them good. Illinois Jacquet, Hank Jones and Major Holley on the November 1961 dates, which produce the two best things here in "The Switch" and "Mood Indigo." Eddie Bert on trombone for the title track in March. And then, on the last date in April 1962, Burrell with Leo Wright, Joe Dukes and a young Jack McDuff at the organ, tearing through "Moten Swing" and "One Mint Julep" like the room was on fire. That April session is the first meeting of a partnership that would produce a full album the following year.

Scott Yanow's line on it is that the results are excellent and that leaving it unissued makes no sense, especially with McDuff selling records by the crate at the time. "Mambo Twist" has dated, and there is a compiled-from-the-vault looseness to the running order that a real album would not have. None of that matters much. This is Burrell at thirty, playing electric blues guitar with people who could keep up, and it went missing for two decades.

Moodsville was the Prestige subsidiary for records you put on late, and the brief was strict: slow, warm, no showing off. Burrell is temperamentally perfect for that brief. Coleman Hawkins, at fifty-seven and still the largest sound in the music, is not, which is what makes the record interesting rather than merely nice.

Hawkins plays on four of the seven tracks. When he is out, this is a Detroit rhythm section record: Burrell, Tommy Flanagan, Major Holley, Eddie Locke, drifting through "Guilty" and "No More" at walking pace. When he comes in on "Montono Blues" the temperature changes immediately. He is not louder so much as denser, and Burrell's answer is to get quieter and let him have it. The exchanges on that track are the reason to own this.

The other detail worth knowing is the guitar itself. Burrell is on acoustic arch-top and nylon string here rather than the amplified sound he had been building his name on, which puts him and Hawkins in the same acoustic space instead of on either side of an amplifier. It was Hawkins's last date for the label. The original jacket, incidentally, spells the title "Bluesey" while the record label spells it "Bluesy," which has kept collectors mildly annoyed for sixty years.

One day in January 1963, Burrell cut two records at Van Gelder's. In the morning he was a sideman on a Jack McDuff organ date. In the afternoon he made the best album of his life.

Everything about Midnight Blue is a decision to leave something out. There is no piano. There is no organ, which for a blues record on Blue Note in 1963 was close to heresy. Stanley Turrentine sits out three of the seven tracks. What is left is guitar, bass, drums and Ray Barretto's congas, and the congas are the whole trick: they give the record a pulse without giving it a beat, so nothing ever has to be pushed. Burrell plays quietly for forty minutes and never once sounds like he is holding back.

"Chitlins con Carne" opens it and has outlived everybody, sampled and covered and played in every guitar shop on earth, and it still works because Turrentine's entrance is so unhurried it is almost rude. "Mule" is Burrell and Major Holley's tune and rides a bassline you could set a watch by. "Wavy Gravy" and "Saturday Night Blues" are the two long stretches where the band simply occupies the groove and declines to leave.

Then, two and a half minutes in the middle of side one, "Soul Lament." Burrell alone, no rhythm section, no Turrentine, no congas. It is the only solo track on the album and it is the reason people talk about this record with their voices lowered. Nothing is demonstrated. He plays the melody, bends two or three notes further than he needs to, and stops.

Reid Miles's cover, the blue field with the type running up the left edge, is one of the four or five most recognizable jackets in jazz, and it earned that. This is the Burrell album to own if you own one. It is also the one that makes the rest of the decade look restless by comparison, because he never tried to repeat it.

This is the morning session. "Love Walked In" was cut on January 8, 1963, a few hours before Burrell walked back into the same room and made Midnight Blue, and the rest of the album followed six weeks later. Knowing that is unfair to Crash! and impossible to forget.

On its own terms it is a good organ record and nothing more ambitious than that. McDuff's quartet was one of the hardest-working units in the business, Joe Dukes could swing a room without ever getting subtle about it, and Harold Vick is a genuinely underrated tenor player. "Grease Monkey" is McDuff's tune and does what the title promises. The eight minutes of "Nica's Dream" are the most interesting thing here, mostly because Horace Silver's changes give everybody something to think about.

Burrell is a guest, and he plays like one: clean, tasteful, comping more than leading, taking his solos and handing the record back. Prestige billed it as "Kenny Burrell with the Brother Jack McDuff Quartet," which is the honest description. "Call It Stormy Monday" is where he sounds most like himself. Worth having if you like the organ trio format. Not the reason anyone remembers January 8, 1963.

Six months after Midnight Blue deliberately left the organ out, Burrell made a record with the loudest organist alive. Creed Taylor put them together at Verve across three July sessions, and the surprise is how little either of them tries to win.

Jimmy Smith in 1963 was a commercial force, capable of burying any guitarist who came near him, and he mostly declines to. "Soft Winds" and "Travelin'" are two men trading four-bar phrases and listening hard. Milt Hinton is on bass for most of it, which matters, because with a real bass player in the room Smith does not have to hold down the bottom with his feet and can play lines instead. Mel Lewis keeps everything honest.

"Fever" is the obvious concession to the singles market and it is fine. "Blues for Del" is the one to hear: six minutes, Burrell's tune, both of them stretching out without either taking over. The record charted, peaking at 108 on the Billboard album chart in a four-week run at the end of 1963, which for a jazz instrumental date is a real result. Nobody's best album, and a genuinely enjoyable one.

One afternoon at Van Gelder's in April 1964, six tracks, done. Prestige worked that way and Burrell never seemed to mind. The band is Will Davis on piano, Martin Rivera, Bill English and Ray Barretto, which is to say the Midnight Blue rhythm concept with a pianist added and the tenor player taken away.

That trade is the whole story of the record. Will Davis is a Detroit pianist Burrell had known since the 1940s and he is fine, unshowy, exactly what you would want. But adding piano to this particular rhythm section fills in the space that made Midnight Blue work, and losing Turrentine removes the only voice that was ever going to push back. What you get is very pleasant and slightly weightless.

The title track is seven and a half minutes and the best of it. "Here's That Rainy Day" is the ballad and Burrell handles it the way he handled every ballad, which is to say beautifully and without incident. Nothing here is bad. If you found it in a dollar bin you would be pleased. It is just hard to make a case for it over the record he had made in the same room fifteen months earlier.

Gil Evans had written for Miles Davis, for Claude Thornhill, for himself. In December 1964 Creed Taylor put him in Van Gelder's studio with Kenny Burrell and an orchestra containing Steve Lacy, Lee Konitz, Elvin Jones and a tuba, and asked what a guitar concerto might sound like. What came back is the strangest and best-made record of Burrell's career.

Evans does not write around the guitar, he writes underneath it. On "Lotus Land," nine and a half minutes of Cyril Scott's 1905 piano miniature rebuilt for jazz orchestra, the horns move in slow blocks and Burrell threads through them without ever raising his volume to compete. The Gershwin "Prelude No. 2" is barely two minutes and does more with an English horn than most arrangers manage with a whole reed section. "Greensleeves" got Evans a Grammy nomination for arranging, and it deserved it: the tune arrives sideways and you do not recognize it for twenty seconds.

Interleaved with the orchestral pieces are quintet tracks cut in April 1965, Burrell with Roger Kellaway, Joe Benjamin, Grady Tate and Willie Rodriguez. "Breadwinner" and "Terrace Theme" are the flamenco-leaning ones, played on nylon string, and they are not filler; they are the record catching its breath. "Downstairs" is Elvin Jones's tune, which is a detail worth sitting with.

The album took three Grammy nominations in 1966, for instrumental jazz performance, for Evans's arranging, and for the cover photograph. It remains the only time Burrell built a record around somebody else's imagination, and it is the one that argues hardest for him as an artist rather than a very good guitar player. If Midnight Blue is the record you love, this is the one you admire.

The first record for Chess's jazz arm, and the first appearance of Richard Wyands, who would be Burrell's pianist on and off for the next fifteen years. Esmond Edwards produced. The sleeve credits it to the Kenny Burrell Quartet rather than to Burrell alone, which is a fair description of how it plays.

The concept, such as it is, is women: six Burrell originals with women's names or the idea of women attached, plus "Girl Talk" and "People." It is a thin premise and the record does not need it. What it has instead is a working band playing ten short tracks with no ambitions beyond doing them well. Oliver Jackson is a lighter drummer than Bill English and it suits the material.

"Isabella" and "Suzy" are the two originals worth going back for. "La Petite Mambo" is an Erroll Garner tune and the most fun anybody has here. The sources disagree about where it was made, with Discogs putting it at RCA in New York and jazzdisco placing it in Chicago; the engineers listed are RCA New York staff, so New York is the better guess. A pleasant record that nobody would call essential, including, you suspect, the people who made it.

Jazz Christmas albums are usually contractual and usually terrible. This one is neither, and it took thirty-seven years and a 2003 Verve reissue for most people to find that out.

The reason it works is Richard Evans, who arranged and conducted almost all of it and treated the material as if it were a real assignment. "The Little Drummer Boy" opens with a rhythm figure lifted more or less intact from Ravel's "Bolero," builds for three and a half minutes, and has become the version people mean when they say the jazz version. "My Favorite Things" is taken somewhere bluesier than Rodgers wrote it and somewhere quite different from where Coltrane had taken it five years before. "Merry Christmas Baby" is the Charles Brown blues and it closes the record on exactly the right note.

Burrell arranged two himself, "Away in a Manger" and "Silent Night," and both are quiet and unaccompanied enough to sound like they wandered in from another album. The Chess house band is on it, including Charles Stepney at the piano two years before he started making Rotary Connection records in the same building. The orchestra behind them is uncredited, which is the one frustrating thing about the whole project. Out of print for most of its life, back in circulation now, and genuinely good.

A tribute to Charlie Christian, which for a jazz guitarist of Burrell's generation is a tribute to the person who invented the job. Eight tunes Christian had played with the Benny Goodman Sextet between 1939 and 1941, cut across four dates at Van Gelder's, with Phil Woods taking the Goodman role on alto instead of clarinet.

The smart decision is that Burrell does not imitate. He plays the repertoire, not the solos. Universal's own description of the record puts it plainly, that rather than copying Christian he plays creatively inside the swing format and comes up with fresh statements of his own, and that is what happens: "Rose Room" and "Stompin' at the Savoy" are unmistakably 1967 recordings of 1940 material, not reconstructions.

Phil Woods is superb. He was never a swing player and does not pretend to be one, so the two of them end up meeting somewhere that is not quite either era. Ron Carter and Grady Tate keep the whole thing modern underneath. "Wholly Cats" adds Richard Wyands and is the closest the record comes to nostalgia. Reissued decades later under the flatter title For Charlie Christian and Benny Goodman, in case the point had been missed.

Scott Yanow opens his review by pointing out that despite the title, the music has nothing to do with 52nd Street, and that is the fairest possible starting point. Side one is a four-part "Suite for Guitar and Orchestra" co-written by Burrell and Richard Evans. Side two is five shorter pieces. Nothing on either side is about the bebop clubs the title invokes.

Evans is doing the same job here he did on the Christmas record, and doing it well: strings, Chicago session brass, and a rhythm section built out of the Chess house players. The suite moves in four short movements and the third, "Round and Round We Go," is the one with actual momentum. "Con Alma" is Dizzy Gillespie's tune and the only track where the arrangement gets out of the way long enough for Burrell to stretch.

Coming two years after Guitar Forms, the comparison is unavoidable and unkind. Gil Evans wrote spaces for Burrell to move through; Richard Evans writes settings for him to sit in. The playing is lovely throughout and the record never grabs you. It has been reissued repeatedly, including a 1998 GRP CD and a 2021 Japanese SHM-CD, so somebody keeps making the case for it.

Burrell wrote the liner notes himself, which tells you he cared about the argument the title is making: that the blues is the thing everybody in American music has in common. To prove it, Don Sebesky's orchestra plays Horace Silver, Ma Rainey, Memphis Slim, a spiritual, and a Buffalo Springfield song.

That last one is the surprise. "Everydays" is Stephen Stills's tune from Buffalo Springfield Again, recorded within months of the original, and putting it next to "See See Rider" is a real thesis rather than a marketing idea. The horn sections across the three dates are absurd on paper, Thad Jones and Urbie Green and Snooky Young and Bill Watrous, and Herbie Hancock is at the piano throughout.

Where it thins out is in the execution. Sebesky's charts are handsome and busy, and a guitarist whose entire gift is for space ends up with very little of it. The best track is the one that abandons the concept: "Were You There," one minute and seven seconds of Burrell alone with the spiritual, cut at the February 19 quartet session. AllMusic gives the album three stars out of five and that is a defensible number. An interesting record more than a satisfying one.

Four different bands across six sessions, nine months apart, assembled into one album. Three Sebesky orchestra dates in April 1968, then a solo guitar date and two quartet dates in January 1969. It should not hold together and largely it does not, but the reason to own it is on side one.

Wes Montgomery died on June 15, 1968, between the two halves of these sessions. "Blues for Wes" was recorded on January 14, 1969, with Richard Wyands, Ron Carter and Freddie Waits, and it is four and a half minutes of the most direct playing Burrell put on record in the sixties. No orchestra, no concept, no arranger. Two guitarists had come out of the same tradition and taken it in different directions, and one of them was gone at forty-five.

The rest is uneven in the way this whole late-Verve stretch is uneven. The Sebesky title track and "Love You Madly" are polished and a little airless. "Just A-Sittin' and A-Rockin'" is Burrell entirely alone and is over too quickly. "Night Hawk" runs eight minutes with the quartet and is the other genuinely good thing here. The album is worth having for two tracks, which is a strange thing to say and still true. Burrell's own account of Montgomery's playing is worth reading alongside our Wes Montgomery reviews.

The last record of the decade and the one that points at where the seventies were going. Johnny Pate arranged it and co-produced it with Burrell, and Pate writes nothing like Sebesky: thin, spare backdrops rather than full orchestral upholstery, closer to a Chicago soul session than a Verve jazz date. It gives Burrell more room than he had been given in three years.

Side one is the suite, five linked pieces about the city, running from a one-minute introduction into the seven-minute "Asphalt Canyon Blues" and out through "Alone in the City." It is a mood record about New York in 1969 and it earns the concept, which the previous two albums did not. Roland Hanna is on piano and is used sparingly and well.

Side two is the grab bag: Mercer Ellington's "Things Ain't What They Used to Be," Percy Mayfield's "Please Send Me Someone to Love," the Jackie DeShannon hit "Put a Little Love in Your Heart," and "Going to Jim and Andy's," named for the midtown bar where every session musician in New York drank between dates. That last one is the most relaxed thing on the album. The record has become a rare groove favourite and was reissued in Japan in 2021 as part of a Burrell ninetieth-birthday series. It is much better than its obscurity suggests.