Gary Burton (born January 23, 1943) is an American retired jazz musician who plays the vibraphone, composes music, and teaches. Burton created a new way of playing the vibraphone using four mallets instead of the usual two. This method made him recognized as an innovator, and his playing style and techniques are often copied by others. He also helped start the genre of jazz fusion and made duets more common in jazz. Additionally, he was an important teacher in music education after spending 30 years teaching at the Berklee College of Music.
Biography
Burton was born in Anderson, Indiana, United States. He began learning music at the age of six and mostly taught himself to play the marimba and vibraphone. At sixteen, he started studying piano while finishing high school at Princeton Community High School in Princeton, Indiana (1956–60). He said that jazz pianist Bill Evans inspired his way of playing the vibraphone.
Burton attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, from 1960 to 1961 and the Stan Kenton Clinic at Indiana University in 1960. He studied with Herb Pomeroy and quickly became friends with composer and arranger Michael Gibbs. After building his career in the 1960s, he returned to Berklee College of Music in 1971 and worked there until 2004. He started as a professor, then became a dean, and later an executive vice president during his final years at the college. In 1989, Burton received an Honorary Doctorate of Music from Berklee.
Early in his career, at the request of Nashville saxophonist Boots Randolph, Burton moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and recorded with local musicians, including guitarist Hank Garland, pianist Floyd Cramer, and guitarist Chet Atkins.
Burton toured the U.S. and Japan with pianist George Shearing. Shearing asked Burton to write an entire album of compositions for him, which was released as Out of the Woods in 1965. Burton wrote about the album in his autobiography, Learning to Listen, calling it his "most ambitious effort at composing and arranging." He played with saxophonist Stan Getz from 1964 to 1966. During this time, he appeared with the band in the movie Get Yourself a College Girl, playing "Girl from Ipanema" with Astrud Gilberto. In 1967, he formed the Gary Burton Quartet with guitarist Larry Coryell, drummer Roy Haynes, and bassist Steve Swallow. The group’s first album, Duster, combined jazz, country, and rock music. Earlier albums, such as Tennessee Firebird and The Time Machine (both from 1966), also showed Burton’s interest in blending musical styles. After Coryell left the quartet in the late 1960s, Burton worked with guitarists Jerry Hahn, David Pritchard, Mick Goodrick, Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Wolfgang Muthspiel, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Julian Lage.
Burton was named DownBeat magazine’s Jazzman of the Year in 1968, making him the youngest person to receive that title. He won his first Grammy Award in 1972. The following year, Burton began a forty-year collaboration with pianist Chick Corea, who helped popularize the format of jazz duet performances. Their eight albums won Grammy Awards in 1979, 1981, 1997, 1999, 2009, and 2013.
Burton has performed with many jazz musicians, including Gato Barbieri, Carla Bley, Chick Corea, Peter Erskine, Stan Getz, Hank Garland, Stephane Grappelli, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, B. B. King, Steve Lacy, Pat Metheny, Makoto Ozone, Tiger Okoshi, Astor Piazzolla, Tommy Smith, Ralph Towner, and Eberhard Weber.
Burton is known for a special way of holding mallets called the "Burton grip," which is popular among jazz vibraphonists and some concert marimbists, including Pius Cheung and Evelyn Glennie.
From 2004 to 2008, Burton hosted a weekly jazz radio show on Sirius Satellite Radio. In 2011, he released his first album for Mack Avenue Records, Common Ground, featuring the New Gary Burton Quartet (with Julian Lage, Scott Colley, and Antonio Sanchez). In 2013, the group released Guided Tour, their second recording for Mack Avenue Records. Burton’s autobiography, Learning to Listen, was published by Berklee Press in August 2013 and was voted "Jazz Book of the Year" by the Jazz Journalists Association.
Burton retired from performing in March 2017 after a farewell tour with pianist and longtime collaborator Makoto Ozone.
Personal life
Burton is openly gay. He was in a same-sex relationship by the 1980s and told people openly about his sexuality during a 1994 radio interview with Terry Gross. In 2013, he married Jonathan Chong in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Burton's current partner is Dustin Le.
Discography
- Works (ECM, 1984)[LP]
- Collection (GRP, 1996)
- Take Another Look. A Career Retrospective (Mack Avenue, 2018)[5LP]
Mack Avenue Superband
- Live from the Detroit Jazz Festival – 2013 (Mack Avenue, 2014) – live recording 2013