Kenny Burrell

His Blue Note debut, the one Alfred Lion needed two attempts to get on tape. This playlist runs the expanded First Blue Note Sessions compilation rather than the original LP sequence, so it carries twenty-three tracks including the material Lion left in the vault.

An original 1958 mono pressing of BLP 1596, ripped from the vinyl. Volume 1 only, so it is half the session; the two volumes came out of a single day with Art Blakey, Tina Brooks, Louis Smith and Junior Cook, and the review covers both. Andy Warhol did the cover.

The live Blue Note date from the Five Spot with Tina Brooks, Bobby Timmons, Roland Hanna, Ben Tucker and Art Blakey. This is Blue Note's own playlist for The Complete Masters, fourteen tracks, so it runs well past the original LP. Reviewed on the Blue Note Classics page rather than the Burrell era pages.

The co-led date with Tommy Flanagan, John Coltrane and Idrees Sulieman, filed under Coltrane's name on most uploads including this one. Note the playlist is a long channel mix that opens with the album, so it keeps going once the record ends.

Cut in March 1958 with Tommy Flanagan, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, then held back four or five years and issued after Coltrane had become Coltrane. "Why Was I Born" is the duo track, just guitar and tenor, and it is the reason to hear this.

The trio night at the Village Vanguard with Richard Davis and Roy Haynes, recorded September 1959 and issued on Argo in 1960. No piano, no horn, and Burrell playing like a man with nothing to hide behind. He would come back to record in this room at least four more times, in 1978, 1986, 1989 and 1993.

The date with Coleman Hawkins sitting in on four of the seven tracks, one of the great late Hawkins performances and a reminder of how comfortably Burrell worked with players from the generation above him. Moodsville was Prestige's slow-and-quiet subsidiary and the brief suited them both.

The one everybody names first. One January day with Stanley Turrentine, Major Holley, Bill English and Ray Barretto, no piano and no organ anywhere on it. "Chitlins con Carne" is the famous track and "Soul Lament" is the solo guitar piece at the center.

Gil Evans writing for a jazz orchestra around a single guitar, with Steve Lacy, Lee Konitz, Elvin Jones and Ron Carter in the cast. Three Grammy nominations and the record that proved Burrell could carry a concert-scale setting without raising his volume.

The summit of the Fantasy years, an all-star double album assembled after Ellington died in 1974, with Thad Jones, Joe Henderson, Jimmy Smith, Jon Faddis, Jerome Richardson and Snooky Young. Three years later Burrell began teaching a course on Ellington at UCLA.