Veteran’s Day : Longtime jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell follows fellow great Joe Pass to the Wheeler Hot Springs stage.

When veteran jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell hits the stage at Wheeler Hot Springs this Sunday, he’ll be the second veteran jazz guitarist at the venue in the past few months, following on the heels of Joe Pass in December.

Is this shaping up as some kind of unofficial guitar series? If it is, it’s not a moment too soon.

What Burrell shares with Pass, besides having been a sideman with piano giant Oscar Peterson, is historical significance. Burrell played a critical role in the wave of straight-ahead jazz guitarists--along with Pass, Jim Hall, Herb Ellis and others--who cropped up in the ‘50s and early ‘60s and helped push the instrument to new heights of viability in jazz.

Nostalgia and historical resurgence are in the air for seasoned-but-active players of Burrell’s ilk. Mainstream jazz has made a solid comeback in the past decade, and CD reissues of old albums parade the past onto music store shelves.

Burrell’s “latest” album, for instance, actually is a reissue of his 1957 Prestige album, “Kenny Burrell.”

To what does he attribute his staying power?

“Part of the reason that I’ve been successful in my recording career and my performance career is that I like a lot of different things,” Burrell said in an interview from San Diego last week.

“The bottom line for me is, as Duke Ellington would say, that there are only two kinds of music--good and the other kind. I like to play the good kind, no matter what style or format it is.”

That’s not to say, however, that Burrell hasn’t also put in time playing the “other kind.”

Born in Detroit in 1931, Burrell hit the road out of college with Peterson and wound up a New York studio musician in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. In that capacity, he worked on a dizzying variety of music, from backing Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett to lesser, more faceless duties.

“During that same time, I was recording with wonderful jazz artists, from Herbie Hancock to Eubie Blake, from Coleman Hawkins to John Coltrane, from Paul Chambers to Oscar Pettiford, and from Kenny Clarke to Art Blakey,” Burrell remembered.

“That was the other part of what I was doing, which kept me reminded and stimulated that I could get out there and do what I wanted to do in terms of my own creative stuff.”

With the release of his early well-received albums, “Midnight Blue” and “Guitar Forms,” both made with arranger Gil Evans, Burrell’s solo jazz career was off and running by 1964.

Was it always his goal to be a leader?

“Yes and no,” he said. “We all dream of having a band, but that was not the main thing. The goal, in whatever form it takes, is to play the music that you love, whether you’re the leader or co-leader.”

About three decades and 80 albums later, Burrell is one of the living legends on the instrument. When he plays in Ojai, he will be in a trio with bassist Andy Simpkins and drummer Sherman Ferguson, both Los Angelenos.

There is an intimacy in the guitar trio format. Is there also increased pressure?

“As far as I’m concerned, as soon as I start to make music for an audience, there’s pressure,” Burrell said. “I don’t care what instrumentation it is. I don’t consider it pressure in a negative way; I just have a responsibility to make good music when I step on the stage.”

Burrell started working with a guitar trio back in Detroit “out of necessity,” he said. “I needed a job.” Moving to New York in 1957, he then formed a trio with Roy Haynes and Richard Davis, recording at Village Vanguard in 1959.

“I’m very comfortable with that format,” he said. “I look at it not so much as a physical challenge, but as a musical challenge. You don’t have to fill all the spaces with notes.

“If you’re coming at it from the idea that the piano is missing, then you have a certain attitude, and not necessarily a positive one. I look at it really like an opportunity to exploit all of the possibilities of the guitar.”

While technically gifted, Burrell has a tendency toward economy, preferring to say a lot with a little.

It is a description with which Burrell isn’t at all uncomfortable.

“Well, I guess that’s fair for you to say,” he said. “I look at it as language. We’re talking, right? I’m trying to tell you something. I don’t have to bombard you with big words, little words, a whole bunch of words to get my point across.

“It’s the same thing with notes. What I’m feeling is what I’m trying to project. If that comes out and you get the message, then it’s done.

“Whatever it takes to make the music work, that’s what you do.”

Last Chance Opera

This is the last weekend to see Jeff Kaiser’s mini-grand, gonzo opera, “The Rooster Brings Heresy,” staged at the Plaza Players Theater in the Livery Arts Center in Ventura.

The project is testament to the Ventura composer’s stubborn resourcefulness and creative muscularity. On another level, it also suggests the powerful possibilities of collaborative efforts such as this in the area.

Leavening the free-associative lava flow of language in Matt Swain’s libretto, Kaiser’s scoring is actually fairly tonal and melodically driven. His computer-generated textures include both abstract sonics and minimalist grid work, as well as cheeky pop culture references.

Dryly humorous and laced with self-justifying Dadaist touches, “Rooster” is a surprisingly palatable operatic romp, somewhat reminiscent of Robert Ashley’s recently released “Improvement.”

Visually, the low-tech funk and amiable disjointedness of Paul Benavidez’s sets and Melissa Fair’s costumes set the stage aptly for the non-linear antics.

Robert E. (Doc) Reynolds wanders about the stage, blathering in a bathrobe. Meanwhile, lushly bedecked Geraldine Decker goes bel canto amid the supportive rumblings of the “chorus,” clad in drab attire, of Katherine O’Hara, Charles Padilla and Linda Sorisio. Off to the side is “interpreter” Deby Tygell.

Interpretations are open, but when the Old Man, in his final soliloquy, refers to “the world’s first generation with a full vocabulary of psychobabble,” some light bulb of internal reference goes off.

Pseudo-psychobabble never sounded so good, so . . . operatic.

* WHERE AND WHEN

* Kenny Burrell trio at Wheeler Hot Springs, 16825 Maricopa Highway in Ojai, Sunday at 7 p.m. Info: 646-8131.

* “The Rooster Brings Heresy,” at 8 p.m. through Saturday, Plaza Players Theater, 34 N. Palm St. in Ventura. Info: 652-0288