Today is Wynton Kelly’s 85th birthday anniversary. He’s best known for his work with Miles Davis and as the pianist who played “Freddie Freeloader” on Kind of Blue. Miles loved Wynton’s combined skills for playing bebop changes and modal harmony, an ideal synthesis of Red Garland and Bill Evans. Kelly made only one other studio date with the trumpeter, but he’s all over Miles’s great concert albums from Stockholm and at the Blackhawk in San Francisco, and he made outstanding sessions with Dinah Washington, Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, Art Pepper, John Coltrane, and Hank Mobley too. Kelly was a friend of Ellis Marsalis, who named his second-born son after him in 1961. Here’s the Brooklyn-born pianist with Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, and John Coltrane playing “On Green Dolphin Street.”
