Sunset to Dawn by Kenny Barron

Well, let's get into the album itself.

Let's start out.

Let's talk about, you know, kind of the history, where this album came from, what time period, you know, the whole story of how the album came to be.

And then we'll get into talking about breaking down the album itself.

So start now with kind of the history.

I think that Kenny Barron's Sunset to Dawn is a really interesting record historically because it captures him at kind of a turning point.

He was already really experienced and highly respected as a sideman, but this was his first album as a leader.

It was recorded in New York on April 2nd of 1973 when Kenny Barron was 29 years old and released by the Independent Muse label, which is a label that I can't get enough of.

We'll talk about it more.

I think this is probably our first Muse record that we've done on the pod.

I think so, and that's a shame, but we're getting to it now.

We'll get to more.

There's so much incredible stuff.

The Free Slave by Roy Brooks.

We'll get into the Muse stuff.

It's something, a catalog that I dive really deep into.

So this is done on the Muse label, and I think one thing historically, before we get into more about the Muse label, is...

they really kind of let musicians kind of do what they wanted in a time where things were really kind of becoming a push to be like, play more pop music, more commercial stuff on different labels.

And it seemed like Muse was kind of more of a place in the 70s for musicians to express themselves freely.

So I think that's the perfect backdrop for what Kenny Barron's going to do here on Sunsets at Dawn.

um so let's talk about like kenny before sunset to dawn so he'd already been working professionally for more than a decade he started playing when he was really young um he's from philadelphia uh but moved to new york as a teenager and quickly became part of the city's jazz network by the 1960s he had worked with musicians including dizzy gillespie for a And I think that one of the most particularly important connections here when thinking about this album is Yusuf Lateef.

He became Lateef's pianist around 1970.

And I think that that experience is really useful for understanding Sunset to Dawn.

Lateef's music was already incorporating a lot of African and Middle Eastern influences.

influences unusual instrumentation electronics and more open approaches to composition so i think that baron was really absorbing a lot of that while still having this foundation in hard bop and post bop you think about the album eastern sounds from yusuf latif um things like that so he's getting exposed to a lot of those kind of like you know different african middle eastern and even like um afro-cuban influences while playing with with yusuf so i think that's really important So I think this album is the debut of a musician who had spent years learning how to operate in many different musical environments, and now he's finally getting his own canvas, which is really cool because we'll hear most of his own compositions.