Charlie Burrell’s big left hand cradles the neck of the upright bass like a baby, his right hand coaxing a cascade of notes from the instrument’s wooden belly: alternately popping and loping across the strings, always in perfect time.
The glowing end of a cigar — Dominican robustos, baby, better than Cubans — juts from the musician’s mouth. Eyes closed, he cracks a beatific smile. His face, though creased with age, seems adrift in time.
He could be back in the Paradise Club in Detroit, the city where he grew up in poverty. Or with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in the early 1960s, when he was its first black player. Or on the stages of Club Algeria or Lil’s After-Hours in Five Points’ heyday, backing jazz legends Billie Holiday, Erroll Garner and Charlie Parker.
But Burrell is in his home just north of City Park, amid his studio’s memorabilia and sheet music. A stand holds the score to “Lush Life,” the Billy Strayhorn classic. Yes, Burrell met him too.
“I started playing the bass when I was 12 years old,” Burrell said. “It was so big I had to stand on a Coca-Cola box to reach the upper part of the neck. And I literally pulled it around in a little red wagon. Got some teasing over that.”
At 90, Burrell is both a pioneer — he has been called the Jackie Robinson of classical music — and one of the few surviving links to the glory days of midcentury jazz. He taught or mentored famed jazz bassist Ray Brown and his own niece, multi-Grammy winner Dianne Reeves.
Documentaries have lauded him. He owns a wall full of awards and proclamations, to which he rolls his eyes and says, “Enough!” in a mock bellow. Occasionally, he recorded. (“Man on First Bass.” Check it out.)
For all his musical reach, Burrell spent most of his career in Denver, where his influence still resonates, said David Abosch, principal oboist and musical director at the Denver Symphony Orchestra (later the Colorado Symphony Orchestra), where he worked alongside Burrell for 50 years. “He was tremendously dedicated and expected others to be just as dedicated. He didn’t mince words. And he’s a fast friend.”
Most important to his fans, Burrell still plays the random gig around Denver. He remains a natty fixture on stage, as befitting someone who wore a tuxedo for classical performances and, back in the day, pegged pants for his jazz sets.
“He’s one of a handful of people who have mastered classical and jazz bass, which have two different languages and techniques,” said pianist Purnell Steen, who jams with Burrell, his cousin, on the first Friday of each month at Dazzle Restaurant and Lounge, a popular jazz club on Lincoln Street. “And he was so generous to younger players.”
Although as Melanie Burrell, his wife of 43 years, is quick to note, teaching was never his passion. “He’s a performer and entertainer,” she said. “That’s where he puts his effort.”
This is not the path most would have predicted for his life. But Burrell brought discipline and will to his pursuits.
“It just touched my soul”
Born in Toledo, Ohio, he was brought to Detroit by his mom at age 3, along with his two siblings. His father had abandoned the family. “He was a scoundrel,” Burrell said. Detroit in the 1920s was a magnet for black people, many of them fleeing the economically ravaged Jim Crow South. Burrell’s family was poor, but he went to excellent schools.
Still, he marvels at how he fell into music. “It was a real fluke,” he said. “We didn’t have anything in the house, musically. No instruments, no radio, no nothing.”
What music he heard was mainly the blues and stride piano drifting from raucous rent parties, Friday- night fish fries and smoky joints that weren’t exactly kid-friendly.
When Burrell was 12, he acquired a crystal radio set, thanks to a job selling Oh Henry! candy bars that let him redeem coupons for prizes. The radio delivered the world to his bedroom, plus a eureka moment.
“I’ll never forget it,” Burrell said. “It was 8 or 9 one evening, and I lucked upon something so good. It was the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Pierre Monteaux, playing ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ It just touched my soul.
“I told myself right then and there that one day I would play in that orchestra.”
Burrell gravitated to the bass. His mom, Denverado, encouraged him. He was accepted at Detroit’s Cass-Technical High School to study music, although teachers told him there was no future for a black kid enamored with Bach and Mozart.
“I loved jazz, but it didn’t touch me like classical music,” Burrell said. “It moved me all the way — just the inner feeling. It felt like heaven.”
By his teens he had regular jazz gigs but, after a Navy hitch and a music degree from Wayne State University, was refused auditions with four symphony orchestras. In an age when being a Pullman porter was a mark of black economic aspiration, there was no way a black man would be allowed to take the stage as a peer of white performers. A classical musician? Him? Even renowned singers such as Paul Robeson and Leontyne Price faced barriers.
Ask Burrell about the racism he encountered, and his response is mixed. He is an even-tempered man of great humor, and talks about shrugging off words, even citing the old “sticks and stones” line.
But there were limits. “Occasionally you had to bust someone upside the head,” he said.
When he came to Denver to visit his mother in 1949, he met John VanBuskirk, principal bassist with the Denver Symphony, on a streetcar. He wrangled a tryout, landing the job with conductor Saul Caston’s approval, but no press fanfare. (Jack Bradley, a light-skinned African-American viola player, had a previous short stint with the orchestra.)
Burrell stuck with the DSO for 10 years, supplementing his income at Five Points hot spots such as the Rossonian Hotel, where he was house bassist.
“But my biggest ambition in life was to play classical music, not jazz,” Burrell said. “At the time a lot of black people looked down at jazz, called it the devil’s message.”
Still, jazz paid the bills, and Burrell loved its beat, the notes that soared and swung, and the improvisation, the chance to depart the musical map.
A 28-year journey
In 1959, he was in Los Angeles, getting his bass repaired. On a whim he drove to San Francisco and talked his way into an audition. It was summer, and he was hired by Arthur Fiedler, on loan from the Boston Symphony Orchestra for the season. At summer’s end, he stayed, the first black member of the San Francisco Symphony. His boss? Pierre Monteaux, who conducted the orchestra on that long-ago night when the 12-year-old Burrell sat rapt by his crystal set and made a silent vow.
“Twenty-eight years, that’s all it took,” Burrell said with a laugh. “That first rehearsal was the greatest musical event of my life. It was glorious.”
Jazz remained in the picture, including a five-year standing gig with piano titan Earl “Fatha” Hines.
In 1965, rattled by an earthquake, Burrell returned to Denver’s symphony, where he played until retiring in 1999.
Today he lives in a small home in a lush yard. He is married — his wife, Melanie, 80, is a former CSO cellist — but they live separately. She lives on their Berthoud farm, raising miniature horses.
“He’s not comfortable in the country,” she said of her husband, who visits three times a week. “He needs people, traffic, noise, pollution. We do have a rich relationship. Some people laugh at the circumstances, but it works for us.”
“It’s been wonderful,” said Burrell, who met Melanie when she asked him to teach her the pizzicato technique, where the cello strings are plucked with the fingers instead of bowed. “It was a mixed marriage, which was uncommon for the time. We’d been married before and each brought four children to the relationship. It’s a big family.
“She was the most important thing in my later life,” he said. “She helped me become more than I could have been.”
Burrell is no longer the strapping man of his old photographs. Age has slimmed his face and once-brawny frame.
“I stay busy,” Burrell said. “I get up before dawn, play one hour of classical music, then one hour of jazz. Have my coffee. Smoke a cigar.”
Then it’s into his backyard for some exercise, stretches and chin-ups on a limb of his apple tree. After that, off to the Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Hospital cafeteria for breakfast, “because they have grits.”
Burrell has throttled back, but George Duke, a keyboardist he mentored, remains an international star. The two met in the early 1960s when Duke was a freshman at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where Burrell taught.
“I came home from school and told my mom we had a teacher whose last name was Burrell, which was her maiden name,” Duke recalled in a telephone interview from Manhattan. “She told me, ‘That’s your second cousin.’
“He started coming over for Sunday dinner and would bring his bass. Once he had me play a classical and a jazz piece. Afterwards, he told me I didn’t have a shot as a classical pianist but did with jazz. It stung for a moment, but he showed me my true path. He was pivotal, showed me everything.”
Steen, the pianist, calculates Burrell had played for more than 2 million people in his 75-year career. “He has a love of people and music, they’re synonymous to him,” Steen said.
Burrell agreed. “Anyway, I’ve loved every second of it.”
William Porter: 303-954-1877 or wporter@denverpost.com
