Four minutes in, Chitlins con Carne came on and the skip button stopped being an option.
Kenny Burrell, Midnight Blue. Blue Note BLP 4123. Recorded January 8, 1963 at Van Gelder in Englewood Cliffs, Alfred Lion producing. One session, nine tunes cut, seven of them made the LP.
Here is the lineup. Burrell on guitar, Stanley Turrentine on tenor, Major Holley on bass, Bill English on drums, Ray Barretto on conga.
Notice what is missing. No piano.
Everything else follows from that. Most Blue Note dates from that stretch have a pianist filling the middle of the sound. Take the piano out and the guitar owns all that space. Burrell does not rush to fill it either. He plays a phrase, he lets it sit, he plays another one. The gaps are the point.
On a car stereo that reads as calm. Nothing is fighting for your attention. You can follow one line the whole record or you can leave it running in the background while you deal with traffic, and both work. Very few records pull that off.
Barretto is a big part of why it moves. Conga instead of a busier drummer gives most of these tracks a steady pulse that never gets loud. English keeps brushes and light ride going underneath. It swings without ever demanding anything from you.
Chitlins con Carne is the famous one. Burrell wrote it, Turrentine plays the head with him, and the groove sits at that perfect medium tempo where nothing needs to happen. Stevie Ray Vaughan cut a version of it that turned up on The Sky Is Crying in 1991, and it works there too, which tells you the tune is bulletproof.
Turrentine only plays on four of the seven album tracks. He is off Soul Lament, the title track, and Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You. That changes the shape of the record. You get the two horn front line, then it drops to just guitar and rhythm, then it comes back.
Soul Lament is Burrell completely alone. No bass, no drums, no conga. Two minutes and forty three seconds of solo guitar in the middle of a blues record. It should not fit. It fits.
The title track is the one I keep going back to. Four minutes, Burrell with just Holley and English and Barretto. It is the sound the album is named after and it earns the name without trying to be a statement.
Gee Baby, Ain't I Good to You is the Don Redman and Andy Razaf standard and Burrell plays it about as plainly as you can play it, no tricks, just the melody and a good tone.
The original seven tracks run about thirty six minutes. That is a morning drive. The CD reissue tacks on Kenny's Sound and K Twist from the same day, both good, both unnecessary. Stick with the seven.
One more thing worth knowing. Reid Miles did the cover, Francis Wolff shot the photo, and the design was good enough that Elvis Costello's Almost Blue paid homage to it in 1981. Look them up side by side sometime.
If you want a record that sounds great at seven in the morning and does not ask you to concentrate, this is it. NPR put it in their basic jazz library in 2005 and they were right.
Thirty six minutes, no piano, nothing on it raising its voice. Burrell never made another one quite like it.