It's Billy Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center.
Any short list of guitarists most admired by both musicians and jazz listeners is a sure bet to include the name Kenny Burrell.
I'm Billy Taylor, and this is Billy Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center,
A program where we talk some and play some to give you insights into jazz.
As a guitarist, Kenny Burrell has made restraint an art form.
But as a performer, he's really gotten around.
The extensive and diverse list of musicians he's worked with includes
Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones, John Coltrane, Jimmy Smith, and Benny Goodman, to name just a few.
He's also been leading his own groups, and he still finds time to compose and teach at UCLA.
He's busy, as you're about to hear.
We're in the John F. Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater with a wonderful audience and my trio,
Chip Jackson on bass, Steve Johns on drums,
and guitarist Kenny Burrell.
Thank you.
Thank you for watching.
Thank you.
Kenny Burrell.
Thank you.
A very wonderful pianist, composer, arranger, a man named Duke Pearson.
Let's get to some of your early days.
What made you take up the guitar?
Well...
Was it your first instrument?
Actually, the piano was my first instrument.
Hey!
Watch it, watch it.
But that's because, like many families, there was a piano around the house.
Sure.
Music got me, the bug got me, and I really wanted to play something.
Now, my brother Billy, as I said, my first teacher, was already playing guitar.
So I wanted to do something.
Sure.
thought because at 13 you don't want to be your own person and Billy was already playing
guitar and I really liked the saxophone. I really was taken with Lester Young and Coleman
Hawkins.
Good models. All right. Yeah.
Shoeberry. But this was during World War II and as you know there was a war effort
on, and metal was very expensive, because I had to go to the war. And saxophones made
out of metal were very expensive. And I came from a poor family, and we didn't have that
kind of money. And guitars were very inexpensive, because that was before all of the electronics.
It was just wood and some frets. That was it. So I settled for the guitar.
And I wanted to, I just really wanted to play something, so I settled for the guitar.
And about that time, however, I heard Charlie Christian, who was playing the electric guitar.
And he was, with the electric guitar, he could come up in the front line with the saxophone players and the trumpet players and get heard.
wouldn't have to sit in the background like Freddie Green and others and just
play rhythm so I said well the guitar is not so bad after all you know so I was
able to become get in the front line and play solos and melodies and chords and
stuff and then I must mention two other people that are very important not only
in convincing me that the guitar was a beautiful instrument but in the history
of guitar. I always like to mention Oscar Moore.
We worked with the Nat Cole Trio, the original trio.
Right. As I say, Christian put the guitar up in the front line with the saxophones and trumpets,
but basically his forte was a single line, whereas Oscar Moore's forte was the chords.
the beautiful harmonies that he laid down behind that pole. Well, that was really revolutionary.
I mean, he was the first one to really bringing forth those modern concepts of chords with
clusters.
Play something. Demonstrate what you're talking about. A chord that sounded like what?
That kind of thing.
And passing tones.
All of that kind of modern harmony that you hear on, yeah.
But the thing is, you know as a piano player, you can get a full sound with just a few notes.
With the clusters and picking the right notes and that's one of the things that Oscar Moore
are brought to not only modern guitar, but modern music.
Let's get back to the gentleman that you were making
reference to, Charlie Christian.
He did a thing that I really like to hear you play,
and I wish you would play with this, without the piano,
on this one.
Soft winds.
That was one of my favorites.
Yeah, this is Charlie Christian's tune,
and it also has unusual kind of format for the blues.
Yeah.
Yeah, unusual.
Thank you.
I'm Billy Taylor, and this is Billy Taylor's Jazz at Kennedy Center.
With me is my guest, guitarist, composer, and educator, Kenny Burrell.
How is it you got into jazz?
I just got into jazz.
I mean, I was born into jazz, I would say.
it was the music around my house along with blues along with many other related
genres also around my neighborhood around my community I and like I said
when I was growing up I was listening to Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman and Kate
Smith and the Mills Brothers and Bing Crosby. All of this was popular music. And later on,
then all these categories came into the being. But when I was a kid, it was just music to
me.
Good music, as Duke Ellington says, two kinds of music.
As Ellington says, it's either good or the other kind.
And you certainly didn't want to play the other kind.
Yeah, but truthfully, that was the criteria.
One of the constant things that happened in the music that you were listening to was the blues.
And the blues seemed to be the core in many of the things that you do.
And so you would, I know many of the records you made with Jimmy Smith, with other people,
I mean, it really gets down.
I mean, you get into some serious blues there.
Where'd that come from for you?
Again, the same thing.
I think it's just part of my background, where I grew up and the music that I listened to.
I didn't mention, when I mentioned Oscar Moore, I meant also to mention another person who
is popular, but I think most people don't realize his importance in the development
of jazz, blues, and American popular music, and that's T-Bone Walker.
He to me was a bridge between blues and jazz.
He was a man who could, I feel, if he wanted to, play what we think of as jazz.
He had that kind of facility.
But he was, as you know, a great blues player, a great showman.
And he influenced a lot of people such as B.B. King and myself and many others who look
at him as a one who was this very strong urban blues player who took the blues to the cities,
to the nightclubs, and turned everybody on that way, and threw the records, you know,
Stormy Monday and so forth.
Well, I'm going to put you to the test.
I'm going to give you a blues G, see what happens.
Okay.
We'll see what happens.
Okay.
Thank you.
?
Thank you.
See, that's a blues he didn't even know.
That's something I wrote called Soul Sister, but this is something he wrote.
This is one I don't know.
This is a very beautiful ... Kenny is a wonderful composer.
I mentioned that when I introduced him.
But because he records with everybody, Tony Bennett, you name him, he's recorded with him,
many people forget that he also writes really lovely pieces of music.
This is one of them.
Thank you.
piano plays softly
Thank you.
Thank you
Thank you.
piano plays softly
Thank you.
piano plays softly
Isn't that beautiful?
Listen to the Dawn is the title of that.
Composed by Kenny Burrell.
Thank you, Billy.
Thank you.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
Chip Jackson on bass.
Steve Johns on drums.
It's Billy Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center
on NPR National Public Radio.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for joining us
here at the Tourist Theater for Billy Taylor's
Jazz at the Kennedy Center.
This is a program where we play some, talk a little
bit, and give you some insights
into America's classical music,
jazz. I'm
I'm Billy Taylor and my guest is one of the finest musicians in jazz.
He's really a very special human being as well as an excellent guitarist.
His name is Kenny Burrell.
So far, Kenny, I've been asking all the questions,
but as we do with each of these shows,
I want to give our Terrace Theatre audience a chance to ask questions of us.
I'm sure they will, and I'm sure they'll have some thoughts
that are on the minds of some of our radio listeners.
So we'd like to remind our questioners, those of you who have things to ask,
Please tell us your name, tell us where you come from.
So let me take the first question.
Yes, I'm Harold Snow from Atlanta, Georgia.
Mr. Burrell, I've admired your playing for several years now,
and you seem to get better and better.
But I was wondering if you practice as much these days
as you did when you first started playing jazz.
The answer is no.
You know, truthfully, in my teens,
when I first started really playing.
I was practicing six, eight hours a day,
and then often after dinner sometime.
But the thing is, when you're older
and you have reached a certain level of technical proficiency
and you're working a lot,
I don't feel personally for me the need to practice as much.
But I think what happens is there's certain things,
I call it quality time.
quality of practice in other words I try to work on the things that are giving me
a problem at the moment to keep it up with the other things because there's
always a problem you know there's always something that tell me about you you say
oh boy I better work on that because for whatever reason it's not as up to the
level of the other thing so the time that I practice I try to put in on their
problems and then the other thing as you know in any business as you get older
You get busy, so you don't really have the time to practice.
And like Billy and I and the other musicians, we travel a lot.
A lot of time is spent traveling, packing, unpacking,
in and out of hotels, planes, and so forth.
And so the time is a little bit limited, too.
So it kind of all works out anyway.
Another question?
Mr. Burrell, I've noticed in some of your recordings
that there's a certain dark side to the music
that to me is more reminiscent of a European musical influence
than a blues influence.
And I'm wondering if you feel you've had certain influences
from the European music and community
or if you feel that it's more American-based.
As far as the influences in my music,
I would say that I play mainly what I feel.
I'll try to open that door and let the music flow and I have listened to all
kinds of music because besides the fact that I just took it on my own to do that
when I was in college I had to listen in order to get through college was I was a
music major I majored in theory and composition so I had to hear music from
all parts of this globe so again we're we're always influenced by many things
So other people may hear it a different way than you hear it,
but the point is just to tap into what my operation is
when I'm performing is I try to let the feelings flow,
let the music flow, and I don't calculate it hardly at all.
I know the changes to most of the stuff that I'm doing,
And that's like knowing the story.
I know which, you know, I'm gonna go from here,
I'm gonna turn left at this corner,
and I'm gonna turn right at that corner,
and I'm gonna go around in a circle.
Well, I know that, so I don't have to worry about,
well, I'm just gonna do that, but what am I gonna say?
You know, what am I feeling to express?
And that's what I try to do.
Well, one of the reasons you love good music
is because one of the principal influences on your work
was Duke Ellington.
You teach a course in El Antonio at UCLA.
So tell me about that.
How did it get started?
Well, it got started because I had been doing seminars and workshops all over the place,
all over the United States.
And I had done a few at UCLA because I was living out there at the time.
and they wanted to expand their studies on jazz was this was the african-american
studies department and they called me and said that we'd be interested in
expanding our look at african-american culture and I said would you be
interested in doing something in jazz and I said yeah why not you know but let
think about it because I want to make sure that I know what I'm doing before I
tell you what I'm gonna do I want to think about it so I thought about it and
I thought that looking at it from a cultural standpoint from a musical
standpoint from many standpoints Duke Ellington was probably the most
important musician I could talk about and so I decided to do that and at the
same time, I was talking about jazz. So I used Ellington as a focal point to talk about
the whole history of jazz, but yet used Ellington as a focal point to talk about African American
culture and sociological and psychological and economics, all of that stuff, and it worked.
You play so many Ellington things. You've done so many, recorded so many of his works.
Let's play a few things.
Let's start with you doing something you like.
All right.
Thank you.
PIANO PLAYS
piano plays softly
Thank you.
piano plays softly
Thank you.
guitarist Kenny Burrell
it doesn't get any better than that
I want to thank him for joining us
because I really enjoyed playing with you.
Couldn't you tell?
Now, stay right there where you are
because there's more great programming coming up.
But before we go, I'd like to let you know
who helped put this show together.
Our producer is Tim Owens.
Executive producers, Derek Gordon and Mary Horowitz.
Recording engineer, Terry Knight,
with technical assistance from Rima Snyder.
Post-production engineer, Chuck Thompson.
Production manager, Deirdre Lavrakis.
The editor for this program was Wiley Rollins.
Billy Taylor's Jazz at the Kennedy Center is a co-production of NPR
and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Educational Department.
Financial support is made possible by a major grant from the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund,
helping people to make the arts part of their everyday lives,
and by the U.S. Department of Education.
Additional support comes from the Kennedy Center Corporate Fund,
NPR member stations, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
I'm Billy Taylor, and this is NPR National Public Radio.
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