About the personal-life-and-family angle:

If you read at least one of the previous articles closely,
it mentioned that one of Kenny Burrell's grown children
has already died.

death of David Burrell, 2006

Because Burrell's son David had been extremely active,
though in a low-profile way, on the music scene,
David's passing merited notice in the music business.

One of those Kenny-Burrell-exposé articles
quoted in previous posts
had lengthy quotations from Robin Tomchin,
whois Kenny Burrell's daughter-in-law (now divorced),
and the David Burrell tribute confirms Tomchin's family connection.


It is also apparent, with careful attention to names and relationship,

that guitarist Kenny Burrell's life includes multiple marriages.
Katherine Goodwin, his present wife, has attracted attention
because she initiated the GoFundMe campaign on behalf of her husband.

But when Burrell relocated from the East Coast to the West Coast,
as the LA Weekly interview reports,
he was thinking of raising a family:
the interview reports that, in the late 1970's,
his wife was pregnant with 'their daughter' when they moved to LA.

This was at least one previous marriage, perhaps two marriages back,
before the current marriage with Katherine Goodwin,
with whom, as far as I can make out,
Burrell has fathered no children.

If my arithmetic is correct,
Kenny Burrell is the father of five adult children;
four of them are alive today,
and they are from two different marriages
(see David Burrell article).
And when David Burrell died of Crohn's disease,
both his mother and 'step-mother' were still living.


I don't see all this as any big deal.
Multiple marriages are more common and more acceptable today
than they were in my grandparents' time.

And Burrell, as the 'Jazz from Detroit' chapter makes clear,
had the kind of successful, long-term entertainment career
that makes it very difficult
to settle down and provide for a growing family.

Sometimes when life happens, it happens in a cluster --
and some clusters are bad-luck, unfortunate clusters.
I imagine that to his fellow musicians in the business,
the hard-luck clusters are in fact very familiar --
other people have rough times in their lives,
they just don't have all of this publicity and news coverage about it.