“THE BLUES,” Duke Ellington once wrote, “the blues ain’t nothin’ but a cold gray day, and all night long it stays that way...the blues is a one-way ticket from your love to nowhere; the blues ain’t nothin’ but a block crepe veil ready to wear.”
The blues is as many things as the number of people it has touched, and they number in the tens of millions. A lot of them are convinced that the blues as it struck them down was the only true, unremitting blues anyone ever had; but they can never see inside the next man’s soul.
There are Tin Pan Alley lyric writers, too, who think they know all about the blues. They discovered it almost a half century ago, discovered the word but probed hardly at all into its rock bottom meaning, and songs like Limehouse Blues offered the letter without the spirit. The beachheads had been established by W. C. Handy with St. Louis Blues and a few other early statements; but they were soon washed away by the bathos of bastardized blues, while the pure and authentic remained the preserve of America’s firmly separated tenth of a nation. Few in those days, outside the Harlems of the north and the cotton fields and churches of the south, knew much about the truth of the blues, its real meaning, real form and substance.
Even today there are in the market places of the world far more synthetic than genuine blues; but there are also, happily, greater and broader opportunities for those to express themselves who have really paid enough dues to understand the blues.
I’m not tolkng about the blues you get when you’re waiting for a $10,000 royalty check and it turns out to be only $9,000, or the blues because your best girl walked out and you had to go bock to your fourth wife, or even the blues because somebody said the blues is making bread this year and you can cry yourself a river of juke box quarters if you wail the blues long enough and loud enough.
I’m just talking about good, uncomplicated, sincere musicians who play the blues when they feel like playing the blues.
That’s the way Kenny Burrell felt when he talked with Alfred Lion about the idea for the album. “I have always had a love for the blues,” he said. “In my earliest days in Detroit I worked with groups that concentrated a great deal on the blues. And I wanted to get a group together for this session that can feel the blues just the way I do.”
Kenny decided that there would be no need for a piano on this occasion; not that he believes exclusively in pianoless rhythm sections as such, but the sound just wasn’t required for his concept of the groove he wanted to establish.
Chittlins Con Corne, the first title on the record, gives you more than a hint of what is coming. Ray Barretto, a master of the conga drum techniques, sets a Latin mood; a touch of bossa nova, but basically it’s strictly the blues. And Stanley Turrentine wails in a manner that makes you wonder how many times that verb has been thrown around loosely and superficially. This is definitive wailing.
Mule — a title like this has immediate meaning to any experienced jazz zoologist. Just as surely as Willie Smith is The Lion, Johnny Hodges the Rabbit and Ben Webster the Frog, so is Major Holley Jr. the redoubtable mule of the jazz family. This one opens with beautiful subtlety; just Kenny ad libbing very slowly, with an almost motionless, one-or-two-notes-to-a-bar, reluctant Mule in the stall behind him. Major Holley is a great man, though less famous than others with his talent; and he knows the blues just as sure-footedly as Kenny himself. Mule is part of Kenny’s regular group, which worked recently at the Five Spot in New York. (The tasteful Bill English, too, is part of the regular Burrell personnel.)
Soul Lament is Kenny’s personal — very personal — solo message. It’s on electric guitar, sure, but he doesn’t lean on the amplification as a crutch, and you are reminded, during this exceptional performance, that Kenny has listened to Flamenco, to the guitars of Spain as well as Charlie Christian. The way this melody and its interpretation are constructed, it’s almost as if Kenny were asking questions and answering them for himself. “Is it true the blues have really got you down?” say the single note lines, and “Well, this is the way I feel this evening,” reply the chord patterns. This is a soulful lament indeed.
The tempo changes, but the mood keeps the same feeling, as Kenny introduces another minor-groove theme, the title number of the album. This time, though, he’s joined by the rhythm section and there’s a beat so firm that the tempo may seem faster than it actually is. This one, too, is Burrell all the way.
Wavy Gravy could have been called “Building The Blues,” for it has a pattern of mounting intensity. At the start there are just the sets of three notes by Mule to establish the waltz pattern; then comes an ad lib chorus by Kenny. The second chorus brings Stanley in (saying nothing much more than a sort of repeated amen); on the third, though, the waltz theme is played, then Stanley is propelled into his fine solo. Both Stanley and Kenny offer in this one some of their most inspired moments of the whole album; I found myself reflecting how sad it is that because of the prejudices of those days against anything but four-four time, men like Charlie Christian and Chu Berry never got to waltz the blues.
Gee Baby Ain’t I Good To You, the only standard tune in this set, goes back to around 1930 and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, whose director, Don Redman, wrote the music. “It’s a ballad,” says Kenny, “but essentially it’s still the blues.” Kenny’s eloquence is such that you can almost hear Andy Razaf’s lyrics on his solo... “it’s love makes me treat you the way I do... .“
Saturday Night Blues brings the session to a solidly rocking conclusion; the blues with guts. Stanley plays as if he never had it so blue, and Kenny offers convincing evidence that Saturday night is the bluest-tinged night of the week.
Looking over the whole session, studying the seven performances and their relationship to the blues, you gain a valuable picture of the variety of moods, tempos, beats and feelings that the blues can involve. Each number is somehow different from the rest, yet all have that indefinable quality that can best be summed up in words as a down-home blues feeling.
And where, you may ask, does down home mean? Rio? Madrid? Minton’s? Or Detroit, where Kenny was born and grew Up and studied classical guitar and played his first jazz gigs?
You might say that it ¡s all of these places and more; but wherever it is and no matter where you want to go in quest of the roots, these sides will take you down home in a swinging, gentle haze of midnight blue.
— LEONARD FEATHER
Cover Design by REID MILES
Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER
RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes
A NEW LOOK AT MIDNIGHT BLUE
To describe Kenny Burrell as an integral part of the Blue Note story is to sell this still-thriving guitarist short. Perhaps better than any of his contemporaries, Burrell represents the level of versatility and consistent quality that transcended individual record labels and created the fertile jazz recording scene of the 12-inch LP’s first decade.
He was everywhere, as a sideman and a leader, after launching his East Coast career with two Blue Note albums in 1956. And one suspects that certain excellent sessions he cut for other companies with Coleman Hawkins in place of Turrentine; or A Night At The Vanguard — classic trio Burrell — might have more substantial reputations today if they had been issued under the Blue Note logo. Consider such gems as Bluesy Burrell, cut for Prestige/Moodsville four months before the present session with Holley and Barretto aboard, Tommy Flanagan’s piano added and Coleman Hawkins in place of Turrentine; or A Night At The Vanguard, classic trio Burrell with Richard Davis and Roy Haynes that Argo taped in 1959 less than a month after Blue Note had documented a Burrell quintet (with Tina Brooks and Art Blakey), On View At The Five Spot Cafe.
Yet if such masterpieces from other catalogues (and others like Kenny Burrell with John Coltrane and The Tender Gender) can be imagined as Blue Note releases, no rival label could possibly have provided as fitting a home for Midnight Blue. Leonard Feather’s notes report what the music so clearly reveals; that Burrell had a clear overall vision for this album, involving a program of blues and related material that might shout (but only in context) yet would also explore the feelings to be uncovered at lower volumes and slower tempos. It was a concept that must have taken producer Alfred Lion back to his earliest ensemble project with the Port of Harlem Jazzmen.
Given the particular affinity of the guitar and the blues, space was needed to allow the instrument its full expressive potential. Lion was willing to give Burrell the necessary room where other producers of the time might have insisted upon a piano or, especially given the album’s theme, an organ. Taking further advantage of the textural possibilities by adding Ray Barretto’s conga drums to Bill English’s trap set was also within the Blue Note tradition. Candido had teamed with Kenny Clarke on the label’s Introducing Kenny Burrell, and Barretto had assumed the role of house conguero for both Blue Note and Prestige since important 1958 recordings with Lou Donaldson, Red Garland and Gene Ammons. Bassist Major Holley, Jr. and English were Burrell regulars who worked and recorded freuently with the guitarist in these years, while Stanley Turrentine the only Blue Note leader among the supporting artists, had first shown a penchant for making indelible music with Burrell on the 1960 session that produced Jimmy Smith’s Midnight Special and Back At The Chicken Shack.
In various combinations, Burrell, Turrentine, Holley, English and Barretto brilliantly realize the original goal. While the album is filled with great moments, like the guitarist’s naked emoting on ‘Soul Lament” and the propulsion he generates when locking into tempo on “Midnight Blue,” the overall plan and pace create one of the most subtle cumulative moods ever conjured on two sides of vinyl. Hear how the waltz tempo of “Wavy Gravy” arrives like a seismic shift in terrain, and how affirmatively things are concluded on “Saturday Night Blues.” The seven original tracks form a complete statement, a considered presentation that in no way contained the spontaneity at the music’s heart. The bonus track “Kenny’s Sound” is particularly enlightening in this regard. It was the first piece done at the session and clearly did not enhance the aura of the final album, yet it served as a perfect muscle-flexer that allowed the musicians to loosen up and prepare for the highly focused task ahead. The other added title, “K Twist,” was recorded again nearly two years later on a session designed to produce material for release on 45. The later personnel is quite similar, with everyone from this session save Holley returning; but the addition of Herbie Hancock’s piano creates a less fluent if more commercial veneer.
Midnight Blue did not need “K Twist” in order to generate a hit, since in “Chitlins Con Carne” it had one of the most ingratiating blues lines of the period. “Chitlins” had life as a 45 as well. I can still recall the fade at Stanley Turrentine’s entrance on the two-part single, both sides of which were played to death on the rare jazz radio shows to be heard in early-sixties St. Louis; and I also have not forgotten the rush of delight when I finally heard the unedited performance on LP. “Chitlins Con Carne” might seem rather basic to some players and listeners more impressed by complex scales and harmonic substitutions, yet it holds profound lessons about telling a story through music and functioning as a collective unit missing from most texts and exercise books. It also establishes a level of music discourse that is sustained over the remainder of this timeless album.
— Bob Blumenthal, 1999
Blue Note Spotlight - February 2013
http://www.bluenote.com/spotlight/soul-lament-kenny-burrells-midnight-blue/
In an era dominated by the glossy veneer of “Facebook blue,” Kenny Burrell‘s Midnight Blue sets the mood for a brief return to a bygone era when the deep indigo of the Yves Klein version was more common. Darker hues ruled the night, and the pale moonlight of a lovelorn skyline meant it was past last call and all that remained of the day was an overwhelming air of what could only be called the blues. “The blues,” Duke Ellington wrote, “the blues ain’t nothin’ but a cold gray day, and all night long it stays that way…the blues is a one-way ticket from your love to nowhere; the blues ain’t nothin’ but a black crepe veil, ready to wear.”
Leonard Feather begins his liner notes for Burrell’s seminal album with this quote, invoking one of the consummate jazz guitarist’s greatest influences, and one of his greatest champions. Now 81, Burrell even teaches a course on Ellington at UCLA. Part Lawrence Lucie, part Charlie Christian, he has a steely, cool-under-pressure sound on the guitar that dovetailed perfectly with Blue Note’s prevailing blues-infused character.
Few albums capture the aesthetic of Blue Note’s golden era better than Midnight Blue—a consistent set of original minor grooves meant to be experienced in its entirety, rather than padding for one standout track—and it justifiably occupies a place in the jazz canon, a common entry on countless essential listening lists. Recorded 50 years ago at Van Gelder studio in Englewood Cliffs with Burrell’s pianoless quintet, the album still holds up to critical scrutiny, or to a pairing with a half-empty bottle of Scotch. Undoubtedly, 1963 was a high-water mark for jazz, in New Jersey and elsewhere.
One of Burrell’s most enduring achievements, the album plumbs the depths of the blues for its harmonic subtleties and lyricism in a manner that can be readily accessible on its face yet challenging enough to reward repeated visits. As always with Burrell, though, never mistake brevity for simplicity; the fathomless 12-bar mantra has no two identical choruses, and Burrell doesn’t rely on reflexive facility, the blues equivalent of fool’s gold.
A true master, Burrell has internalized the form, giving him the sense of repose and restraint that is the cornerstone of any bluesman worth his salt. On this outing, he is joined by like-minded players who create the illusion of a loose blowing session within a tight framework: tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, bassist Major Holley, drummer Billy Gene English, and conguero Ray Barretto, a highly regarded bandleader in his own right who injects a dash of Latin flavor into the mix.
Burrell got his start as a Detroit rhythm guitarist; as a result, his time is unerring and right in the pocket, he always spells out the chords and forecasts where he’s going, but like a great bus driver, he doesn’t draw attention to the underlying mechanics. The effect is a listener-friendly album with a tonally nuanced atmosphere easily shared between the jazz aficionado and the neophyte who just heard Kind of Blue for the first time; regardless of background, a smooth ride allows passengers to take in the scenic vistas.
The album opens with Burrell’s classic minor blues, “Chitlins con Carne.” Often covered by artists ranging from Horace Silver to Stevie Ray Vaughan, this is the low-key original that set the standard for this now standard Latin-tinged blues. The eight-bar intro lays down a pulsing Latin clave, with Holley pedaling the bass as Barretto takes liberties on the congas. Turrentine’s matter-of-fact statement of the melody establishes his by turns lugubrious and diaphanous sound.
Burrell’s sparse comping sets the album’s precedent for succinctness, one of his hallmarks. His deceptively clean guitar solo walks a tightrope between endless space and airtight rhythmic motifs; a devil-may-care attitude in the face of death that comes from having been down and out and having lived to tell about it. Turrentine plays foil, Captain Kirk to Burrell’s Spock, singing the blues right out of the gate, but the two show their psychic connection when seamlessly trading not fours, but ones, until the blistering out chorus.
“Mule” recalls Howlin’ Wolf sideman Hubert Sumlin‘s feel and precision, a slow-marinating, soft blues that the band works over like a bomb squad that has seen it all. Unlike other jazz subgenres, the key to the blues is to never let the bomb go off, and the five demonstrate an unwavering focus, keenly aware of this urgent fact. Punctuated by Holley’s downward bass slide riff and English’s ambling hi-hat, Turrentine and Burrell stretch out on this quintessential slow jam.
Burrell keeps it mellow on the crepuscular “Soul Lament,” a solo minor groove that departs from the blues form but nevertheless retains its spirit. Though under three minutes, this represents some of Burrell’s most sensitive playing, replete with embellishments, a rhythmic elasticity, and complex inversions. The pace picks up abruptly on the title track, which reintroduces the rhythm section, but not Turrentine. Taking another departure from the 12-bar blues, Burrell shows his prodigious bebop chops here, cutting loose on some extended lines juxtaposed with subtler rhythm guitar, employing technique that carries his characteristic fullness despite its comparatively fewer notes.
Turrentine returns on “Wavy Gravy,” a smoldering mid-tempo blues waltz that brings the minor groove to a new tension point. Holley establishes the groove with a well-articulated bass line, which Burrell glides over sparsely, until the saxophonist comes in to state the head in unison with the guitar. Turrentine’s and Burrell’s solos are the epitome of cool, a relaxed but structured call-and-response that typifies the album’s eponymous color.
“Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You,” the album’s sole non-original, is a lazy, schmaltz-free meditation on love. Burrell uses it as a springboard for his effortless, behind-the-beat bebop phrasing, playing off English’s sultry brushwork. Burrell closes the album with “Saturday Night Blues,” a driving nightcap to a bottomless evening that shifts the blues from minor to major. Turrentine simply wails; his style contrasts perfectly with Burrell’s cavalier detachment. The two continue riffing over each other until it all starts to fade out—the blues are never finished, merely abandoned at dawn—as Saturday night palpably fades into Sunday morning.
Blue Note Spotlight - July 2014
http://www.bluenote.com/spotlight/kenny-burrell-reckoning-with-the-blues/
Sooner or later, every jazz musician arrives at a moment of reckoning with the blues. It’s a foundational language of improvisation, and a starting point; if you live on jazz time, it’s almost impossible to escape. And despite its structural simplicity, even veterans find the blues an endless challenge – perhaps because to communicate successfully in the blues, the musician has to put aside whatever he’s learned and become involved on an emotional level. Inflections and grace notes matter. It’s futile to simply rattle off licks, because many of those squibby little flatted-third motifs have been used and recycled for a century. The only way to be persuasive within the blues is to fully engage it – as musical structure and philosophical orientation, a way of seeing and being in the world.
For decades, musicians seeking to develop a personal approach to the blues have turned to, and devoured, Kenny Burrell’s understated Midnight Blue. It’s a potent dose of blues feeling served neat. It’s a core text of blues-based improvisation that offers parallel wisdom about life, much of it contained within the phrase “don’t try too hard.” There’s a lesson in every chorus, not because Burrell shreds but because he doesn’t: The guitarist whose tone entranced Jimi Hendrix – and whose style was emulated by Stevie Ray Vaughan, among many others – moves deliberately, patiently, seeking fleeting illumination between the big pronouncements. The lure for Burrell here is the midnight part: He’s acquainted with the romance of the later hours, and he’s not trying to hurry them along. He lets his ideas hang in the air, smoldering like a neglected cigarette. His tunes move at leisurely last-set tempos – the molasses-slow “Mule” begins with a few stoptime choruses that showcase the supremely inviting roundness of his guitar tone – and when he does lean back to uncork some blistering run, it is usually a knockout blow, delivered with lethal precision.
Midnight Blue is one of those records that seems to live inside a stylized, high-resolution movie scene. Check out the percussive crawl that begins “Chitlins Con Carne” – it pulls listeners into the convivial ambience of an afterhours bar where possibly shady dealings are going down, and the band is only thing keeping the peace. After a few tunes that conjure different perspectives on that same scene, Burrell gives the band a breather to play, alone, his gorgeously dejected “Soul Lament.” Here, he shows how blues mastery goes beyond notes, to include shading and pitch-bending and all sorts of sonic manipulations as the tone decays. Hear him attack a note on this riveting meditation, and you don’t stop to wonder if he “means” it: You know. His phrases arrive electrified with conviction, and a bit of wily warrior energy. The program ends with a deceptively intense medium swing entitled “Saturday Night Blues,” and here Burrell shows an entirely different facet of his art: Listen to the way he plays behind tenorman Stanley Turrentine, fashioning liquid long tones and syncopated slashing chords into a gently agitated, and utterly ideal, backdrop. Turrentine never had it better.
These days in jazz, there’s a tendency to over-analyze, to put every note played by a major figure under the microscope. Some recordings defy such scrutiny. Midnight Blue is one of them: Take it apart and study it all you want, but just as with the works of the great bluesmen, if you don’t dive in fully and listen with an open heart, you’re probably going to miss some essential part of the message.
