Kenny Burrell Adds Choral Work to a String of Pearls

To refer to Kenny Burrell as a guitarist is a half-truth that is reducing itself, year by year, to an even more fractional understatement, given the scope of his other activities.

True, Burrell remains fixed in the public mind as a fleet and creative instrumentalist, but his restless imagination has taken him into many other areas. He was the founder and is the president emeritus of the Jazz Heritage Society, a Los Angeles-based activist organization. He is the author of a book on the art of the guitar. At one time he owned a nightclub in New York.

In 1971, he began a series of college seminars. In recent years he has divided his time between the East and West coasts; while out here he has been a regular lecturer at UCLA, offering a course on the music of Duke Ellington.

Most significantly, he has had a long and enviable career as a composer, writing works mainly for his own albums; but his latest project is without precedent. Tonight, at Royce Hall, UCLA, he will be a guest soloist with the Boys’ Choir of Harlem, offering the world premiere of “The Love Suite,” a 45-minute work he describes as a “Double Suite for Guitar and Choral Group.”

“I first got together with the choir three years ago, just to play on a record session for which they used a professional rhythm section,” Burrell explained.

“It just happened that at that time I had been commissioned by a New York group called Art Awareness to write a choral piece, and they wanted to hear a group try it out. During a break in the record session I asked the choir director, Dr. Walter Turnbull, whether he would consider having the boys sing this piece I’d been asked to write. He smiled and said, ‘Funny you should ask. We were thinking about requesting you to compose something for us.’ So we were able to satisfy one another’s wishes.”

Burrell soon learned that the Boys’ Choir, founded 20 years ago, has had a unique career, touring worldwide in performances of its eclectic repertoire drawn from gospel music, popular songs, jazz and spirituals, highlighted by choreography. In 1980 the choir was the subject of an Emmy-winning documentary, “From Harlem to Harlem: The Story of a Choir Boy.”

“Writing for this group is a big challenge,” Burrell said, “because there are 35 voices--sopranos, altos, tenors, baritones and basses. I wrote the whole thing, words and music. I’ll be playing both acoustic and electric guitar in the course of the piece. It has a lot of different American musical characteristics: rock and blues feelings, classical, jazz, anything that is a part of me and a part of what we hear around us all the time.”

The choir left Monday on its first West Coast tour and will appear Sunday in San Francisco and Wednesday in San Diego. That will be followed by another week of one-night stands until it returns to New York, where the organization now has its own self-contained school.

While the choir is winding up its obligations, Burrell will return to the regular schedule as a guitar soloist that has been the main focus of his career since the 1950s. After arriving in New York from his native Detroit he led overlapping lives as a sideman (with Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Benny Goodman, Gil Evans among others) and as leader of various small groups.

When the tenor sax giants roamed the land, Burrell was with them, recording with Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins (on the famous “Alfie” sound track date) and John Coltrane. When organ-guitar-drums trios were the fashion in the 1960s, he was there, at sessions with the best of them: Jimmy Smith, Wild Bill Davis, Brother Jack McDuff.

His most recent recording initiative involved a quintet he put together with two other guitarists, Rodney Jones and Bobby Broom, for the album “Generation” (Blue Note BT85137). All three guitarists doubled on acoustic and electric instruments. A follow-up album, due out soon, will introduce a hybrid known as the guitarjo, a six- stringed banjo tuned like a guitar.

The only aspect of Burrell’s multifarious life that has not surfaced in recent years is his singing. Long ago, when the late John Hammond was producing his LPs for Columbia, he recorded a vocal album, “Weaver of Dreams.”

Asked whether his teaming with the choir might not provide a logical time to resume his vocal career, Burrell laughed and said, “No, that album is gone and forgotten. We’ve got all these talented boys singing; I’ll just try to play my guitar part well and leave the vocals to people who do it best.”