Ode To 52nd Street

Recorded in September 1967 at Chess's Ter Mar Studios in Chicago, Ode to 52nd Street paired guitarist Kenny Burrell - on loan from Verve - with the ambitious arranging of Richard Evans, Cadet's in-house writer-producer who was pushing the label's jazz artists toward larger orchestral canvases in the late 1960s. The centerpiece is the four-part 'Suite for Guitar and Orchestra,' a through-composed work that let Burrell stretch beyond the blues-drenched hard-bop persona he'd built at Blue Note and Prestige into something closer to a concerto, alternating his lyrical, unhurried guitar lines against string and horn charts. The second side balances that ambition with more digestible material: two Evans/Burrell originals, a reading of Dizzy Gillespie's 'Con Alma,' Evans's own Latin-tinged 'Soulero,' and a moody instrumental take on 'Wild Is the Wind.' Burrell, already one of the most versatile and in-demand guitarists of his generation - equally at home behind vocalists, in organ trios, or fronting his own dates - used the album to reassert his standing as what one contemporary account of the sessions called 'the whole player,' a musician as comfortable with formal, orchestrated writing as with straight-ahead swing. The record sits alongside his more celebrated Blue Note and Verve work as a lesser-known but distinctive entry in his catalog, valued by collectors for its adventurous suite and Evans's inventive charts. It never achieved the canonical status of Burrell's Midnight Blue or Guitar Forms, but it remains an interesting document of a guitarist testing orchestral jazz at the height of his career, and of Cadet/Chess's late-'60s push into more ambitious jazz production.