[Ed. note: This post was originally published on August 1, 2016]
Yesterday was Kenny Burrell’s 85th birthday. I heard him first on Jimmy Smith’s Back At the Chicken Shack, and first heard his great original “Chitlins Con Carne” on Junior Wells’ 1966 album, Hoodoo Man Blues. The bluesman Otis Rush is another Chicagoan whom I heard play the tune, and in recent years I’ve read interviews with him in which he’s said he listens to Kenny’s version everyday and hailed its host album, Midnight Blue, as his all-time favorite. On the local front, I heard “Chitlins Con Carne” played at the weekly jam sessions that I frequented at the Kitty Kat Lounge in Worcester, and I’ve rarely met or heard of a blues guitarist who didn’t name Burrell as a model of technique, tone, and phrasing. Given the appreciation Kenny states for bluesmen T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King, it seems fitting that his best-known tune is one that so sweetly straddles the jazz and blues idioms.
The Burrell original was recorded in 1963, with saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, bassist Major Holley, drummer Bill English, and conga player Ray Barretto. Midnight Blue ranks high on all kinds of lists, including one that says it epitomizes the “perfect Blue Note [Records] sound.”
By the time I got to see Burrell in person, he’d already become my favorite jazz guitarist. His tone alone makes everything he plays appealing, and in addition to his huge legacy in hard bop, he’s minored in Ellingtonia for the past forty years. Thanks to Kenny for coining the phrase, “Ellington Is Forever,” as the title of his two-volume memorial album to Duke, and as director of the jazz studies major at UCLA, he introduced a course in “Ellingtonia” in the late seventies.
Following the litany of milestones and awards announced by the emcee at this UCLA concert, Burrell plays an Ellington/Strayhorn medley that includes “Azure,” “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me,” “Pretty Girl,” and “The Single Petal of A Rose.”
Kenny’s accompanied a who’s who of singers over the years including Blossom Dearie, Tony Bennett, Carol Sloane, and Billie Holiday. He played “God Bless the Child” with Billie on her 1956 album, Lady Sings the Blues. Here he plays the Lady Day classic, “Lover Man.”
