Burton Greene, born June 14, 1937, and died June 28, 2021 in Chicago. He is best known for his free jazz work in New York City. He was a multi-genre player, exploring avant-garde jazz as well as the Klezmer medium. Greene was a musician in New York’s free jazz scene of the 1960s, playing with artists such as Marion Brown and Alan Silva. He formed the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble with Alan Silva in 1963. In 1964, he joined Bill Dixon’s Jazz Composers Guild and Cecil Taylor’s Jazz Composers Guild. He also performed with Rashied Al, Albert Ayler and Gato Barbieri, Byard Lanca, Sam Rivers, Patty Waters and other musicians. ESP-Disk released two albums under his name during this period. In 1969, he moved to Europe, first to Paris. He later lived in Amsterdam, where he played with Dutch musicians such as Maarten Altena or Willem Breuker. He began to explore the Klezmer tradition during the 1980s in his Klezmokum groups (with Perry Robinson), Klez-thetics and later Klez-Edge, with Marek Balata as vocalist. Klez-Edge released an album, Ancestors Mindreles, NaGila Monsters (2008), on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. Two Voices in the Desert, a duet with Perry Robinson also on the Tzadik Label, was released in January 2009. Greene recorded and performed in New York, and on the East Coast, starting in the mid-1990s. Greene recorded and performed with several groups that were based in New York at this time, including a duo with Mark Dresser, a quartet with Roy Campbell Jr., Lou Grassi, and Adam Lane, as well as a trio with Ed, George Schuller, on drums, and a trio with Ed, George Schuller, and Russ Nolan, on flute and sax, and Paul Smoker, on trumpet. Memoirs of a Musical Pesty-Mystic, his autobiography, was published by Cadence Jazz Books in 2001. Greene was killed on his boat in Amsterdam. From Wikipedia
