Dave Burrell (b. 1941) is a jazz pianist and composer currently based in Philadelphia. He emerged as an influential innovator in New York’s free jazz scene in the mid-1960s, playing alongside trailblazing musicians such as Marion Brown, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and David Murray. In addition to more than forty albums under his own name, he has recorded over eighty albums as a sideman. He continues to be a fixture at international jazz festivals and top clubs around the world.

Burrell’s compositions for the theater include the opera Windward Passages (1979), with a libretto by his wife, Monika Larsson, and Holy Smoke (1999), created with choreographer Eva Gholson. As a composer-in-residence at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, he wrote numerous pieces inspired by archival documents and other materials, including Bill of Sale for a Slave (2007), Syllables of the Poetry of Marianne Moore (2008), and Western Extension of the United States of America 1811 (2009). In 2010 he launched a project called American Civil War: 1861–1865, which led to the composition of Portraits of Civil War Heroes (2011), Civilians During War Time (2012), Turning Point (2013), Listening to Lincoln (2014), and Ode to a Prairie Lawyer (2015). He was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the New York Vision Festival in 2018.

The Dave Burrell Archive contains recordings, scores, correspondence, contracts, posters, photographs, and clippings, documenting his career from the 1960s to the present.