Kenny Burrell arrived in New York and, within a year, released his debut, Introducing Kenny Burrell, along with six more albums as a leader that same year on Blue Note and Prestige, an extraordinarily fast rise that made him the de facto house guitarist for both labels through the late 1950s. He was Billie Holiday's guitarist on her 1956 record Lady Sings the Blues and played on James Brown's debut album in 1958, before co-leading a session with John Coltrane.

Midnight Blue, recorded January 8, 1963, and released that May, featuring tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, became Burrell's top-selling album and a favorite of both Blue Note co-founder Alfred Lion and engineer Rudy Van Gelder. Stanley Turrentine's and Rudy Van Gelder's own careers are covered in full in Turrentine's JazzProfiles.com profile and Van Gelder's.

In 1996 Burrell became the founding director of Jazz Studies at UCLA, where he has taught some of the most prominent names in modern jazz, including Kamasi Washington, Gretchen Parlato, and Kiefer. In 1978 he began teaching a UCLA course called "Ellingtonia," dedicated to the life and work of Duke Ellington, a subject he continued teaching for decades. His career spans top jazz labels including Prestige, Blue Note, Verve, CTI, Muse, and Concord.

Burrell's warm, blues-rooted, harmonically sophisticated guitar tone became one of the defining sounds of soul-jazz and hard bop in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and his decades-long academic career at UCLA extended that influence directly into the training of subsequent generations of jazz musicians.