Burner Account: Charles Earland 85

Charles Earland Quartet - The Kicker

I'm taking a few moments from assembling the (Jesus fucking Christ already Josh, seek help will you?) merely 24 hours of music I'll be putting up for Miles 100 this week to lay down a tasty B-3 birthday tribute to the man -- born this day in 1941 -- they called The Mighty Burner.

Yes, he's been dead almost 30 years, but The Funk still emanates from the music of Charles Earland, and it's so pure and fantastique that it will never go sour, even without refrigeration.

You know that guttural, carnival-in-Hell sound a Hammond B-3 makes when you swirl from low to high? Deep Purple's Jon Lord made a career of that growl, and Charles Earland could make an organ do that just by looking at it.

So many of his records were part of my Jazz Funk education in the 1990s, I should probably have a PhD in Burner.

Those Prestige platters like Black Talk!, Kharma and Leaving This Planet are core curriculum for this kind of music, and they're an essential pillar of an almost Biblical funk foundation.

It's tragic but as usual with guys like this, there are sometimes no archival or ROIO type items around. There is this one though, and it's pretty terrific if you ask me.

Charles Earland Quartet

Jazzfest 1993

Philharmonie

Berlin, Germany

10.28.1993

01 Charles Earland announcement

02 Cosmic Phriends

03 Here Comes Charlie

04 band introductions

05 Kickin' the 3

06 Europa

07 The Kicker

08 Unforgettable

Total time: 1:12:50

Charles Earland - organ

Todd Herbert - tenor saxophone

David Sampson - guitar 

Zimbabu Hamilton – drums

sounds like/spectrally resembles an off-air master cassette or reel of the original NDR broadcast

edited & remastered by EN, May 2026
479 MB FLAC/direct link

He's been gone awhile, but I'll always love the music of The Mighty Burner, so there was no way I was gonna let his milestone 85 pass without acknowledgement.

So there's Charlie Earland. I'll return very shortly with one of the craziest, most in-depth posts you'll ever see on this page, but for right now I have to get back to assembling it. Because it's more of a motherfucker look than the one you see The Chief giving Kenny G in that famous photo of them together, trust me you better get your ears on real tight folks.--J.

5.24.1941 - 12.11.1999