Courtesy of Mark Payler
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Pianist Purnell Steen, who died on November 18 at age 84 after injuring himself in a fall, was among the most revered performers in Denver jazz — and his loss is the second in recent months to strike a family whose roots may run deeper than any other on the local music scene, regardless of genre. Steen’s cousin, legendary bassist Charles Burrell, was 104 years old when he passed away in June.
Fittingly, both Steen and Burrell were part of the Colorado Music Hall of Fame’s Jazz Masters & Beyond induction concert, staged in 2017; so, too, was singer Diana Reeves, Burrell’s niece. Burrell was known as the Jackie Robinson of classical music owing to his membership in the Denver Symphony Orchestra, whose color barrier he broke in 1949. At the event, Steen vividly remembered that momentous debut even though he was just eight years old at the time.
“I was sitting there with my mother,” Steen remembered. “My mother said Charles was going to be playing, and everybody showed up, and there was no Charles, and I started crying. She said, ‘Wait a minute. He’s coming.’ And the last person to cross the stage before the maestro Saul Caston took the baton was Charles Edward Burrell Sr. I can still hear, 68 years later, people saying, ‘Oh, my God. He’s negro.’”
Steen witnessed plenty of other epochal musical performances in Denver, as he detailed in a Westword interview published in February. Jazz giants such as Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald performed in the Mile High City in part “because there was fertile ground for jazz,” he said.
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Among the magnets that drew these artists to Denver was the Rossonian Hotel, located in the Five Points neighborhood. Steen pointed out that “Black people still could not get public accommodations in many parts of the country. Well, when they got here, they found this very nice, vibrant city, which had these people who were very hungry for jazz and welcomed them. It was as though they were making a pilgrimage; it was tantamount to making a pilgrimage to Mecca.”
This wasn’t the only geographical comparison the area inspired. “Do you know who named Five Points the ‘Harlem of the West’?” Steen asked. “It was Jack Kerouac,” the iconic beat-era author whose magnum opus On the Road includes scenes set in Denver. “I saw him with my own two beady little eyes. I’m not telling you what I heard — that is what I saw, and at the time he had not become famous. He was on this transcontinental odyssey, and he stayed here about a year and a half.”
As Steen told it, Kerouac “was the white guy who was in there, and he was always drunk. Man, he had the filthiest mouth; he was always cursing, drunk and writing up a storm. I remember he’d say, ‘Oh, man, it’s the best damn music I’ve ever heard! This place is the Harlem of the West.” So it was Jack Kerouac who gave Five Points that nickname.”
The starting point for Steen’s own musical journey, he told KGNU, was the Zion Baptist Church, whose organist taught him the rudiments of the keyboard. And while jazz became his career, he also made a mark as a civil-rights activist circa the 1960s, meeting with Robert Kennedy during his stint as attorney general and attending Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington.
Throughout his long and fruitful career, Steen contributed mightily to Denver’s jazz legacy via his virtuoso playing, heard to great effect in combos such as Paul Steen and Le Jazz Machine and Paul Steen & the Five Points Ambassadors. Since the 1990s, his favorite venue was Dazzle, which he headlined regularly for nearly a quarter-century. Fans kept coming back in part because his work — heard on recordings such as 2002’s Swing Shift and 2012’s This Little Light — remained fresh and vital even as he paid homage to jazz’s rich past. In his words, “Those of us who are still left are trying our very, very best to preserve the cultural footprints so that we won’t be lost to history in the sands of time.”
With Steen gone, others will have to keep Denver’s jazz torch burning. Fortunately, he and his talented relatives set a brilliant example for future generations to follow.
Services for Purnell Steen are pending. Visit the Purnell Steen Music website for updates and details.
