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KENNY BURRELL is Director of the Jazz Studies program in the Department of Ethnomusicology, and is Professor in the Department of Music. He is a specialist in jazz performance, improvisation, composition, and jazz history. A perennial music poll winner, Burrell was recently named #1 Jazz Guitarist for the second time by the Jazz Times International Readers poll. Burrell has been active from 1951 to the present as a guitarist and composer in a variety of musical contexts, including solo, small combo, large ensemble, and symphony orchestra. He is a producer and renowned recording artist, and has recorded for several major labels. His extensive discography includes the critically acclaimed Guitar Forms, Ellington is Forever, and Kenny Burrell and John Coltrane. He has recorded 87 albums under his own name, and several hundred with other artists. He has been associated with a virtual "Who's Who" in the music business, performing and recording with such artists as Duke Ellington, Herbie Hancock, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Tony Bennett, Billy Holiday, and Quincy Jones. Working with such an array of artists through the years, Burrell has helped shape the direction of jazz and other popular music.
Burrell is recognized as a foremost authority on the music of Duke Ellington and has taught a course he created at UCLA, "Ellingtonia," for 18 years. It was the first regular college course on Ellington in the U.S. and in the world. He has also contributed to the Ellington Archive at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. As a composer he has received several commissions, including one which resulted in a world premiere at New York's Lincoln Center with the famous Boys Choir of Harlem. He is co-founder and president emeritus of the Jazz Heritage Foundation, member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, and a member of the American Guild of Authors and Composers. He holds an honorary doctorate from William Paterson College and a B.M. from Wayne State University.
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