Burton Greene at Barking Legs Theater

This is a vanishingly rare opportunity to hear a legendary pianist who was part of the first wave of recordings made by the groundbreaking ESP-Disk record label in the sixties. Burton’s first ESP recording was number 1024, which was released just after recordings by Paul Bley, Marion Brown and Frank Wright, and just before Patty Waters, Henry Grimes and Timothy Leary. What becomes a legend most? The company they keep! The young among you will be able to tell friends decades from now that you saw Burton Greene in a solo performance at Barking Legs.

Burton Greene rose to popularity during the 1960s on New York’s free jazz scene, gigging with well-known musicians which included Alan Silva and Marion Brown, among a host of others. With Alan Silva he formed the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble in 1963.[1] He joined Bill Dixon’s and Cecil Taylor’s Jazz Composers Guild in 1964, and also played with a number of other artists, including Rashied Ali, Albert Ayler, Gato Barbieri, Byard Lancaster, Sam Rivers, Patty Waters, and others. During this time, he recorded two albums under his own name for ESP-Disk....

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This is a vanishingly rare opportunity to hear a legendary pianist who was part of the first wave of recordings made by the groundbreaking ESP-Disk record label in the sixties. Burton’s first ESP recording was number 1024, which was released just after recordings by Paul Bley, Marion Brown and Frank Wright, and just before Patty Waters, Henry Grimes and Timothy Leary. What becomes a legend most? The company they keep! The young among you will be able to tell friends decades from now that you saw Burton Greene in a solo performance at Barking Legs.

Burton Greene rose to popularity during the 1960s on New York’s free jazz scene, gigging with well-known musicians which included Alan Silva and Marion Brown, among a host of others. With Alan Silva he formed the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble in 1963.[1] He joined Bill Dixon’s and Cecil Taylor’s Jazz Composers Guild in 1964, and also played with a number of other artists, including Rashied Ali, Albert Ayler, Gato Barbieri, Byard Lancaster, Sam Rivers, Patty Waters, and others. During this time, he recorded two albums under his own name for ESP-Disk.

He moved to Europe in 1969, first to Paris. Since then he has been living in Amsterdam and played with such Dutch musicians as Maarten Altena and Willem Breuker. During the late 1980s he began exploring the Klezmer tradition in his groups Klezmokum (along with Perry Robinson), Klez-thetics, and a more recent group called Klez-Edge with vocalist Marek Balata. Klez-Edge has a recent recording Ancestors, Mindreles, NaGila Monsters (2008) out on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. A duet with Perry Robinson, also on the Tzadik label, Two Voices in the Desert was released in January 2009.

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