Kenny Burrell: Guitar Forms (Verve Acoustic Sounds Series) [VERVE]

Why you'll love it

This Acoustic Sounds Series edition is mastered by Ryan K. Smith at Sterling Sound from the original analog tapes, pressed at Quality Record Pressings and housed in a tip-on gatefold jacket. The album earned three Grammy nominations.

This edition

• Verve Acoustic Sounds Series
• 180g vinyl
• Mastered by Ryan K. Smith from the original analog tapes
• Pressed at Quality Record Pressings
• Tip-on gatefold jacket
• Remastered
• Stereo mix

About the album

Kenny Burrell could have made another lovely small-group record and nobody would have complained. Instead he and producer Creed Taylor built Guitar Forms as a showcase for every side of his playing: big orchestral pieces with Gil Evans, tight blues with a combo, and a single solo performance.

Evans's orchestra appears on five of the nine tracks, with Lee Konitz, Steve Lacy, Johnny Coles and Ron Carter in the ranks, and his arrangement of "Greensleeves" earned a Grammy nod of its own. "Lotus Land" stretches toward ten minutes of shifting colour, "Moon and Sand" floats on a bossa sway, and "Last Night When We Were Young" is pure late-night melancholy. With Roger Kellaway, Joe Benjamin, Grady Tate and Willie Rodriguez, Burrell digs into Elvin Jones's "Downstairs" and his own "Breadwinner," and Gershwin's "Prelude No. 2" is Burrell alone, unhurried and gorgeous.

Rudy Van Gelder engineered the sessions in Englewood Cliffs across late 1964 and spring 1965, and the album remains one of the most elegant guitar records Verve ever made. One guitarist, a full orchestra and a tuba, and not one of them stepping on his toes.

Also at Kops: more Kenny Burrell on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Verve (cat# V6-8612), a reissue of the 1965 album.