Founder of The Five Points Ambassadors was a cousin of Charles Burrell, Dianne Reeves

Storied piano player Purnell Steen, a member of Denver’s first family of jazz, died Tuesday (Nov. 18), it was announced today on his website. Steen, 84, was a first cousin to legendary bassist Charles Burrell, who died on June 17 at age 104. Five-time Grammy Award winner Dianne Reeves, pianist George Duke and saxophonist Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson were relatives as well.

Steen was considered a cultural ambassador for the city of Denver and the main keeper of the flame for the Five Points sound.

Steen simply loved jazz. “It is the only art form created in the Western Hemisphere,” he told the Denver Gazette at the promotional launch of the city’s Denver Arts Week on Nov. 1, 2024, at Dazzle Denver. “And it came out of the African American church. It is ours. We created it, and this is the best cultural export the United States has.”

Steen was the founder and frontman for The Five Points Ambassadors, a band that played its regular gig at Dazzle Denver’s Friday Lunch Brunch as recently as Nov. 7. They were also frequent performers at annual summer outdoor traditions like the Five Points Jazz Festival and the summer City Park Jazz series.

In 2021, the Ambassadors brought a memorial for Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm to a close with a rousing performance of John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.”

At that 2024 Denver Arts Week launch, Ambassadors drummer Bill Larson briefly ceded the sticks to Mayor Mike Johnston for one smooth song. Afterward, Steen said, “We’re making the mayor an honorary Ambassador.”

Today, Johnston told The Denver Gazette: “Purnell Steen inviting me to sit in and play with the Five Points Ambassadors is a moment I will cherish forever. Purnell was a legend in Denver’s jazz community and a titan of the Civil Rights movement. My thoughts are with his family, his bandmates, and all who knew him during his amazing life. He will be deeply missed.”

Rodger Hara of KGNU called Steen “the elder statesman of jazz music in Denver.”

Steen was “hatched,” as he put it, at Mercy Hospital on April 15, 1941. In an interview with Hara, he called his life in music divine providence.

“I started studying the piano two weeks shy of my fourth birthday,” said Steen, who claimed to have cognition back to age 3, with America at war in 1944. “My parents gave me, believe it or not, the little classic toy grand piano popularized by (cartoonist) Charles Schultz.” Steen remembered trying to tap out the melodies he heard on radio programs like “The Bell Telephone Hour” and “The Lucky Strike Hit Parade.”

Video: Steen plays at 2024 Denver Arts Week launch

Steen graduated from Denver East High School, taking great pride in being part of a remarkable roster of student musical artists there that now includes Ron Miles, Judy Collins, Don Cheadle (then a high-school sax player) and most of the East Angels who would go on to form the legendary band Earth, Wind & Fire. “I played with Philip Bailey in church when he was 9,” Steen told me last year.

That church was Zion Baptist, located at 24th Avenue and Ogden Street, where he was introduced to Bach and Mozart before turning 8. “It was founded in November 1865 by 10 recently Black Freedmen,” Steen said, making it Denver’s oldest Black church. He knew this, he said, “because I have been a member of Zion since 1946.”

Steen performed all over the world after having been mentored by Burrell as a child.

“(Charlie) could take the complex and simplify it and break it down to very simple language that a child could learn to understand,” Steen said after Burrell’s death. He called his cousin the Jackie Robinson of local music after he became the first Black member of the Denver Symphony Orchestra in 1949. “He was a lone eagle,” Steen said of his cousin. “Eagles fly where nobody else dares to fly.”

Video: Denver Mayor jams with Steen

Mostly, when you’re with Steen, “you sit there listening in awe,” Denver7 anchor Shannon Ogden said in a recent profile on Steen.

The Five Points Ambassadors described their music this way: “Imagine Count Basie’s swing combined with Duke Ellington’s ‘love you madly’ charm, topped off with a healthy dollop of Wild West spirit.” The other band members were Larson on drums, Ed Stephen on acoustic guitar, Ron Bland on bass, Vohn Regensburger on Brazilian guitar and, occasionally, Greg Gisbert on trumpet.

Steen was also a history and music educator who gave frequent lectures on the history of Denver and the significance of the Five Points community.

Information on a celebration of life has not yet been finalized.

John Moore is the Denver Gazette’s Senior Arts Journalist. Email him at john.moore@denvergazette.com.