Kenny Burrell
Kenny Burrell arrived in New York from Detroit in 1956 and spent the next four years recording at a pace almost nobody has matched since. He worked both sides of the street at once, cutting leader dates and jam sessions for Blue Note and Prestige in the same months, and the two catalogs run in parallel rather than in sequence. Alongside them sit two meetings with John Coltrane, a guitar summit with Jimmy Raney, and the Village Vanguard trio night that closed the decade. Fifteen albums across two eras. Browse below.
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The two eras overlap rather than follow one another. Burrell was under no exclusive contract in these years and recorded for both houses in the same seasons, so the pages are organised by label rather than by date, with full reviews, personnel details, Apple Music audio previews, and album art for every record.
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 Alfred Lion took three attempts to get, 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, K.B. Blues and Swingin', 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 around long blues lines, the quintet date 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.
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 produced the records reviewed on this site. 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. His reputation was made almost entirely inside this compressed window.
Everything after 1959 is a long second act: Midnight Blue in 1963, the Verve years with Gil Evans, the Ellington tributes, and a five-decade tenure as a working leader. He founded and directed the jazz studies program at UCLA, where he taught for many years, and continued to record into his eighties. Duke Ellington is widely reported to have named him his favourite guitarist.