Dave Burrell was born in Middletown, Ohio, on September 10, 1940. He made a name for himself as a pianist in New York’s free jazz scene in the mid-1960s and has gone on to perform and compose in a variety of styles.

His family moved to Harlem when he was an infant, to Cleveland in 1944, and finally to Hawaii in 1946, where the family remained for the rest of his childhood. He grew up in a musical home. Both of his parents had been members of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers in their student days, and throughout Burrell’s childhood his mother was active in musical theater and opera in Hawaii. In 1958, Burrell began attending the University of Hawaii. He left after two years and joined the Coast Guard. One year later, in 1961, he enrolled at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, where he studied composition, arranging, and jazz piano. Throughout his student career at Berklee, he performed professionally with a group known as the Dave Burrell Quintet and was mentored by saxophonist Sam Rivers, who lived in Boston at that time.

After graduating in 1965, Burrell moved to the East Village in New York, where he lived with Byard Lancaster in a loft above the abstract expressionist painter Michael Goldberg. He quickly began performing in lofts and clubs with Marion Brown, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, and other musicians who came to define the free jazz of the generation after John Coltrane. In 1968, he cofounded the 360 Degree Music Experience ensemble with drummer Beaver Harris and trombonist Grachan Moncur III. He performed with this group through the 1980s.

The first entry in Burrell’s extensive catalog of almost 200 albums dates to October 19, 1966, when he participated in a performance that was recorded and released as Noah Howard at Judson Hall. That year he also appeared on Marion Brown’s Juba-Lee and Three for Shepp, and Pharoah Sanders’s Tauhid. His first album as bandleader was High, recorded in 1968, quickly followed by High Two. In 1969, his performance with Shepp at the Pan-African Music Festival in Algeria was recorded and released by BYG. Two weeks after the festival, Burrell and Shepp collaborated with American expats at BYG’s studios in Paris, where Shepp contributed to Burrell’s acclaimed free-jazz album Echo. Burrell later appeared on the third of the famed Wildflowers albums recorded at Sam Rivers’s New York loft, known as Studio Rivbea.

While in Hawaii visiting his family and performing at the Kool Pacific Music Festival in 1978, Burrell met his wife, the Swedish poet and librettist Monika Larsson, who was filming for Hawaii Five-O, on which she had a small recurring role. Together they wrote and composed the opera Windward Passages and numerous songs. Many of their songs were later released on the album Dave Burrell Plays His Songs, which features singer and frequent Burrell-collaborator Leena Conquest.

Burrell and Larsson devoted much of their careers to trying to have their opera produced on the stage, but at the time of this writing only excerpts of the work have been heard in concert. In 1979, Burrell’s solo piano performance of excerpts at the Entermedia Jazz Festival in New York were recorded and later broadcast on NPR. A commercial recording of his solo performance of the opera’s music in Basel, Switzerland, was released by Hat Hut records in 1980. In the early 1980s, Burrell performed a trio version of the opera on tour in Europe with the Dave Burrell Trio, which included Sunk Pöschl on drums and Leonard Jones on bass. More traditional operatic concert performances of excerpts have taken place in Oakland, California; Rome, Italy; Novara, Italy, in 2018; and Reggio Emilia, Italy, in 2022.

After living in Sweden for two years, Burrell and Larsson settled in Philadelphia in 1985. Burrell began performing more frequently with Odean Pope and Byard Lancaster, who had established themselves as leading musicians in the city. He also increasingly appeared in a duo with saxophonist and clarinetist David Murray, with whom he recorded over twenty albums in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1996 he was awarded a Pew Fellowship in Jazz Composition, which supported a collaboration with choreographer Eva M. Gholson that culminated in the ballets Atlas of a Difficult World and Holy Smoke.

In the 2000s, Burrell began collaborating more regularly with bassist William Parker. Along with drummers Rashied Ali and Andrew Cyrille, Parker toured and recorded as a member of Burrell’s Full Blown Trio. Since 2004, Burrell has appeared numerous times at the Vision Festival in New York, which is produced by Parker’s nonprofit organization, Arts for Art. Burrell also participated in Parker’s project The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield, in which an all-star ensemble reimagined many of the songs made famous by the Chicago soul singer. Also participating in the project was the writer and poet Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). In the 2000s, Burrell and Parker appeared frequently with Baraka in performances of his “Speech Quartet.”

In 2006, Burrell began a composition residency at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. Inspired by the museum’s collections, he introduced his Bill of Sale of a Slave and Syllables of the Poetry of Marianne Moore in 2007 and 2008, respectively. He also began a multi-year study of the Rosenbach’s Civil War–era holdings that resulted in many new works, including Western Extension of the United States (2009), Portraits of Civil War Heroes (2010), Civilians in Wartime (2012), Turning Point (2013), Listening to Lincoln (2014), and Ode to a Prairie Lawyer (2015).

In 2018, the Vision Festival honored Burrell with a lifetime achievement award. At the week-long festival Burrell reunited in performances with many of his past collaborators, including Shepp, Parker, Cyrille, Hamid Drake (drums), Darius Jones (alto saxophone), Steve Swell (trombone), Harrison Bankhead (bass), and Kidd Jordan (tenor saxophone). The festival featured the premiere of Burrell’s suite Harlem Renaissance.