[TR24][OF] Gary Burton - Take Another Look: a Career Retrospective - 1961/2018 (Jazz)

Gary Burton
Born in 1943 and raised in Indiana, Gary Burton taught himself to play the vibraphone and, at the age of 17, made his recording debut in Nashville, Tennessee, with guitarists Hank Garland and Chet Atkins. Two years later, Burton left his studies at Berklee College of Music to join George Shearing and subsequently Stan Getz, with whom he worked from 1964-1966.
As a member of Getz's quartet, Burton won Down Beat magazine's Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition award in 1965. By the time he left Getz to form his own quartet in 1967, Burton had also recorded three albums under his name for RCA. Borrowing rhythms and sonorities from rock music, while maintaining jazz's emphasis on improvisation and harmonic complexity, Burton's first quartet attracted large audiences from both sides of the jazz-rock spectrum. Such albums as Duster and Lofty Fake Anagram established Burton and his band as progenitors of the jazz fusion phenomenon. Burton's burgeoning popularity was quickly validated by Down Beat magazine, which awarded him its Jazzman of the Year award in 1968. During his subsequent association with the label (1973-1988) the Burton Quartet expanded to include the young Pat Metheny on guitar, and the band began to explore a repertoire of modern compositions. In the '70s, Burton also began to focus on more intimate contexts for his music. His 1971 album Alone at Last, a solo vibraphone concert recorded at the 1971 Montreux Jazz Festival, was honored with a Grammy Award. Burton also turned to the rarely heard duo format, recording with bassist Steve Swallow, guitarist Ralph Towner, and most notably with pianist Chick Corea, thus cementing a long personal and professional relationship that has garnered an additional two Grammy Awards.
Also in the '70s, Burton began his career with Berklee College of Music in Boston. Burton began as a teacher of percussion and improvisation classes at Berklee in 1971. In 1985 he was named Dean of Curriculum. In 1989, he received an honorary doctorate of music from the college, and in 1996, he was appointed Executive Vice President.
Burton began recording for GRP records in the '80s and '90s. In 1990, he paired up again with his former protege Metheny for Reunion, which landed him the top spot on Billboard magazine's jazz chart. Burton is now recording for Concord Records. Departure (Gary Burton & Friends) was released in 1997 by Concord Records as well as Native Sense, a new duet collaboration with Chick Corea, which garnered a Grammy Award in 1998. Also in 1997, Burton recorded his second collection of tango music, Astor Piazzolla Reunion, featuring the top tango musicians of Argentina, followed by Libertango in 2000, another collection of Piazzolla music. His 1998 Concord release, Like Minds, an all-star hit featuring his frequent collaborators Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Roy Haynes, and Dave Holland, was honored with a Grammy win, Burton's fifth. Gary's vibraphone tribute CD, For Hamp, Red, Bags and Cal, was released in March 2001 on Concord and garnered Gary's 12th Grammy nomination. His most recent release in 2002 is a unique project with Makoto Ozone, his pianist collaborator of the past twenty years. In Virtuosi the pair explore the improvisational possibilities of classical themes including works by Brahms, Scarlatti, Ravel, Barber and others. In an unusual move, the Recording Academy nominated Virtuosi in the classical category of the Grammy awards, a unique honor for Gary.
Next came a new band that Gary formed in 2003 as he announced his retirement from Berklee College of Music after 33 years in music education. The GENERATIONS band featured a line-up of young talented musicians including then sixteen-year old guitarist Julian Lage and Russian-born pianist Vadim Nevelovskyi. Gary recorded two CDs with the group titled GENERATION and NEXT GENERATION and the band toured steadily from 2003 through mid-2006.
Since then, Gary has focused his recording and performing efforts on collaborations, with old friends and new, including tours and recordings with Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, Makoto Ozone, Spanish pianist/composer Polo Orti, and French accordionist Richard Galliano. L¹hymne a L¹amour with Richard Galliano was released on the Camjazz label in August 2007. Armistad Suite with Polo Orti and the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra was released in spring 2007. A live concert recording with Chick Corea will be released in 2008, followed by a CD titled The Gary Burton Quartet Revisted featuring performances by Gary with Pat Metheny, Steve Swallow and Antonio Sanchez.
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Reviews
"Gary Burton reminds us that musical composition and creative performance interaction soar aloft only when the standards are held high." - All About Jazz

℗ 1961 BMG Music
© 2018 Mack Avenue Records II, LLC
A popular phrase in years past was “Life Begins at 60,” but Gary Burton—as he has done so often throughout his career—is rewriting the book on retirement. Having turned 70 in January, an age when most artists begin to solely look back, Burton forges ahead with his new Mack Avenue Records album, Guided Tour, which solidifies the reputation of his next great band, The New Gary Burton Quartet. In addition, Burton has literally written the book on his life, saving those backward glances for his upcoming autobiography, Learning To Listen, due on Berklee Press in September 2013.
His stature as the former Executive Vice President at the famed Berklee College of Music caps a three-decade life in jazz education, which coincided with his already busy career as a performer and recording artist. Known for reintroducing and expanding the technique of four-mallet playing while crafting one of the jazz world’s signature sounds, he is also celebrating the 40th anniversary of his ongoing collaboration with pianist Chick Corea (winning yet another GRAMMY® Award in 2013 for their most recent project, Hot House). And having established the first on-line courses for Berklee, Burton has recently expanded his web presence to create a course in improvisation for Coursera (the massive online education platform), which, as of two months before its launch, had already enrolled 25,000 students.
On Guided Tour, jazz’s most innovative and accomplished vibraphonist proves that The New Gary Burton Quartet—which he premiered last summer on his Mack Avenue debut, Common Ground—was no one-trick pony. Featuring the prodigal guitar genius Julian Lage as well as two veterans, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Antonio Sanchez, Guided Tour provides a road map to one of the most dynamic bands on the scene today.
Apart from their own playing, many of jazz’s greatest figures—Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis—are also known for the handful of indisputably great bands they led throughout their careers. Like them, Burton has assembled a few such Olympian groups of his own: his first quartet, which pioneered the fusion of jazz and rock in 1967; his quintet with Pat Metheny in the 1970s; and now this band, which achieves a rare synergy.
“It’s the difference between playing with some excellent musicians, and finding a group chemistry that goes beyond that—a coming together of ‘sympatico’ creative minds,” says Burton. “In my five decades of playing in various bands, mostly my own groups, I have only experienced this a handful of times; if even one player is not an equal part of the combination, it doesn't achieve that magical state. But from the first recording of this band, everything just clicked perfectly.”
If that’s how this band started out, you can imagine how they sound now, with a year’s growth and a world tour on their resume. “I'm happy to report that our second album is every bit as strong a statement of group identity as before,” Burton affirms. “If anything, we have evolved as an ensemble—which is the dream of every band leader.”
As he recounts in the upcoming autobiography, Burton was already a steadily working musician in rural Indiana in his high school years, before heading for Nashville, recording the very first jazz-and-country album (with guitarist Hank Garland), and scoring a major-label record contract—all before entering the Berklee College of Music at the age of 17, in 1960.
Throughout his career, Burton has “paid it forward,” introducing other precocious young artists to the jazz world—Larry Coryell, Pat Metheny, Donny McCaslin, Makoto Ozone—and Lage, who made his first recording with Burton in 2004 at the age of 15, has continued as the next recruit to that echelon. Lage further develops as a front-line collaborator on this new album, able to match the virtuosity of Burton himself.
On Guided Tour, Burton sought out original material from all the group’s members (as he did with Common Ground), illuminating their wide range of cross-cultural musical styles. “They outdid themselves this time,” he says. The program includes “Legacy”—a haunting ballad written by Scott Colley to honor his recently deceased father...