Charles Burrell and Bennie Williams

"Charles opened the door for other Black musicians and he showed that Black musicians didn’t have to be relegated to stereotypes," said Bennie Williams, vice-president of the Association. "He showed that jazz musicians could also perform classical music and be good at both. We are honored to bestow this award [a sculpture of a jazz player created by artist Ed Dwight] upon Charles Burrell."

Hundreds of his friends, family and admirers from the community attended the ceremony, where he was presented with a sculpture of a jazz bass player created by sculptor Ed Dwight.

In a recent interview, "Charlie" described his amazing life and the struggles and obstacles of entering a White-dominated classical field to pursue the passion of his life – music.

Born in Toledo, Ohio on October 4, 1920, Burrell is quick to note that his family lived one block from legendary jazz pianist Art Tatum. The Burrell family moved to Detroit when Charlie was three and it was here where Charlie’s life as a musician began. His mother encouraged him to learn a musical instrument and continued to encourage him as he progressed.

"My mother, wisely, thought I ought to learn all of the bass instruments and so I started playing the string bass and the tuba when I was 12 years old," Burrell recalled.

"During that first year of instruction, I was listening to a performance of the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Pierre Monteaux on my family’s crystal set radio (a precursor to modern radio technology.) That was the exact moment I determined that I wanted to become a professional musician, and more than that, it was the moment that I set a goal to become the first Black musician to perform in the San Francisco Symphony, a dream I realized 28 years later."

Charles Burrell and and his music

Upon completing junior high school, Burrell was accepted at Cass-Technical High School in Detroit, one of the most prestigious music schools in the nation. "If you graduated from Cass-Tech, you could go right out and get a job in a professional symphony. But I couldn’t because I was Black," he said.

Even as a young student, Burrell was faced with obstacles because of his color.

"My first bass teacher was Gaston Brohn, the principal bassist of the Detroit Symphony. The interesting thing back then was that Blacks were actually discouraged from learning classical music. Mr. Brohn reluctantly accepted me as a student. He told me that he would only allow me to study with him under the condition that I promised not to play the classics. Well, I would go home at night and practice for hours the exact classics that he forbid me to practice.

"It wasn’t until I began studying with Detroit bassist Oscar Legassey that I realized Brohn had purposefully taught me incorrect techniques and habits that took me more than four years to correct. I didn’t get angry, it was just another one of those things that you get over and learn from and move on."

Legassey became one of Charlie’s greatest musical mentors and helped Charlie to learn correct techniques and styles. Unlike Brohn, he not only encouraged, but required Charlie to learn classical music including the great symphonies and operas. It was a friendship that would last throughout Charlie’s life.

Another great influence on Burrell was jazz bass great Milt Hinton who Charlie first met when he first started playing the bass when he was 12-years-old. Charlie met him backstage at a jazz concert in Detroit. When Charlie was 16 and a more mature musician, he once again met up with Hinton.

"I was 16-years-old and he was 26 and I spent six weeks with him. He gave me my first real lessons in jazz and also my first real lesson in life. I mean he taught me some things you don’t learn in books. I mean how to be a person, how to take care of and respect yourself, and how to respect others. He also taught me not to have any racial hang-ups. He had none and that helped me tremendously."

While Charles was diligently practicing classical music, he and his friends also openly embraced jazz music and would practice in the small garage attached to his mother’s home. They would learn the latest Duke Ellington and Count Basie hits and practice the licks of the Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbeck and learn the current rhythm section styles.

"The first jazz song I ever heard was on the radio in 1934 – Happy Go Lucky Local, performed by Duke Ellington and it got me hooked," remembers Burrell. "The song was later ripped off by Jimmy Forrest and became the big hit Night Train.

"I loved practicing classical music, and still had it in my mind that I would some day perform in a major classical symphony, but I also loved the way the girls looked at me when I played jazz," Charlie joked. "Jazz musicians felt respected – we wore pressed suits with white shirts and a bib with five-cent paper cuffs and a paper collar."

In addition to dates with pretty girls, the practice was paying off in other ways. Burrell recalls sitting in at a jam session with the renowned jazz stride pianist Fats Waller. "I had the pleasure of jamming with Fats Waller, but after about five minutes, I put my bass down! These were the big boys and I just wasn’t ready for that!"

Soon Burrell was getting calls to play for the big names in jazz that were coming through Detroit. In 1937, when he was 17 years old, Burrell got a call asking him to join the Lionel Hampton big band, one of the headline jazz acts in the nation at the time.

"I joined the band and was the kid among all these jazz greats. We traveled for two weeks on a big bus. Then one morning, I awoke in a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee to find out that the entire band had left the night before, stranding me in Memphis – without paying me! I had one nickel to call my mother in Detroit who wired me bus fare. That was a hard lesson to learn for a young musician." But that lesson that was softened two years later.

In 1939, Burrell was playing with a jazz trio at the Three Sixes Lounge in Paradise Valley, the Black section of Detroit. During this engagement, he shared the stage with the legendary Billie Holiday.

In the summer of 1941, Charlie attended the New England Conservatory of Music and in the fall, joined the Navy for a four-year stint at Camp Robert Small at the Great Lakes Naval Base outside of Chicago where he was selected to join the first-ever all black Navy band.

The U.S. Navy, one of the most segregated branches of the U.S. military, created the all-Black band to show they were trying to bring more Blacks into the Navy. But Burrell and the other musicians were only allowed to play once a day during the early morning flag-raising ceremony and at the occasional recruitment parties for Black recruits. They weren’t allowed to play at the officers clubs or other base events.

While the policy was clearly discriminatory, the musicians used the free time to their advantage, practicing and learning from each other about jazz, music theory, and other musical techniques. During this time Burrell met and played with the now renowned jazz trumpeter Clark Terry. He also mentored bassist Major Holley, and taught famed jazz trombonist Al Grey how to read music. "It was a fantastic time for us, really," recalled Burrell.

"As long as we were back in the morning in time to march in formation for the flag-raising ceremony, it wasn’t a problem." As he explained, "Chicago was only 40 miles away so we also spent a lot of time playing in the great Chicago jazz clubs of the day. But most important, we had time to practice and we were learning new things from each other every day."

During this period, Charlie also took classes at Northwestern University and following his honorable discharge from the U.S. Navy, he enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit. Because he had completed his musical courses at Cass Tech, he was only required to complete the required academic courses to fulfill the school’s music degree requirements. As he was preparing to graduate, Charlie once again was faced with the harsh reality of racism at the time.

"The Administrator of Music for the Detroit School System called me into his office and said very matter-of-factly, ‘I have good news and bad news. The good news is you will graduate with your degree, the bad news is that as long as I’m administrator of music in Detroit, there will be no Black music teachers in the system.’"

Despite the obstacles, Burrell charged on to pursue his ambition to play in a major symphony

Burrell speaks candidly of his desire to want to perform as a classical bass player during the ’30s and ’40s. "It was totally unheard of for Blacks to want to be considered to play in a symphony. Many times I would be asked, ‘Why are you practicing all of those classical pieces? You’ll never be able to audition, let alone play for a symphony.’

"When I first met Milt Hinton I told him I wanted to do something special for Black musicians. At the time, if you were a Black musician, you were relegated to playing the nightclubs or the ‘joints’ as we called them. That was as far as you could go. I wanted to be the first Black to play in a major orchestra so my Black brothers would have some place to go. If I could practice and prove myself and get in, then that would open the doors for someone else. It was my big ambition. Milt told me, ‘Charlie, you can do it. It will be hard, but you can do it.’"

After being refused auditions with four different symphonies, Burrell came to Denver in 1949, where his mother was living at the time.

He found work at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital as a janitor and also enrolled at the University of Denver to receive his teaching certificate for the Denver schools. One morning, while taking the streetcar to work, he noticed another passenger carrying a leather case that resembled a bass violin bow. He struck up a conversation and learned that the passenger was John VanBuskirk, the principal bass player with the Denver Symphony. They spoke about their mutual interest and VanBuskirk invited Charlie to his home and told him to bring his bass.

It was clear to VanBuskirk, upon hearing Burrell play, that he was a serious classical musician, and he immediately arranged for him to audition for the Denver Symphony.

Burrell became the second Black to audition with the Denver Symphony. Jack Bradley, a light-skinned Black who was the grandnephew of Dr. Justina Ford, was given an audition to play viola in the Denver Symphony but left for Houston after only a few seasons.

"My audition was interesting," said Burrell. "It consisted of 55 minutes of talking and only five minutes of playing a whole-note, two-octave ‘G’ scale. They wanted to primarily see if I was intelligent and able to fit in with the symphony. I was the first visible, dark-skinned Black to audition with the symphony, and it was a riskier proposition in those days."

Saul Caston, the talented conductor of the Denver Symphony at the time, had also conducted the National Youth Symphony in Philadelphia, which included talented young musicians from throughout America. One of the trumpet players, a kid named Billy Horner, was a light-skinned Black. When the orchestra was asked to go to Europe on a tour, they were unable to bring Billy because he was Black.

"Saul was very unbiased," Burrell remembers. "He wanted to make sure that the barrier that was about to be broken was going to work and that I would fit with the Symphony."

Burrell joined the Denver Symphony with no fanfare in the local press or in the local Black community. "Classical music wasn’t in our blood," said Burrell. "Very few Blacks attended the symphony; it was expensive and the majority of Denver’s Blacks either worked on the railroad or were domestic servants."

Charles Burrell and band members

The grueling schedule of a symphony musician required many hours of individual practice as well as full symphony rehearsals and performances three nights a week. In addition, the Denver Symphony would perform a full ten-week summer schedule at Red Rocks.

"Playing at Red Rocks was tremendous. We played under the stars on a regular basis until financial difficulties coupled with the summer rains wouldn’t allow it anymore."

Burrell’s routine consisted of awaking at 5 a.m., five to six hours of individual practice, attending a three- to four-hour rehearsal, and performing at an evening concert. After symphony

Charles Burrell and daughter

In 1959, while in Los Angeles having his string bass repaired, Burrell drove up the coast to San Francisco to visit his cousin, Beatrice, and her teenage son, George Duke. Luck and destiny again played an important role in the next chapter of Burrell’s life.

Burrell had parked his car at the War Memorial Auditorium where the San Francisco Symphony performed – the same symphony he had heard when he was 12 years old. As luck would have it, the principal bass player of the San Francisco Symphony, Philip Karp, drove into the same parking lot and noticed Burrell’s string bass in the back seat of his car.

"We struck up a conversation and before I knew it, Phil had asked me if I would like to audition with the symphony. I, of course, agreed right away!"

Burrell displayed his virtuosity at the audition, and true to his dream, became the first Black musician to ever play in the San Francisco Symphony. At age 82, he is still visibly moved when he recalls the moment he walked into his first rehearsal with the San Francisco Symphony.

"If there were one moment in my life as a musician that I consider my glory, it was showing up for that first rehearsal with the San Francisco Symphony when out walks Pierre Monteaux." This was the same Pierre Monteaux who had conducted the San Francisco Symphony Burrell had heard over his family’s crystal set radio when he was 12 years old.

"It was like the Messiah had walked in. There has never been a moment like that before or after. That was paradise. That was the greatest musical moment in my life."

This time, there was a major fanfare – newspapers throughout the nation announced that Charles Burrell had broken the color barrier in one of the country’s most prestigious symphony orchestras.

Ultimately, during the five-and-a-half years he stayed in San Francisco, Burrell racked up a number of ‘firsts.’ He became the first Black musician to play in the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Ballet. He also became the first Black professor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

His routine in San Francisco was even more intense. The orchestra’s performance and rehearsal schedule provided him little time to pursue his love of jazz, although he did find a somewhat regular gig playing with the famous Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines big band on off-nights from the Symphony.

On Sundays, his day off, he would visit his cousin and begin a grueling ten-hour mentorship session with her 17-year-old son, George Duke, a gifted piano player who was studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

"Every Sunday for five years, at noon, we would meet up after church and his mother would cook up some of the meanest soul food while I tutored George on jazz. I would teach him chord changes and help him with different alterations and styles. We would work until 10 at night. My cousin George is simply a genius. It was an absolute pleasure to work with him. I was fortunate enough to be there to offer him guidance at a time early in his life and help him to learn some things about how to swing and how to play the blues."

Duke, who went on to become a multi-Grammy-award-winning pianist, composer, and arranger recalls the significance of those Sundays with his cousin Charlie.

"On a personal level, it was so very important," said Duke. "During these important formative years, Charlie took the time every Sunday to actually teach me. There were no jazz teachers at that time. He showed me the right and the wrong way to do things and shared information. To me, he was like a dad or a brother who was in the field I was in. The experience was beyond measure and I’m just so fortunate that it happened.

"A turning point for me was when I went to Charlie and told him I didn’t know what to pursue. On one hand, I wanted to be a classical pianist and on the other hand, I wanted to pursue jazz. Charles was one of the few people who had substantive knowledge about both classical and jazz music. He had experienced in both worlds as a professional musician. He told me to play a classical piece, which I did, and then he told me to play a jazz piece. Afterwards, he said that my strength was in jazz and that while I had the talent to pursue classical, it would require a different discipline. My heart was in jazz, but having someone like Charles tell me what he’d been through in both worlds helped me to solidify my decision."

Burrell admits that the prestige and notoriety of performing in the San Francisco Symphony took its toll. He wasn’t playing as much jazz as he wanted to, but he was also being paid a tremendous amount of money for his symphony work. "After five-and-a-half years in San Francisco, I became somewhat of a high roller, and one day went to my bank account and realized I only had $26! I knew I had to do something different."

The following weekend, an earthquake, measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale, shook San Francisco. The broken dishes, upturned furniture, and broken gas line on his stove convinced Burrell that this was an omen telling him to leave San Francisco. The very next day he told the symphony he was leaving to go back to Denver. When he arrived back in Denver he was immediately hired again by the Denver Symphony, where he performed for the next 30 years.

Whenever the top jazz performers appeared in Denver, their managers would call ahead to arrange for local groups to back them. Burrell was the top on-call jazz bassist in Denver for more than 50 years. And while his jazz life was as magical as the classical music world he helped to revolutionize, he speaks modestly of the jazz legends he performed with.

He fondly recalls the second time he found himself playing behind Billie Holiday during an engagement in Denver.

"It was about 1952, and I got a call from Chris Sonokus, a local piano player who was called to back Billie Holiday when she was playing a weekend at the Club Algeria in downtown. She was my all-time idol in the jazz world. I’ll never forget it. I was standing behind her and she was singing Them There Eyes. She looked back at me and started giving me her "cute eyes" and winking at me. Oh! I fell in love!

"That same year, I played with drummer Shelly Rhym in the house band at Lil’s After-Hours, a club in Five Points that really didn’t start shaking until about two in the morning. Charlie Parker was scheduled to show up and at about 2:15 [a.m.]. He came through the door, walked onto the bandstand, and fell asleep. About an hour and half later he woke up, played a few numbers and then fell asleep again. We all knew he was a junkie, so this really didn’t surprise us, but it was disappointing."

Throughout his career, Burrell was requested to accompany many jazz legends including Ralph Sutton, Ella Fitzgerald, Erroll Garner, Charlie Parker, Ben Webster, Nellie Lutcher, Gene Harris, and Sarah Vaughn.

Purnell Steen, Burrell’s cousin and local jazz pianist, recalls the time in 1958 that Erroll Garner was playing at the Denver Theater at 16th and Glenarm.

"Charlie called me up. I was 17 years old at the time and was just beginning to learn jazz. My mother and my teachers prohibited me from learning jazz – they were very refined and thought jazz was undignified. Charlie let me stand in the wings. Gus Johnson was playing drums and I was able to see Mr. Garner play. Afterwards, Mr. Garner was hungry and wanted some soul food but didn’t want to go to a restaurant. Charlie woke up my mother LaVerne, who was a fabulous cook and always had food in the fridge. We had a soul food feast and afterwards, I asked Mr. Garner if he would play. We stayed up until about five in the morning eating soul food and listening to Erroll Garner play jazz on the same piano I practice on to this day."

More recently, Burrell has enjoyed the accolades of his niece, two-time Grammy award-winning jazz vocalist Dianne Reeves. Reeves, who was raised and continues to live in Denver, recently won her second straight Grammy for Best Jazz Vocalist for The Calling, her tribute to jazz legend Sarah Vaughn. She often cites Charlie as one of her most important musical mentors.

"When he found out I was singing and that I had talent, he decided from that moment on that my education should be music with a focus on jazz," recalls Reeves. "It was at a time when Rhythm and Blues dominated the airwaves; groups like Sly and the Family Stone, but my uncle gave me a grounding in the classic jazz vocalists. He would bring over recordings of these great jazz artists and would always be willing to discuss them whenever I had a question. It was through him that I got my first introduction to Sarah Vaughn.

"He would also take me with him to different performances and venues around the city and I would sing with great jazz musicians like Louise Duncan. He would also bring me to the Dick Gibson parties and introduce me to many of the jazz legends who also happened to be his close friends.

"When I went out into the world, I felt prepared and like I had my tools in order. Through him, I learned that the soul to the music is through communicating with other musicians."

"It wasn’t a challenge to teach Dianne, it was a pleasure," said Burrell. "She listened to me and I tried to help her to prepare herself and not be disillusioned about the music. I was fortunate to be around when she needed me. I tried to help her understand what music offered and the type of education and musical background she needed so she could learn to read music. I also tried to teach her not to be deceived by the types of false glories that come with fame and how not be swallowed up by the media vultures. I knew she was special and possessed the best voice since Sarah Vaughn."

Reeves said that while she was growing up, Burrell was always her ‘Uncle Charles,’ but realized later of the legendary status of her bass-playing uncle. She says that even today, traveling all over the world to different festivals and concerts, musicians still approach her and ask her to pass their best wishes on to Charlie Burrell.

As part of the pioneer generations of jazz music, Burrell has strong feelings about how jazz has evolved. "When I was learning jazz, it was strictly from recordings and from my fellow jazz musicians," he said. "Today’s jazz musicians, with a few exceptions, don’t understand the music, they fail to realize that jazz isn’t necessarily what you play, but how you play. Being able to play a hundred thousand notes very quickly is not jazz – jazz is about feeling and self-expression. The genesis of jazz was an expression of the full gamut of emotions with an emphasis on the struggle and pain of being Black in America."

Retired from the Denver Symphony since 1999, Burrell stills maintain a rigorous practice schedule. Waking early in the morning, he spends hours athletically bowing over the strings of his big acoustic bass in the dedicated music room of his North City Park home. He warms up with scales and arpeggios. His favorite pieces are Bach etudes, symphonic and operatic excerpts from Mozart, and the Wagnerian bass motifs. He’ll easily segue into the classic jazz standards, and sometimes he’ll play along to an Oscar Peterson recording taking over the part of Ray Brown, a former student.

Charles Burrell at home

At 82 years, he still puffs away on his signature "robusto" cigarsºthe butt of many of his friend’s jokes. On any given day he may be found at he and his wife Melanie’s ranch outside of Berthoud where they raise miniature show horses. On any given night he may be found playing his bass with his cousin Purnell’s swing quartet, although he is slowly resigning the bass spot to a younger, and certainly less talented bassist.
At a recent concert at the Auraria King Center, his old friend and trumpeter Clark Terry performed and introduced Burrell to the crowd of adoring fans.

While there is still an obvious discrepancy in the number of Black musicians in symphony orchestras throughout the nation, Burrell’s determination to break the color barrier certainly opened doors of opportunity for African Americans to pursue classical music.

Charlie Burrell’s life can be summed up with a comment he made during the PBS Special Jazz in Five Points that aired in 1999.

"Music is my great love affair, and, in fact, it is my first, and always has been, my first."