Friday, February 26, 2021

Freedom

The Kenny Burrell album Freedom contains three different sessions by two different bands.  

The first sessions were recorded in March and April of 1963 and in addition to Burrell, include Seldon Powell on sax, Hank Jones on keyboards, Milt Hinton on bass, and Osie Johnson on drums.

The other five tracks were recorded on October 22, 1964 and include Herbie Hancock on piano, Ben Tucker on bass, Bill English on drums, and Ray Barretto on congas.  The sax player on the second date was Stanley Turrentine, fresh off his performance with the Shirley Scott Quartet the month before.

The October 1964 tracks were Freedom, G Minor Bash, Lonesome Road, K Twist, and Love, Your Spell Is Everywhere.  Turrentine doesn't perform on that last track.

The album wasn't released until 1979, and then in Japan only at that.  It wasn't released in the U.S. until 2011, and it's never been issued in CD or other digital format  I find this unusual given the popularity of Turrentine, Kenny Burrell, and Herbie Hancock.  I don't hear anything "substandard" in the tracks that would have prevented them from being released sooner or more broadly.

The titular track was included in Blue Note's 2005 Kenny Burrell compilation called The Artist Selects and in a 2017 Universal Music Group compilation called Soul Jazz.  The track Love, Your Spell Is Everywhere was included in The Artist Selects compilation and 1995's The Best of Kenny Burrell - The Blue Note Years.    

Fortunately, all of the tracks can be streamed on YouTube, but you have to search for them by individual song titles.

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