Kenny Burrell
Kenny Burrell arrived in New York from Detroit in 1956 and spent four years recording at a pace almost nobody has matched since, working both sides of the street at once for Blue Note and Prestige. The 1960s took him from Midnight Blue to Gil Evans, through six labels and a Christmas record. Then came CTI, and most of the 1970s on Fantasy, making orchestrated Ellington tributes and stripped-down guitar trios in roughly equal measure. The last stretch runs another thirty-five years, from a forgotten audiophile LP in 1980 to a live date at Catalina’s in 2015, most of it made while he was building and running the jazz studies program at UCLA. Fifty-five albums across five eras. Browse below.
Browse by Era
The first two eras overlap rather than follow one another. Burrell was under no exclusive contract in the 1950s and recorded for both houses in the same seasons, so those pages are organised by label rather than by date. The third era is the busiest of his career and the one most people know him by, and the fifth covers the long late period that most discographies skim past. Every review carries personnel details, Apple Music audio previews, track listings, and album art.
Seven records from Burrell's first four years in New York. The Savoy quintet date that introduced the Detroit players as a group, the Blue Note debut that took Alfred Lion three attempts, the co-led session with altoist John Jenkins, and the two Blue Lights volumes cut in a single day with Art Blakey and Tina Brooks. Two of the seven sat unissued for more than twenty years.
Eight records for Bob Weinstock's Prestige and its New Jazz subsidiary, plus the live Argo date. Three Prestige All Stars jam sessions built on long blues lines, the quintet with Cecil Payne and a young Elvin Jones, 2 Guitars with Jimmy Raney, two sessions with John Coltrane on either side of his year of getting clean, and A Night at the Vanguard.
Fifteen records across six labels, and the two everybody names first. Midnight Blue with Stanley Turrentine and no piano at all, and Guitar Forms with Gil Evans writing for a jazz orchestra around him. Alongside them: the co-led dates with Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff and Coleman Hawkins, a Charlie Christian tribute, a Christmas album that took thirty-seven years to find its audience, and a Columbia session shelved until 1983.
Twelve records for four labels. The Don Sebesky orchestration at CTI, the long Fantasy contract with Benny Golson charts and a funk record along the way, both Ellington Is Forever volumes with their all-star casts, and the late trio dates for Concord Jazz and Muse that close with a second Village Vanguard night nineteen years after the first.
Thirteen records across thirty-five years. A jazz-history survey for a tiny audiophile label, two Muse trio dates that sat on the shelf for three years each, Togethering with Grover Washington Jr. and a Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette rhythm section, the three-guitar Jazz Guitar Band cut across two nights at the Village Vanguard and split into two albums, a suite written for Ralph Bunche and issued by a university press, and the late live sets from Dizzy’s and Catalina’s.
Ten Kenny Burrell records embedded as full-album videos and playlists: Introducing Kenny Burrell, Blue Lights, On View at the Five Spot Cafe, The Cats, Kenny Burrell & John Coltrane, A Night at the Vanguard, Bluesy Burrell, Midnight Blue, Guitar Forms, and Ellington Is Forever.
Open the Kenny Burrell video page →Two 1960s recordings sit outside the era pages. The 1959 Blue Note date On View at the Five Spot Cafe is reviewed on the Blue Note Classics page, and "Soul Lament," the solo guitar track at the centre of Midnight Blue, has its own entry on Favorite Jazz Tracks.
Era Five covers thirteen albums but not the whole late catalogue. Still to come from that stretch: the two live duo records with Rufus Reid (A La Carte and Ellington a la Carte), the mid-1990s Vanguard pair for Paddle Wheel and Evidence (Midnight at the Village Vanguard and Then Along Came Kenny), Love Is the Answer with the Boys Choir of Harlem, Blue Muse, the 75th Birthday Bash Live! set with the Gerald Wilson Orchestra, Tenderly, and Special Requests from Catalina’s in 2012.
Kenny Burrell, born 1931
Kenneth Earl Burrell was born July 31, 1931, in Detroit, into a musical household on the city's east side. He started on guitar at twelve, drawn first to Charlie Christian and then to Django Reinhardt and Oscar Moore, and came up inside the extraordinary Detroit scene of the late 1940s alongside Tommy Flanagan, Paul Chambers, Elvin Jones, Pepper Adams, Donald Byrd and Yusef Lateef. He was a member of the New World Music Society, the musicians' collective that several of them founded.
His first recording was as a sideman with Dizzy Gillespie in 1951, while he was still an undergraduate. He finished a bachelor's degree in music theory and composition at Wayne State University in 1955, one of the few musicians of his generation to complete a conservatory-level education before turning professional, and moved to New York the following year.
The four years that followed made his reputation. Burrell recorded prolifically for Blue Note, Prestige, Savoy and Argo, sometimes for two labels in the same week, and became the guitarist that arrangers and producers called first. Nat Hentoff was already describing him in 1957 as the most important of the newer guitarists. The 1960s, covered by the third era page here, brought Midnight Blue, the Verve and Cadet years, and Guitar Forms with Gil Evans.
The 1970s are the decade covered by the fourth era page here: a CTI album under Creed Taylor, a long Fantasy contract that produced everything from Benny Golson big-band charts to a soul-jazz record, the two Ellington Is Forever tributes assembled after Ellington's death in 1974, and a return to the unaccompanied guitar trio for Concord Jazz and Muse. Duke Ellington is widely reported to have named Burrell his favourite guitarist.
The fifth era page picks up in 1980 and runs to 2015. The records get further apart and the settings keep changing: guitar trios for Muse, a genuine straight-ahead date with Grover Washington Jr. as Blue Note was relaunching under Bruce Lundvall, a three-guitar band built to bring two younger players forward, a quartet with Jay Hoggard’s vibraphone, a mostly solo Ellington and Strayhorn program, and four vocal tracks on a record made when he was sixty-nine.
Teaching runs underneath all of it. Burrell joined the UCLA faculty in 1978 with Ellingtonia, the first college-level course anywhere devoted to Duke Ellington, became founding director of the jazz studies program in 1996, and held the post for twenty years. He established the Kenny Burrell Archive of African American Music at UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center in 2004 and wrote an extended suite for Bunche that the university issued on its own imprint in 2006. He continued to record and perform into his eighties, closing with two live albums for HighNote.