Kenny Burrell © Andrea Canter

You can feel good about feeling good as the Jazz Bakery hosts a stellar quintet featuring James Moody, Kenny Burrwll and Benny Green in a New Year's Eve benefit concert. One of the surviving champions of Dizzy Gillespie's music, NEA Jazz Master James Moody is an accomplished musician on the tenor and alto saxophones, as well as the flute, despite being born partially deaf. In addition to his instrumental prowess, Moody is an engaging entertainer, captivating audiences with his personal charm and wit. NEA Jazz Master Kenny Burrell pioneered the guitar-led trio with bass and drums in the late 1950s. Known for his harmonic creativity, lush tones, and lyricism on the guitar, Burrell is also a prolific and highly regarded composer.  Benny Green is a hard bop jazz pianist who "graduated" from Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and toured with Ray Brown until his death.  Green has been compared to Bud Powell in style and counts him as an influence. 

James Moody © Andrea Canter

Although born in Savannah, James Moody was raised in Newark, New Jersey. His interest in jazz was sparked by a trumpet-playing father who gigged in the Tiny Bradshaw band, and he took up the alto sax, a gift from his uncle, at the age of 16. His first musical training came in the Air Force, and after leaving the service in 1946 he joined the Dizzy Gillespie big band, staying until 1948. Gillespie became his musical mentor. In 1949, he moved to Paris for three years, often playing with visiting American musicians, including the Tadd Dameron- Miles Davis band.

In Sweden he recorded his famous improvisation on "I'm in the Mood For Love" in 1949, playing on an alto saxophone instead of his usual tenor. His solo was later set to lyrics by Eddie Jefferson and recorded by King Pleasure, known as "Moody's Mood for Love," becoming a surprise hit in 1952. Throughout the rest of his career, Moody would be more known for the vocal version of the song based on his solo than for the instrumental version itself, and obliged requests for the song by singing his famous solo.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, he led his own bands, and worked alongside other saxophonists, notably Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, with whom he co-led a three-tenor sax band. In 1963 he returned to the Dizzy Gillespie small group, where he largely remained until 1971. In 1975, he moved to Las Vegas and worked numerous hotel and casino shows with singers and comics, picking up the clarinet along the way. In 1979, he left Las Vegas and moved back to New York to lead his own quintet.

Then in 1989 he moved to San Diego, working as a consummate soloist and member of all-star touring units. In the 1990s, he teamed up again with his lifelong friend Dizzy Gillespie to tour Europe and the United States as a member of the United Nations Orchestra. He continues to tour worldwide and experiment with his music, sometimes including synthesizers and strings on his recordings. He is sought-after on college and university campuses for master classes, workshops, and lectures, and has received honorary doctoral degrees from the Florida Memorial College and the Berklee College of Music. In 1997, he played an acting role in the Clint Eastwood film Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Kenny Burrell © Andrea Canter

After graduation, he toured for six months with the Oscar Peterson Trio and then moved to New York, where he performed in Broadway pit bands, on pop and R&B studio sessions (with Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, and James Brown), in jazz venues, and on jazz recordings. He went on to work and/or record with such artists as Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, Stan Getz, Gene Ammons, Kenny Dorham, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, and Jimmy Smith. As a leader, he has recorded more than 90 albums and is a featured guitarist on more than 200 jazz recordings, including ones with Art Blakey, Herbie Hancock, and Quincy Jones.

Kenny Burrell's compositions have been recorded by artists including Ray Brown, June Christy, Grover Washington, Jr., Frank Wess, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. His extended composition for the Boys Choir of Harlem was premiered at New York's Lincoln Center, and his "Dear Ella," performed by Dee Dee Bridgewater, won a 1998 Grammy Award.

In addition to performing and recording, he is a professor of music and ethnomusicology at the University of California at Los Angeles. A recognized authority on the music of Duke Ellington, he developed the first regular college course ever taught in the United States on Ellington in 1978. In 1997, he was appointed Director of the Jazz Studies Program at UCLA, where he has enlisted such faculty members as George Bohanon, Billy Childs, Billy Higgins, Harold Land, Bobby Rodriguez, and Gerald Wilson.

Kenny Burrell is the author of two books, Jazz Guitar and Jazz Guitar Solos. In 2004, he received a Jazz Educator of the Year Award from Down Beat. He is a founder of the Jazz Heritage Foundation and the Friends of Jazz at UCLA and is recognized as an international ambassador for jazz and its promotion as an art form.

Benny Green © Andrea Canter

After high school, Green moved to the West Coast and freelanced around the San Francisco Bay Area, gaining experience working as a sideman. But it was after his return to New York in the spring of 1982 that Green's career took a sharp upward turn. Benefiting from studies with Walter Bishop Jr., he joined Betty Carter's band in April 1983 and began a four-year stint of performing, recording and learning with jazz's most respected vocalist. The piano chair in Art Blakey's prestigious Jazz Messengers followed, as well as a year with the Freddie Hubbard Quintet in 1989. Green joined Ray Brown's Trio in 1992 and was with it un Brown's death.

Wendsday, December 31, 2008

Early (8:30 pm)  or Late Show (10:30 pm): $100 / Entire Evening: $140 at the Jazz Bakery, located at 3233 Helms Ave. in Culver City.  The box office opens one hour before show time, you can also call for reservations at 310-271-9039.  For more information visit  www.jazzbakery.org.  Tickets are $30, $15 for students. Reserve tickets online  at https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/49079 .

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