Burton Greene

Burton Greene emerged as a central participant in New York’s free jazz scene throughout the 1960s, collaborating alongside such leading musicians as Marion Brown, Sam Rivers, Gato Barbieri, and Alan Silva. His earliest training involved classical piano at Chicago’s Fine Arts Academy, followed by jazz lessons with Dick Marx spanning 1956 to 1958. Relocating to New York in the early 1960s—just as the city’s free jazz community was gaining strength—he established the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble with Silva in 1963, widely regarded as one of the first ensembles dedicated exclusively to spontaneous composition. He entered the Jazz Composer’s Guild the following year. As a bandleader he documented several sessions for the ESP-Disk imprint during the middle of the decade, then relocated to the Netherlands in 1969.

Thereafter Greene adopted an itinerant existence across Europe while keeping a houseboat residence in Amsterdam. His studio activity remained sporadic through the 1970s and 1980s. Notably, he numbered among the small cohort of free jazz pianists who explored synthesizers, performed unaccompanied, and directed ensembles featuring unconventional instrumentation. One such later undertaking was the klezmer-oriented Klez-Jazz project, which included clarinetist Perry Robinson. Throughout the 1990s he returned to more regular recording in the United States, especially for the Cadence Jazz and C.I.M.P. imprints. His life story appears in the autobiography Memoirs of a Musical “Pesty Mystic”—or—From the Ashcan to the Ashram and Back Again, issued by Cadence Jazz Books.