Playing the changes

Gary Burton has packed his Grammy awards. The world's best-known living jazz vibraphonist has also brought 25 years of tax returns into his sixth-floor office at Berklee College of Music. They're stacked in boxes, ready for the shredder.

"It was time to do something drastic and significant with my life," he says, sitting at a conference table in his soon-to-be former space on Boylston Street. "I haven't even had a band for the last seven years."

He's got one now, the Gary Burton Generations Band, having recruited three Berklee students and 16-year-old California guitar prodigy Julian Lage. He also has new digs, having sold his Boston townhouse for one in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Burton's new place is part of a complex named, appropriately, "The Ellington." This week, Burton is leaving Boston and Berklee after 33 years, the last eight as the school's executive vice president, basically second in line to the school's president, Lee Berk. Tomorrow, Burton, 61, returns to being simply a musician.

"I made the decision to make this change two years ago," Burton says. "Lee wanted me to wait before they started the search and then I would make it known. I've had a lot of time to get my mental focus on what I see as the next phase of my life."

From the time he made his first recording at 17 -- on guitarist Hank Garland's "Jazz Winds From a New Direction" in 1961 -- to this April's "Generations," Burton has recorded more than 50 albums as a soloist. He's played with Stan Getz, Astor Piazzolla, and Eric Clapton. In recent years, he's also taken a rare stance in the music world by openly discussing his sexuality. After the collapse of his second marriage in the 1980s, Burton, through therapy, determined that he was gay.

The third phase of Burton's career, as he calls it -- after working as a musician, then as an administrator -- is a lot like the first, with one exception. Instead of Burton as the wide-eyed apprentice, he's the mentor. The members of the group he'll head into the studio with later this year are largely unknown. And Lage, the guitarist, is just a few years younger than Pat Metheny was when he joined Burton's band in the mid-'70s.

"I've played with a lot of musicians who are from the `you better do great or you're off the bandstand' school," says Lage. "With Gary, you know you have to rise to your best, but if I miss a chord or something, there's just a brief look up from the vibes. If I know I missed something I missed the night before, it's usually followed by a laugh because it's funny I did it twice."

There are many jazz veterans who prefer working with their peers, polished and fully matured musicians. Then there's Burton, who believes there is something special about playing with younger musicians.

"If you're trying to create a sound or style, a person set in his ways is less likely to go with you," he says. "Newer players are more pliable."

When Burton decided to retire from Berklee, he faced an important challenge. After years of touring sporadically and borrowing other people's groups for recording sessions, he needed his own group. By chance, he decided to lead a student project at Berklee this spring. A group of players rehearsed under Burton, then entered the studio to record their material with Metheny for an album set to come out later this year. In that group, Burton discovered two members of his future band, now graduated pianist Vadim Neselovskyi and drummer James Williams. Bassist Luques Curtis, another Berklee grad, signed on after filling in at one of the student sessions.

"It's totally a blessing, and something I didn't see coming," Williams says. "At the end of our session, he was talking about the future, about doing `something new.' I just said, `what would I have to do to be part of this thing.' "

The Gary Burton Generations Band played its first gig at the Blue Note in New York in July, and three nights at Cambridge's Regattabar in August.

For Burton, the experience with his new band gives him a chance to do for younger players what older musicians did for him. When he arrived on the scene in the early '60s, Burton didn't appear destined for stardom. He was a white kid who grew up in Indiana and, by virtue of circumstance, became a student of the ultimate oddball instrument, the vibraphone. John Coltrane played sax. Thelonious Monk played piano. Miles Davis played trumpet. Evelyn Tucker, a housewife who lived near the Burtons in Anderson, Ind., played vibraphone, an instrument different from the xylophone because its keys are made of metal, not wood.

When he was 6, Burton's mother took him for his first vibraphone lesson. She later told him he refused to play a note. But when Burton got home, he couldn't stop talking about the instrument, and within a week, he had returned to learn "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star." After two years, he stopped taking lessons but would continue largely on his own. He also would study piano in junior high and later, as a student at Berklee.

Even as a kid, Burton knew what he wanted to do. He created a family group that included his sister on piano, brother on bass, and father on piano. Before long, they were doing 100 dates a year, from Kiwanis Club dinners to company Christmas parties. They played light classical songs and novelty numbers. (Burton remembers doing "Flight of the Bumblebee" while blindfolded.)

The band dissolved when his sister lost interest, but Burton remained committed to music.

He went to band camp and met teachers from Berklee. He played gigs in nearby Evansville, Ind. And when high school ended, Burton packed his bags, and vibes, and headed to Nashville, a city saturated in the culture of the music industry. It was there that Burton was discovered by famous RCA producer Chet Atkins and signed to his first record contract. He received checks from RCA for recording work over the next few years as he moved to Boston to study at Berklee.

In Boston, he began to make peace with his instrument.

"The advantage was I didn't have much competition," he says. "The minus is that not everyone is looking for a vibraphone player."

Over the years, he had tried trumpet, saxophone, flute, bass, and piano.

"I kept coming back to the vibes, and it just felt natural and easy," he says. "I came to the conclusion, this must be it."

As a player, Burton would become famous for two important innovations. Most of the well-known vibe players -- Milt Jackson, Red Norvo, Bobby Hutcherson -- used two mallets; Burton used four.

"He approaches it like a piano," says Matthias Lupri, who was a hard-rock drummer in the '80s until he heard one of Burton's records and became a vibraphone player. "When I heard him, I couldn't believe how the vibes could sound."

Burton also developed a tradition of duet recordings. He has played hundreds of shows with pianists Chick Corea and Makoto Ozone. Also, Burton's among the first generation of jazz players educated at colleges. So while he can remember watching an aging Coleman Hawkins walk slowly and stiffly into a jazz club near the end of his life, desperate for a gig to bring in some cash, Burton can promise himself that he won't have to play forever for a living. His generation knows about retirement accounts and mutual funds.

"There's more to my life than being a performer," says Burton. "I think if I ever couldn't play as I currently do, I'd switch to something else. I say that, but we'll see what happens."

He doesn't know how long his band will be together. He just hopes that when his talented young players do move on, they'll think of him the way he remembers the stars who signed him to work as a sideman in the '60s.

"I hope they'll think back and say, `The first really important thing that happened to me was that I got hired into Gary's band."

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.