In the early 1940s, a Detroit kid wanted to play the saxophone, but wartime rationing of brass and copper made horns nearly impossible to buy. He settled for a $10 acoustic guitar and figured out how to make a decaying string sing like a sustaining breath. That supply-chain accident produced Kenny Burrell, the guitarist Duke Ellington called his absolute favorite. This episode explores how grief, material limitation, and rigorous study combined into one of the most prolific careers in jazz.

We look at a childhood marked by the deaths of three sisters and his father, the Charlie Christian records that pulled him toward music at 12, and the models he studied, from Oscar Moore and Django Reinhardt to T-Bone Walker and Muddy Waters. The conversation explains why his classical guitar studies and theory training gave his improvisation an architectural scaffolding, how the New World Music Society he founded at Wayne State with Yusef Lateef, Elvin Jones, Pepper Adams, and Donald Byrd operated as an analytical workshop, and why he bypassed the struggle phase in New York in 1956 by being an elite sight reader who could nail a chart on the first take.

• His 1951 recording debut with Dizzy Gillespie while still in college and his tour with Oscar Peterson
• Occupying Charlie Christian’s old chair in Benny Goodman’s band from 1957 to 1959
• How he carved out sonic space beside Jimmy Smith’s Hammond organ on the 1965 Top 20 hit Organ Grinder Swing
• Midnight Blue, The Cats with John Coltrane, and Guitar Forms with arranger Gil Evans
• The Ellingtonia course he launched at UCLA in 1978, his students Gretchen Parlato and Kamasi Washington, and his 2005 NEA Jazz Master honor