SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2018
VOLUME FIVE NUMBER TWO
GERI ALLEN
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
TOMEKA REID
(January 27--February 2)
FARUQ Z. BEY
(February 3--9)
HANK JONES
(February 10--16)
STANLEY COWELL
(February 17–23)
(February 17–23)
GEORGE RUSSELL
(February 24—March 2)
ALICE COLTRANE
(March 3–9)
DON CHERRY
(March 10–16)
MAL WALDRON
(March 17–23)
JON HENDRICKS
(March 24–30)
MATTHEW SHIPP
(April 1–7)
PHAROAH SANDERS
(April 8–14)
WALT DICKERSON
(April 15–21)https://www.allmusic.com/artist/george-russell-mn0000646353/biography
George Russell
(1923-1986)
Artist Biography by Richard S. Ginell
While George Russell
was very active as a free-thinking composer, arranger, and bandleader,
his biggest effect upon jazz was in the quieter role of theorist. His
great contribution, apparently the first by a jazz musician to general
music theory, was a book with the intimidating title The Lydian
Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, where he concocted a concept of
playing jazz based on scales rather than chord changes. Published in
1953, Russell's theories directly paved the way for the modal revolutions of Miles Davis and John Coltrane -- and Russell even took credit for the theory behind Michael Jackson's huge hit "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'," which uses the Lydian scale (no, he didn't ask for royalties). Russell's
stylistic reach in his own compositions eventually became omnivorous,
embracing bop, gospel, blues, rock, funk, contemporary classical
elements, electronic music, and African rhythms in his ambitious
extended works -- most apparent in his large-scale 1983 suite for an
enlarged big band, The African Game. Like his colleague Gil Evans, Russell never stopped growing, but his work is not nearly as well-known as that of Evans, being more difficult to grasp and, in any case, not as well documented by U.S. record labels.
Russell's
first instrument was the drums, which he played in the Boy Scout Drum
and Bugle Corps and at local clubs when he was in high school. At 19, he
was hospitalized with tuberculosis, but he used the enforced inactivity
to learn the craft of arranging from a fellow patient. Once back on his
feet, he played with Benny Carter, but after being replaced on drums by Max Roach, Russell began to zero in on composing and arranging. He moved to New York to join the crowd of young firebrands who gathered in Gil Evans' "salon," and he was actually invited to play drums in Charlie Parker's
band. But once again, he fell ill, finding himself in a Bronx hospital
for 16 months (1945-1946), where he began to formulate the ideas for the
Lydian Concept. Upon his recovery, Russell leaped into the embryonic fusion of bebop and Afro-Cuban rhythms by writing "Cubana Be" and "Cubana Bop," which the Dizzy Gillespie big band recorded in 1947. He contributed arrangements to Claude Thornhill and Artie Shaw in the late '40s and wrote the first (and not the last) speculative scenario of a meeting between Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinsky, "A Bird in Igor's Yard," recorded by Buddy De Franco.
While working on his Lydian theories, Russell
dropped out of active music-making for a while, working at a sales
counter in Macy's when his book was published. But when he resumed
composing in 1956, he had established himself as an influential force in
jazz. Russell's connection with Gunther Schuller
resulted in the commission of "All About Rosie" for the 1957 Brandeis
University jazz festival, and he also taught at the Lenox School of Jazz
that Schuller co-founded. He formed a rehearsal sextet in the mid-'50s that became known as the George Russell Smalltet, with Art Farmer, Bill Evans, Hal McKusick, Barry Galbraith, and various drummers and bassists. Their 1956 recording Jazz Workshop (RCA Victor) became a landmark of its time, and Russell
continued to record intriguing LPs for Decca in the late '50s and
Riverside in the early '60s. Another key album from this period, Ezz-Thetics, featured two important progressive players, Eric Dolphy and Don Ellis.
Finding the American jazz scene too confining for his music, Russell
left for Europe in 1963, living in Sweden for five years. From his new
base, he toured Scandinavia with a new sextet of European players and
received numerous commissions -- including a ballet based on Othello, a
mass, and the orchestral suite Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature: 1980. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1969, he joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music, where Schuller had started a jazz department, and this gave him a secure base from which to tour occasionally with his own groups. Russell
stopped composing from 1972 to 1978 in order to finish a second volume
on the Lydian Chromatic Concept. He led a 19-piece big band at the
Village Vanguard for six weeks in 1978, played the Newport Jazz Festival
when it was based in New York City, and made tours of Italy, the U.S.
West Coast, and England in the '80s.
Russell's
most imposing latter-day commissions included "An American Trilogy" and
the monumental three-hour work "Time Line" for symphony orchestra, jazz
ensembles, rock groups, choir, and dancers. In addition to The African Game and So What on Blue Note, Russell
made recordings for Soul Note in the '70s and '80s and Label Bleu in
the '90s, while continuing to teach at the New England Conservatory and
leading his Living Time Orchestra big band into the 21st century. In 2005 George Russell & the Living Time Orchestra's The 80th Birthday Concert,
released on the Concept label, celebrated the legendary octogenarian's
contributions to the art of jazz with performances of some of his most
groundbreaking extended compositions and arrangements. George Russell died in Boston on July 27, 2009 of complications from Alzheimer's disease; he was 86 years old.
George Russell
George Russell is a hugely influential, innovative figure in the
evolution of modern jazz, the music's only major theorist, one of its
most profound composers, and a trail blazer whose ideas have transformed
and inspired some of the greatest musicians of our time.
Russell
was born in Cincinnati in 1923, the adopted son of a registered nurse
and a chef on the B&O Railroad. He began playing drums with the Boy
Scout Drum and Bugle Corps and eventually received a scholarship to
Wilberforce University where he joined the Collegians, whose list of
alumni include Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Ben
Webster, Cootie Williams, Ernie Wilkins and Frank Foster. But his most
valuable musical education came in 1941, when, in attempting to enlist
in the Marines, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, spending 6 months in
the hospital where he was taught the fundamentals of harmony from a
fellow patient. From the hospital he sold his first work, “New World,”
to Benny Carter. He joined Benny Carter's
Band, but was replaced by Max Roach; after Russell heard Roach, he
decided to give up drumming. He moved to New York where he was part of a
group of musicians who gathered in the basement apartment of Gil Evans.
The circle included Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, Max Roach, Johnny
Carisi and on occasion, Charlie Parker. He was commissioned to write a
piece for Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra; the result was the seminal
“Cubano Be/Cubano Bop” the first fusion of Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz,
premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1947 and featuring Chano Pozo. Two years
later his “Bird in Igor's Yard” was recorded by Buddy DeFranco, a piece
notable for its fusion of elements from Charlie Parker and Stravinsky.
It
was a remark made by Miles Davis when George asked him his musical aim
which set Russell on the course which has been his life. Miles said he
“wanted to learn all the changes.” Since Miles obviously knew all the
changes, Russell surmised that what he meant was he wanted to learn a
new way to relate to chords. This began a quest for Russell, and again
hospitalized for 16 months, he began to develop his “Lydian Chromatic
Concept of Tonal Organization.” First published in 1953, the Lydian
Concept is credited with opening the way into modal music, as
demonstrated by Miles in his seminal “Kind of Blue” recording. Using the
Lydian Scale as the PRIMARY SCALE of Western music, the Lydian
Chromatic Concept introduced the idea of chord/scale unity. It was the
first theory to explore the vertical relationship between chords and
scales, and was the only original theory to come from jazz. Throughout
the 1950's and 60's, Russell continued to work on developing the Concept
and leading bands under his direction. In the mid-fifties, a superb
sextet, including Bill Evans and Art Farmer recorded under his
direction, producing “The Jazz Workshop,” an album of astonishing
originality; the often dense textures and rhythms anticipated the
jazz-rock movement of the 1970's. Click for larger imageDuring this
time, he was also working odd jobs as a counterman in a lunch spot and
selling toys at Macy's at Christmas; the release of “The Jazz Workshop”
put an end to Russell's jobs outside of music. He was one of a group to
be commissioned to write for the first annual Brandeis Jazz Festival in
1957--”All About Rosie” was based on an Alabama children's song. “New
York, New York,” with poetry by Jon Hendricks and featuring Bill Evans,
Max Roach, John Coltrane, Milt Hinton, Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer and a
Who's Who of the New York jazz scene is striking in it evocation of the
New York of the late fifties. From 1960, Russell began leading his own
sextets around the New York area and at festivals; he also toured
throughout the Midwest and Europe with his sextet. One of the important
albums of this time was “Ezz-Thetic,” which featured Eric Dolphy, Don
Ellis and Steve Swallow.
Disillusioned by his lack of recognition
and the meager work opportunities in America, he arrived in a wheel
chair in Scandinavia in 1964, but returned five years later in spiritual
health. In Sweden and Norway he found support for both himself and his
music. All his works were recorded by radio and TV, and he was
championed by Bosse Broberg, the adventurous Director of Swedish Radio,
an organization with which Russell maintains a close association and
admiration. While there, he heard and recorded a young Jan Garbarek,
Terje Rypdal, and Jon Christensen.
In 1969, he returned to the
States at the request of his old friend, Gunther Schuller to teach at
the newly created Jazz Department at the New England Conservatory where
Schuller was President. He continued to develop the Lydian Concept and
toured with his own groups. He played Carnegie Hall, the Village
Vanguard, the Bottom Line, Newport, Wolftrap, The Smithsonian, Sweet
Basil, the West Coast, the Southwest, and Europe with his 14 member
orchestra. He continued to compose extended works which defined jazz
composition. His 1985 recording, “The African Game,”one of the first in
the revived Blue Note label, received two Grammy nominations. Russell
has taught throughout the world, and has been guest conductor for
Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, German and Italian radio.
In
1986, he was invited by the Contemporary Music Network of the British
Council to tour with an orchestra of American and British musicians,
which resulted in The International Living Time Orchestra, which has
been touring and performing since that time. Among the soloists of
stature are Stanton Davis, Dave Bargeron, Brad Hatfield, Steve Lodder,
Tiger Okoshi, and Andy Sheppard. The musicians have developed a rare
understanding of the music, astonishing audiences with fiery music both
complex and challenging, but added to the dynamism and electric power of
funk and rock. Russell himself is a tremendously visual leader, dancing
and forming architectural structures with his hands.
The Living
Time Orchestra has toured all over the world. Most recent projects
included a performance at the Barbican Centre in London and the Cite de
la Musique in Paris, augmented with string players from the U.K. and
France, the Theatre Champs-Elysees for the Festival D'automne in Paris,
the Glasgow International Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Tokyo Music
Joy, the Library of Congress, Festivals of Umbria, Verona, Lisbon,
Milano, Pori, Bath, Huddersfield, Ravenna, Catania, North Sea, and many
more.
Russell has received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship,
the National Endowment for the Arts American Jazz Master, been elected a
Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy, two Guggenheim
Fellowships, the Oscar du Disque de Jazz, the Guardian Award, six NEA
Music Fellowships, the American Music Award, and numerous others.
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/11/arts/george-russell-his-big-band-and-his-big-theory.html?fta=y
It played at the San Diego Kool Jazz Festival, at the University of Arizona at Tempe, at the Kimo Theater in Albuquerque and in Houston. ''I was impressed by the open- mindedness and the receptivity of the people in the Southwest,'' Mr. Russell said by phone the other day from Boston, where he teaches at the New England Conservatory of Music. ''They're really open to new artistic experiences, and they're hungry for them.''
Focus Now on Boston Area
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/arts/music/30russell.html
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/11/11/arts/george-russell-his-big-band-and-his-big-theory.html?fta=y
GEORGE RUSSELL: HIS BIG BAND AND HIS BIG THEORY
by JOHN S. WILSON
November 11, 1983
New York Times
GEORGE RUSSELL is a jazz composer and a jazz
musician. But, primarily, he is a jazz theorist - possibly the first of
his kind. For almost 40 years, he has been developing, justifying and
clarifying his Lydian chromatic concept of tonal organization, which has
over the last two decades vitally affected both jazz and popular music.
The pianist and composer John Lewis has called it ''the first profound
theoretical contribution to come from jazz.''
A concert encompassing Mr. Russell's compositions,
from his pioneering modal piece for Dizzy Gillespie's big band in 1947,
''Cubana Be/ Cubana Bop,'' to his most recent work, ''The African
Game,'' will be given tomorrow evening at 11 at the Entermedia Theater,
Second Avenue at 12th Street (tickets, $10; students and the elderly $8,
at the box office or through Chargit, 944-9300). It will be played by
his new 14-piece group, the George Russell Big Band, which has just
completed the first United States tour that Mr. Russell has ever made
with a large ensemble.
It played at the San Diego Kool Jazz Festival, at the University of Arizona at Tempe, at the Kimo Theater in Albuquerque and in Houston. ''I was impressed by the open- mindedness and the receptivity of the people in the Southwest,'' Mr. Russell said by phone the other day from Boston, where he teaches at the New England Conservatory of Music. ''They're really open to new artistic experiences, and they're hungry for them.''
Focus Now on Boston Area
Although Mr. Russell has led big ensembles
sporadically since the late 1970's, usually made up largely of
established musicians, mostly based in New York, his present band is
focused on young musicians from the Boston area.
''I've always felt the need to have a band that had a
special kind of energy, who were sources of enthusiasm and musical
fire,'' he said. ''And I felt the need to have a band that was a little
more under my control, people who were not so much concerned with other
commitments that I couldn't reach them, get them together and make a
really tight band.''
''My music needs them,'' he went on. ''It's got to
be well rehearsed. My bands have to be tight. We don't just come in and
play off the wall. I find these young musicians a joy to work with
because, to them, going on the road is absolutely new. It's thrilling.
It's what they dreamed about. They envisioned music to be performed, and
they envisioned themselves participating in it. They produce the same
kind of fresh energy that I heard when I first heard Bill Evans in the
50's and when I heard Jan Garbarek and Terry Rybdal in Europe.''
From Drums to Writing
Mr. Russell, who is now 60, started in music as a
drummer, but after hearing Max Roach, who replaced him in Benny Carter's
orchestra in 1943, he decided to concentrate on writing. Shortly after,
hospitalized with tuberculosis, he began to evolve his Lydian chromatic
concept which has been described in Down Beat magazine as ''a 12-tone
concept based on the grading of the intervals on the basis of their
close-to-distant relationship to a central tone.'' In trying to describe
the concept for the lay listener, Mr. Russell envisions four
saxophonists taking a trip down the Mississippi in the guise of
steamboats.
''Coleman Hawkins would be a local steamboat that
stopped at every town and conveyed the local color,'' Mr. Russell
explained. ''Each town would be a chord, and the Hawkins steamboat would
be the scale that sounds the chord. Lester Young would be an express
steamboat stopping only at larger cities - tonic resting points to which
other towns lead. John Coltrane would be a rocket ship that is vocal,
like Hawkins, but it would jet up and down from town to town, while
Ornette Coleman would be a rocket ship that may not descend at all.''
Mr. Russell published the first of a proposed
three-volume explication of his chromatic concept in 1953. Since then he
has been working on a second volume in which he is trying to clarify it
and make it accessible to readers.
''When you are trying to communicate a new theory of
music,'' he said, ''the whole fight is to put the sentences together so
that other people understand them. Sometimes,'' he admitted, ''when I
read them back, I don't understand them.''
Mr. Russell's latest work, ''The African Game,''
which will take up the second half of his program tomorrow and which was
commissioned by the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and the Swedish
Broadcasting System, is based on Albert Einstein's remark that ''God
didn't play dice with the universe.''
''But I think he did once,'' Mr. Russell said. ''In
Africa, between four and eight million years ago, he said grace and then
rolled the dice on the human race, and a species emerged. I don't know
whether the Lord won or lost that game, but hopefully the game is won
and the human race won't blow itself to smithereens.''
JAZZ: A LOOK BACK BY GEORGE RUSSELL
by Jon Pareles
July 12, 1985
New York Times
THE composer George Russell is treating his stint
through Sunday at Sweet Basil, 88 Seventh Avenue South, as a full-scale
career retrospective, culminating with his latest large work, ''The
African Game.'' In Wednesday's first set, Mr. Russell and his 15-piece
Living Time Orchestra made their way through his first 23 years in the
jazz world, from the 1945 ''Cubano-Be Cubano-Bop'' to the 1968
''Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature.''
The constants in Mr. Russell's pieces are modal
harmonies and a distinctive way of layering material; the parts of his
arrangements slide into place like cantilevered architecture, with
trumpet, trombone, saxophone, synthesizer and percussion lines all
overlapping.
Mr. Russell also enjoys eclectic juxtapositions,
from jazz and Afro-Cuban rituals in ''Cubano-Be, Cubano-Bop'' to African
xylophones, electronic sounds, overblown saxophone, jazzy brass chords,
blues guitar and funk bass lines in the Electronic Sonata.
The Sonata, which anticipated much of the jazz-rock
of the 1970's, was the showpiece in Wednesday's first set. It builds
from buzzing electronic sounds, through oozy slow sections, through
brass fanfares, to a climactic battle between a funk vamp and an
accelerating riff.
The Living Time Orchestra, which is partially drawn
from Mr. Russell's students at the New England Conservatory of Music,
was most comfortable with the Sonata's jazz-rock. Mr. Russell's earlier
pieces, which are closer to mainstream jazz, didn't always swing enough.
Although the band hit all the notes, the layers of the music were
blurred. Of the featured soloists, the brooding trumpeter Stanton Davis
and the energetic saxophonist George Garzone stood out.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/30/arts/music/30russell.html
George Russell, Composer Whose Theories Sent Jazz in a New Direction, Dies at 86
George Russell, a jazz composer, educator and musician whose
theories led the way to radical changes in jazz in the 1950s and ’60s,
died on Monday in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. He was 86
and lived in Boston.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Alice.
Though he largely operated behind the scenes and was never well known to the general public, Mr. Russell was a major figure in one of the most important developments in post-World War II jazz: the emergence of modal jazz, the first major harmonic change in the music after bebop.
Bebop, the modern style pioneered by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others, had introduced a new level of harmonic sophistication, based on rapidly moving cycles of dense and sometimes dissonant chords. Modal jazz, as popularized by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, sought to give musicians more freedom and to simplify the harmonic playing field by, in essence, replacing chords with scales as the primary basis for improvisation.
Mr. Russell explained the concept in great detail in a book that came to be considered the bible of modal jazz, “The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation.” Conceived during bouts with tuberculosis in the 1940s, the book was originally self-published in 1953 and published as a book six years later. A final revised edition was published as Volume 1 in 2001; Mr. Russell had been working on a second volume.
Mr. Russell’s concept could be difficult for readers to absorb. “When you are trying to communicate a new theory of music,” he told The New York Times in 1983, “the whole fight is to put the sentences together so that other people understand them. Sometimes, when I read them back, I don’t understand them.”
But the basic idea behind it was simple. He believed that a new generation of jazz improvisers deserved new harmonic techniques, and that traditional Western tonality was running its course. The Lydian chromatic concept — based on the Lydian mode, or scale, rather than the familiar do-re-mi major scale — was a way for musicians to improvise in any key, on any chord, without sacrificing the music’s blues roots.
Mr. Russell proposed that chords and scales were interrelated. He sought ways for an improvising musician to play more notes that fit harmonically with whatever he was playing; to put it another way, he was trying to develop a system in which there are no “wrong” notes.
Miles Davis most famously put Mr. Russell’s ideas into practice. His “Milestones,” written and recorded in 1958, swung back and forth between two scales, rejecting the rapid chord changes that had become prevalent in modern jazz. His landmark album “Kind of Blue,” recorded a year later, is widely regarded as the first great document of modal jazz.
Subsequent recordings by, among many others, the saxophonists John Coltrane (a participant in the “Kind of Blue” sessions) and Eric Dolphy (who also recorded with Mr. Russell), helped spread the gospel of modal jazz. Mr. Russell still stayed mostly behind the scenes, and, in later years, was primarily a teacher, but his fellow musicians acknowledged and appreciated his influence.
George Russell was born in Cincinnati on June 23, 1923, and grew up in a foster home. His adoptive father was a chef on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and his adoptive mother was a nurse. He played drums with the Boy Scouts’ drum-and-bugle corps and attended Wilberforce University in Ohio on a scholarship. At Wilberforce he played with the Collegians, the university’s imposing jazz and dance band. In 1941, while hospitalized for tuberculosis, he learned the science of harmony from a fellow patient. At that time he composed “New World” for the saxophonist and bandleader Benny Carter.
He later moved to New York to play drums with Carter’s band, but he gave up the instrument as soon as Max Roach was called in to replace him. “Max had it all on drums,” he said. “I decided that writing was my field.”
In 1947 he composed the modal introduction to “Cubano Be” and other sections of the multipart “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop,” an early example of Afro-Cuban jazz recorded by Gillespie. He later wrote “A Bird in Igor’s Yard,” an early experiment in classical-jazz crossover, for the clarinetist Buddy DeFranco.
He was part of the circle that convened around the arranger Gil Evans’s Manhattan apartment in the late 1940s, a group that included Miles Davis; returning to music after an illness, he wrote “Odjenar” and “Ezz-Thetic” for a Lee Konitz album recorded in 1951 that also included Davis.
In 1956 he began his own career as a recording artist and a bandleader with the album “The Jazz Workshop.” His other albums from that period included “New York, N.Y.” (1959) and “Ezz-Thetics” (1961).
In 1958 he taught at the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts, run by the pianist and composer John Lewis, who called Mr. Russell’s Lydian chromatic concept “the first profound theoretical contribution to come from jazz.”
In 1964 Mr. Russell, who as a black man was dismayed by race relations in the United States, moved to Scandinavia. He returned in 1969 and joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory, where he taught until 2004.
He also began touring with his own groups, notably the Living Time Orchestra, a large international ensemble he led from the mid-1980s on, which experimented with all kinds of music, including funk, electronics and jazz-rock. A 21-piece version of that band recorded “The African Game,” an album for Blue Note in 1983.
Among the many awards Mr. Russell received were a MacArthur Foundation grant in 1989 and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters fellowship in 1990.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Jock Millgardh, of Los Angeles, and three grandchildren.
On the first few albums released under his name, Mr. Russell composed the music and led the ensemble but did not perform, and although he later played piano in the groups he led, he did not have a high opinion of himself as a pianist. “I don’t play the piano,” he once said. “I play the Lydian concept.”
Matt Stone/Boston Herald, via Associated Press
George Russell in 1999.
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Russell and Ornette Coleman (Youtube.com)
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The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Alice.
Though he largely operated behind the scenes and was never well known to the general public, Mr. Russell was a major figure in one of the most important developments in post-World War II jazz: the emergence of modal jazz, the first major harmonic change in the music after bebop.
Bebop, the modern style pioneered by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others, had introduced a new level of harmonic sophistication, based on rapidly moving cycles of dense and sometimes dissonant chords. Modal jazz, as popularized by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, sought to give musicians more freedom and to simplify the harmonic playing field by, in essence, replacing chords with scales as the primary basis for improvisation.
Mr. Russell explained the concept in great detail in a book that came to be considered the bible of modal jazz, “The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation.” Conceived during bouts with tuberculosis in the 1940s, the book was originally self-published in 1953 and published as a book six years later. A final revised edition was published as Volume 1 in 2001; Mr. Russell had been working on a second volume.
Mr. Russell’s concept could be difficult for readers to absorb. “When you are trying to communicate a new theory of music,” he told The New York Times in 1983, “the whole fight is to put the sentences together so that other people understand them. Sometimes, when I read them back, I don’t understand them.”
But the basic idea behind it was simple. He believed that a new generation of jazz improvisers deserved new harmonic techniques, and that traditional Western tonality was running its course. The Lydian chromatic concept — based on the Lydian mode, or scale, rather than the familiar do-re-mi major scale — was a way for musicians to improvise in any key, on any chord, without sacrificing the music’s blues roots.
Mr. Russell proposed that chords and scales were interrelated. He sought ways for an improvising musician to play more notes that fit harmonically with whatever he was playing; to put it another way, he was trying to develop a system in which there are no “wrong” notes.
Miles Davis most famously put Mr. Russell’s ideas into practice. His “Milestones,” written and recorded in 1958, swung back and forth between two scales, rejecting the rapid chord changes that had become prevalent in modern jazz. His landmark album “Kind of Blue,” recorded a year later, is widely regarded as the first great document of modal jazz.
Subsequent recordings by, among many others, the saxophonists John Coltrane (a participant in the “Kind of Blue” sessions) and Eric Dolphy (who also recorded with Mr. Russell), helped spread the gospel of modal jazz. Mr. Russell still stayed mostly behind the scenes, and, in later years, was primarily a teacher, but his fellow musicians acknowledged and appreciated his influence.
George Russell was born in Cincinnati on June 23, 1923, and grew up in a foster home. His adoptive father was a chef on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and his adoptive mother was a nurse. He played drums with the Boy Scouts’ drum-and-bugle corps and attended Wilberforce University in Ohio on a scholarship. At Wilberforce he played with the Collegians, the university’s imposing jazz and dance band. In 1941, while hospitalized for tuberculosis, he learned the science of harmony from a fellow patient. At that time he composed “New World” for the saxophonist and bandleader Benny Carter.
He later moved to New York to play drums with Carter’s band, but he gave up the instrument as soon as Max Roach was called in to replace him. “Max had it all on drums,” he said. “I decided that writing was my field.”
In 1947 he composed the modal introduction to “Cubano Be” and other sections of the multipart “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop,” an early example of Afro-Cuban jazz recorded by Gillespie. He later wrote “A Bird in Igor’s Yard,” an early experiment in classical-jazz crossover, for the clarinetist Buddy DeFranco.
He was part of the circle that convened around the arranger Gil Evans’s Manhattan apartment in the late 1940s, a group that included Miles Davis; returning to music after an illness, he wrote “Odjenar” and “Ezz-Thetic” for a Lee Konitz album recorded in 1951 that also included Davis.
In 1956 he began his own career as a recording artist and a bandleader with the album “The Jazz Workshop.” His other albums from that period included “New York, N.Y.” (1959) and “Ezz-Thetics” (1961).
In 1958 he taught at the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts, run by the pianist and composer John Lewis, who called Mr. Russell’s Lydian chromatic concept “the first profound theoretical contribution to come from jazz.”
In 1964 Mr. Russell, who as a black man was dismayed by race relations in the United States, moved to Scandinavia. He returned in 1969 and joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory, where he taught until 2004.
He also began touring with his own groups, notably the Living Time Orchestra, a large international ensemble he led from the mid-1980s on, which experimented with all kinds of music, including funk, electronics and jazz-rock. A 21-piece version of that band recorded “The African Game,” an album for Blue Note in 1983.
Among the many awards Mr. Russell received were a MacArthur Foundation grant in 1989 and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters fellowship in 1990.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Jock Millgardh, of Los Angeles, and three grandchildren.
On the first few albums released under his name, Mr. Russell composed the music and led the ensemble but did not perform, and although he later played piano in the groups he led, he did not have a high opinion of himself as a pianist. “I don’t play the piano,” he once said. “I play the Lydian concept.”
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A version of this article appeared in print on July 30, 2009, on page A29 of the New York edition.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/why-george-russell-will-always-live-in-time-george-russell-by-raul-dgama-rose.php?page=1
Why George Russell Will Always Live in Time
by
AllAboutJazz
AllAboutJazz
A measure of just how underrated a musician he was in his lifetime is reflected in the fact that even three days after he passed on most of the major publications had not even reported his death, much less celebrated his life in the glowing terms that he so richly deserved. Perhaps this was because oddly enough he may have spent a lifetime mostly in the quietude of musical intellectualism rather than in its practice. That is, after all how most may ultimately remember George Russell, born June 23, 1923—died July 27, 2009. He did author the most important work in jazz, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (Concept Publishing, 1953; Concept Publishing Ed. 1959), which is odd, because George Russell just happens to also rank as one of the most important composers, arrangers, conductors—not just a musical intellectual—in the history of jazz. Listen to his peers. Read what they have said. Men like Gunther Schuller and Gil Evans, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, David Baker and scores of others. But trust fickle audiences and big record labels to have given him the short shrift in his lifetime.
George Russell wrote one of the earliest Afro-Cuban-Jazz classics, "Cubana-Be/Cubana-Bop," which was immortalized by Dizzy Gillespie. And the great conguero, Chano Pozo glorified it with a solo that will forever stick in the memory. But the song was a majestic piece of musical architecture that even Diz and Chano Pozo would agree that though Pozo's solo was such a lesson in drumming, nothing could detract from the melding of styles: the electrifying chopped rhythms of bebop and the beautifully cadenced, calculated stutter of Afro-Cuban polyrhythms.
That was in 1947. So although Russell did contribute one of the most important books in jazz theory, he matched that up amply and more and earlier too, with some exquisite music, "Cubana-Be/Cubana-Bop" and the later "A Bird in Igor's Yard" (1949), which took an impressionistic look at how the bebop of Bird and the ultra-radical concepts of Igor Stravinsky could become not-so-strange-bedfellows. And these were just the start of a glorious songbook.
The Theory
Still it pays to remember the theory. Russell's historic book marked a major advancement in jazz: the beginning of the Modal period that was to influence men like Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and later Ornette Coleman as well. Jazz musicians had been improvising on chord changes for decades before, whereas modal compositions emphasized more linear modes (like melody) rather than vertical ones (Chordal).
Russell's theory had united the Lydian—one of several ancient modes, which is a scale of unity for the tonic major chord—with a modern use of chromatics, so instead of a key signature dictating and limiting the musician's choice of notes, the tonal center of the piece of music became its center of gravity; the harmonic, chordal richness was still available but now the choice of notes became wider, almost limitless.
This concept—that melodic ideas assume sectional autonomy, independent of any harmonic progression—may have inadvertently begun with Lester Young. But Russell captured it in its entirety and made it stick with compositions to match. No wonder that men like John Lewis, Art Farmer and Ornette Coleman, among others, called it the single most important advance in Jazz theory.
Their paths crossed and forever changed the jazz geography of New York in the 1950s. So George Russell was also associated with Gil Evans. But if anything, Russell's seminal work was a big influence on the thing of Evans. And both men conceived their music on infinitely larger aural canvases. However, because of the complexity of Russell's work, they were less easy to grasp than Evans' music. Consequently Russell may have got the shorter end of the straw when it came to documentation and representation on major record labels in the US. That did not stop him.
Debut as leader
George Russell's musical debut as a bandleader came with the 1956 release of Jazz Workshop (Koch Records). The record featured some of his most enduring songs, "Ezz-thetics," "Concerto for Billy the Kid" and "Ye Hypocrite Ye Beelzebub." At the time it seemed inconceivable that this record was made by a septet, but it actually was. Art Farmer played trumpet, Bill Evans was on piano, there were two bassists and three drummers—Russell himself played chromatic drums and Osie Johnson was on wood drums. In 1959 he made New York, New York (Impulse) with John Coltrane, Max Roach and Evans. The record is a magnificent example of composition, arranging and performance. By 1960, Russell's adventurous spirit took flight. Jazz in the Space Age (Decca/GRP). This featured the two pianos of Bill Evans and Paul Bley together with a large ensemble. The music was made to order and its highlight was the three-part suite, "Chromatic Universe," an ambitious work that mixed punctiliously-written parts and free improvisation. In a second session for this record, Russell added trumpeter, Marky Markowitz, valve trombonist, Bob Brookmeyer and the slow, mysterious, "Waltz from Outer Space," which also incorporated an oriental sounding theme. This record represents some of Russell's finest work.
Throughout the 1960s George Russell was constantly changing, learning, evolving in his music and was also surrounding himself with extra-ordinary musicians. It was during this period that he produced two of his landmark recordings. The first was Outer Thought (OJC, 1960). A pivotal work, the record featured the art of Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone and bass clarinet, David Baker and Garnett Brown on trombones and two bassists—Chuck Israels and Steve Swallow. The drummers were Pete La Roca and Ivory Joe Hunter. This date also featured a George Russell discovery, the amazing Sheila Jordan on vocals. The group made splendid versions of "Ezz-Thetics" and "Stratusphunk."
The second record was Ezz-Thetics
(OJC, 1961). This was a truly classic record, with three Russell
originals as well as extraordinary versions of "'Round Midnight," (with a
jaw-dropping performance by Eric Dolphy), Miles Davis' "Nardis" and
David Baker's "Honesty." A year later came The Stratus Seekers (OJC) with "Blues in Orbit," later recorded by Gil Evans. Russell's musical catalogue also included The Outer View,
(OJC, 1962) on which he absolutely transformed Charlie Parker's "Au
Privave," a challenge to his musicians to stretch beyond their wildest
limits. There was also a most haunting version of "You are my Sunshine,"
by Sheila Jordan.
Europe and after
But in the early 1960s, disillusionment had set in and the composer moved to Europe. Here he taught music and performed, gathering together, teaching and influencing some of the most important musicians there. Jan Garbarek was one such musician and nominated him as one of his most important influences in his own playing and composing. Russell also celebrated his years in Europe with some of his mightiest work. At Beethoven Hall (Saba, 1965) was one such record, which brought the composer together with cornetist Don Cherry. Dipping in to his Lydian concepts in Europe, Russell turned in extraordinary versions of "Bag's Groove," "Confirmation" and "'Round About Midnight." Then he turned his attention to something even more daunting and produced Othello Ballet Suite and Electronic Sonata No. 1 (Flying Dutchman, 1968). This compelling work combined the jazz, classical idioms with Shakespeare. A year later he produced Electronic Sonata, 1968 (Soulnote, 1969). This two-part, 14-event piece featured a very young Jan Garbarek on tenor saxophone and Terje Rypdal on guitars. And The Essence of George Russell (1966) featured the first big band version of "Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature."
The 70s were marked by more teaching Trip to Prillaguri (ECM, 1973), more learning and more critical acclaim, especially in Europe. First with the ECM debut and later also with Listen to the Silence. A Mass for Our Time (Concept, 1974); and Vertical Form 6 (Soulnote, 1976).
By now, George Russell was entering a new stage in his career, one that was to characterize his later—and perhaps—his most important music conceptually. This was first heard on Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature (Strata East, 1980) was released in the US. This was an ambitious, elaborate composition and it blended bebop, free improvisation, Asian musical elements and the blues, electronics—including tapes and previously recorded performances. The collision was a brilliant—some say a historic—recording that ranks with Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (Blue Note, 1959). Then came Live in an American Time Spiral (1982), a Village Vanguard recording that was a prelude to his next enormous work.
But absolutely nothing could prepare audiences for The African Game (Blue Note, 1983). This was Russell's Magnum opus. A highly eclectic, nine-event 45-minute suite for augmented big band that depicted the dawn of human civilization from—as we now know—the correct, African perspective. The work attempts, successfully, to embrace an enormous world of sound in an open, colorful manner, with several degrees of timbral unity and emotion, to keep the various idioms from flying out of control. This is a celebrated recording by Russell—his first in 13 years, made with his latest large ensemble, The Living Time Orchestra, a unit that was to be, with personnel changes, his last and greatest big band. That record was followed quickly by So What (Blue Note, 1983). Here too, the Living Time Orchestra responds to Russell's direction with the same kick that typified his Promethean career that began in the 50s and also featured one of his last long compositions, "Time Spiral."
Then again there was a long period of inactivity, before Russell made the first of three visits to the UK. Between 1986 and 1988, he performed and put together London Concerts Vols 1 & 2 (Label Bleu, 1989). Then the recording trail went cold again. But nothing really could prevent George Russell from staying close to the music he so loved. When Gunther Schuller had persuaded him to return to the US in 1969, he did not simply come back. He joined Schuller at the New England Conservatory of Music. He played festivals and he broadcasted in North America and in Europe. His last record was the gargantuan 80th Birthday Concert (Concept Publishing, 2005). Too bad he was stricken by Alzheimer's towards the end of his life, incapacitated not unlike that other compositional genius, Charles Mingus. But it may be that George Russell may not be done after all. Perhaps he will celebrate with a chair in the sky. While down here, we in the world will wait with bated breath.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/george-russell-the-story-of-an-american-composer-by-duncan-heining.php?page=1
New York, NY
http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-george-russell29-2009jul29-story.html
FOR THE RECORD:
George Russell obituary: The obituary of jazz composer George Russell in Wednesday's Section A said that among his survivors was a son, Millgardh. His son's name is Jock Millgardh. —
Russell was a rare spokesman for the study of theoretical principles in an art form that emphasizes improvisation and spontaneity. His treatise “The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization” -- first published in 1953 -- had a significant effect on the growing fascination with modal and free improvisation surfacing in the late 1950s. Elements of the concept, which outlines methods by which improvisers can free themselves from the "tyranny of chords," as Russell described it, were a factor in the modal works present in Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," the bestselling album in jazz history.
Russell's premise that jazz improvisation could reach beyond well-established harmonic foundations further validated the methods chosen by jazz artists such as John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Don Ellis, Wayne Shorter and others. His own compositions -- beginning with the startlingly inventive music on his mid-1950s breakthrough recording, "The Jazz Workshop," continuing with his small groups of the '60s, occasional large ensembles of the '80s, and the Living Time Orchestra that he led on and off until his death -- were constantly evolving displays of the expansive possibilities of his creative overview.
"My work," he told The Times after the MacArthur grant was awarded in 1989, "tries to achieve a kind of world view or synthesis of many kinds of musics, one that doesn't ignore the sounds of our time. My hope is that it's a complete music -- physical, emotional as well as thought-provoking."
George Allen Russell was born June 23, 1923, in Cincinnati, the adopted son of Joseph, a chef on the B&O Railroad, and Bessie, a nurse. Drawn to music at an early age, he sang a number with Fats Waller at age 7 and played drums in a Boy Scout drum and bugle corps. After receiving a scholarship to Wilberforce University, he was called up for the World War II draft. But when tuberculosis was diagnosed in his examination, he was hospitalized, serendipitously with a fellow patient who instructed him in the fundamentals of music theory.
Briefly working as a jazz drummer after his release, Russell decided to explore other areas of music after hearing Max Roach play the drums, and wound up in New York City. By the mid-1940s, he had become part of an adventurous group of young musicians -- Davis, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, John Benson Brooks among them -- who frequented Gil Evan's West Side apartment. Told by Davis that he wanted to "learn all the changes," Russell interpreted the remark as a quest to find new ways to approach harmony, and he began to work on his Lydian Concept. Applying the principles he was discovering, he composed "Cubana Be/Cubana Bop" -- early examples of the blending of jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms -- for Dizzy Gillespie's big band.
In the 1950s, while still supporting himself with odd jobs, he wrote and recorded "The Jazz Workshop" album, which -- combined with the publication of the Lydian Concept -- thoroughly established his credibility as a jazz artist. A commission from the Brandeis Jazz Festival followed, along with the large ensemble album, "New York, New York," which showcased Russell compositions performed by an all-star assemblage that included Coltrane, Bill Evans, Jon Hendricks and others.
Russell led his own sextets in the 1960s, but by mid-decade, the music industry's turn toward rock music had diminished the employment potential for jazz players. He moved to Sweden until 1969, then returned to teach at the New England Conservatory.
A second volume of his Lydian Concept -- "The Art and Science of Tonal Gravity" -- was published in 2001.
He is survived by his wife, Alice; a son, Millgardh; and three grandchildren.
Heckman is a freelance writer.
news.obits@latimes.com
When composer George Russell died in 2009, plenty of the world’s musicians and listeners remained indifferent to his achievements - or were still scratching their heads about them - close on 60 years after his revolutionary methods began transforming jazz. But plenty of others - Ornette Coleman and Jan Garbarek among them - knew exactly why he mattered. Russell didn’t believe that European music theory, with its roots in the major/minor scale system, and the cadential "urge" of its seven notes toward resolutions, could say much that was useful about jazz. So he shifted the emphasis from cadences and chords to the drifting modes of an updated medieval church music, to notions of "ingoing and outgoing" or "gravitational pull" rather than "tension and resolution".
His work inspired the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Gil Evans and Ornette Coleman, and it inspires new artists still - including young US saxophonist John O’Gallagher, a developer of Russell’s theories who has applied jazz improv to serialist composer Anton Webern’s music, and who plays Birmingham and London next week. O’Gallagher’s pianist will be London-based composer and teacher Hans Koller, himself a student of the Russell approach who nonetheless admits that first contact with it can just seem "too weird, super-confusing. We learn piano in the key of C, but with Russell, everything’s a fourth away from where it should be. But the more you get into it, you hear the beauty in it. You can use all 12 notes, the black notes and the white, as long as you have structures, and he offered those."
Russell first published his Lydian Concept of Chromatic Organisation in 1953, and its influence soon spread. Kind of Blue’s So What has two modes replacing a chord sequence. Russell’s All About Rosie has one pentatonic mode superimposed on another, and that idea of bi-modality was central to Coltrane’s later music. When Jan Garbarek, at 19, began being mentored by Russell, he realised he could tap into his own Norwegian folk music this way, using its pentatonic modes. "So rather than a constant urge to cadence, the western idea that the next thing has to keep happening quickly," Koller continues, "you can stay in one colour as long as you want, then move to another. Russell thought of a mode as colour rather than a function - or as colour on top of function, because the beauty of it is that you can combine this approach and a jazz-standards one, and have the best of both worlds. That’s why this doesn’t turn into contemporary-classical music, but keeps the jazz earthiness, in jazz you don’t throw anything out, whereas the contemporary-classical guys wanted to remove things that had been there before. And that’s why it’s liberating, and why I love jazz more than anything else."
The NBC TV show The Subject Is Jazz caught Russell at work just as his message was beginning to be heard by likeminded musicians - five minutes into a 1958 edition of the show, he appears on some of his classic themes with pianist Bill Evans, trumpeter Art Farmer and others, representing The Future of Jazz.
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/377/
"George Russell: The Composer Who Thought Outside the Box"
George Russell , 1989 MacArthur Fellow
"George Russell, Composer Whose Theories Sent Jazz in a New Direction, Dies at 86"
George Russell , 1989 MacArthur Fellow
"George Russell Dies at 86; Composer Influenced the Evolution of Jazz"
Los Angeles Times
George Russell , 1989 MacArthur Fellow
https://necmusic.edu/faculty/george-russell
George Russell (1923–2009) was one
of the charter faculty who led the NEC jazz studies program, beginning
in 1969 and beyond his official retirement in 2004, when he became a
Distinguished Artist-in-Residence Emeritus. He remained a cornerstone of
the NEC jazz community through his death on July 27, 2009. Russell, his
music, and his ideas are inextricably woven into the international
history and culture of jazz and music that has learned from jazz, and
his legacy is found in NEC's all-embracing approach to the study of
music.
For almost 40 years, every jazz student at NEC was exposed to Russell’s music and ideas, even if they did not work with him directly as a studio teacher. Up to his retirement, Russell spent almost every spring semester with the players of the NEC Jazz Orchestra, studying and rehearsing his music for a traditional end-of-semester concert. Due to the aleatory elements in Russell’s music, this nuanced composer/performer experience prepared generations of NEC alumni to be uniquely qualified interpreters of these large-scale works.
A hugely influential, innovative figure in the evolution of modern jazz, Russell was one of its greatest composers, and its most important theorist. His 1953 book The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization is credited as a great pathbreaker into modal music, as pioneered by Miles Davis and John Coltrane. His second volume on the Lydian Concept, The Art and Science of Tonal Gravity, was published in 2001. All of the music’s most important developments—from modal improvisation to electronics, African polyrhythms to free form, atonality to jazz rock—have taken cues from Russell’s pioneering work.
Russell's Living Time Orchestra has performed throughout the world, including the Barbican Centre and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Festival d’Automne and Cîté de la Musique in Paris, and Tokyo Music Joy. His career as a leader is preserved on more than 30 recordings, including work with such musicians as Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Jan Garbarek.
Among Russell's awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, the NEA American Jazz Master Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, six NEA grants, three Grammy nominations, the American Music Award, the British Jazz Award, the Kennedy Center Living Jazz Legend Award, the Swedish Jazz Federation Lifetime Achievement Award, and election to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. NEC bestowed an honorary Doctor of Music degree on George Russell in 2005.
Russell's commissions include the British Council, Swedish Broadcasting, the Glasgow International Festival, the Barbican Centre, and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. He taught throughout the world, and was a guest conductor for Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, German, and Italian radio. Russell has been the subject of documentaries by NPR, NHK Japan, Swedish Broadcasting, and the BBC.
in photo: George Russell conducts in NEC's Jordan Hall in 2003 as part of celebration of Jordan Hall centennial (photo by Tom Fitzsimmons)
More about George Russell.
http://www.furious.com/perfect/georgerussell.html
Check out the rest of PERFECT SOUND FOREVER
http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com/2016/06/george-russell-finds-musics-missing.html
COPYRIGHT by BOB BLUMENTHAL
Surrounded by the music of the black church and the big bands which played on the Ohio Riverboats, and with a father who was a music educator at Oberlin College, he started playing drums with the Boy Scouts and Bugle Corps, receiving a scholarship to Wilberforce University, where he joined the Collegians, a band noted as a breeding ground for great jazz musicians including Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Freeman Lee, Frank Foster, and Benny Carter. Russell served in that band at the same time as another noted jazz composer, Ernie Wilkins. When called up for the draft at the beginning of World War II, he was quickly hospitalized with tuberculosis, where he was taught the fundamentals of music theory by a fellow patient.
In 1945–46, Russell was again hospitalized for tuberculosis for 16 months. Forced to turn down work as Charlie Parker's drummer, during that time he worked out the basic tenets of what was to become his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, a theory encompassing all of equal-tempered music which has been influential well beyond the boundaries of jazz. The first edition of his book was published by Russell in 1953, while he worked as a salesclerk at Macy's. At that time, Russell's ideas were a crucial step into the modal music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis[1] on his classic recording, Kind of Blue, and served as a beacon for other modernists such as Eric Dolphy and Art Farmer.
While working on the theory, Russell was also applying its principles to composition. His first famous composition was for the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, the two-part "Cubano Be, Cubano Bop" (1947) and part of that band's pioneering experiments in fusing bebop and Cuban jazz elements;[4] "A Bird in Igor's Yard" (a tribute to both Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinsky) was recorded in a session led by Buddy DeFranco the next year.[5] Also, a lesser known but pivotal work arranged by Russell's was recorded in January 1950 by Artie Shaw entitled "Similau"[6][7] that employed techniques of both the works done for Gillespie and DeFranco.
Russell began playing piano, leading a series of groups which included Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, Barry Galbraith, Milt Hinton, Paul Motian, and others. Jazz Workshop was his first album as leader, and one where he played relatively little, as opposed to masterminding the events (rather like his colleague Gil Evans). He was to record a number of impressive albums over the next several years, sometimes as primary pianist.
In 1957, Russell was one of six jazz musicians commissioned by Brandeis University to write a piece for their Festival of the Creative Arts. He wrote a suite for orchestra, All About Rosie, which featured Bill Evans among other soloists, and has been cited as one of the few convincing examples of composed polyphony in jazz.[8]
Members of the orchestra on his 1958 extended work, New York, N.Y., included Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Milt Hinton, Bob Brookmeyer, and Max Roach, among others, and featured wrap-around raps by singer/lyricist Jon Hendricks. Jazz in the Space Age (1960) was an even more ambitious big band album, featuring the unusual dual piano voicings of Bill Evans and Paul Bley. Russell formed his own sextet in which he played piano. Between 1960 and 1963, the Russell Sextet featured musicians like Dave Baker and Steve Swallow and memorable sessions with Eric Dolphy (on Ezz-thetics) and singer Sheila Jordan (their bleak version of "You Are My Sunshine" on The Outer View (1962) is highly regarded).
This Scandinavian period also provided opportunities to write for larger groupings, and Russell's larger-scale compositions of this time pursue his idea of "vertical form", which he described as "layers or strata of divergent modes of rhythmic behaviour". The Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature, commissioned by Bosse Broberg of Swedish Radio for the Radio Orchestra, was first recorded in 1968, as an extended work recorded with electronic tape. It continued Russell's continuing exploration of new approaches and new instrumentation.
Russell returned to America in 1969, when Gunther Schuller assumed the presidency of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and appointed Russell to teach the Lydian Concept in the newly created jazz studies department, a position he held for many years. As Russell toured with his own groups, he was persistent in developing the Lydian Concept. He played the Bottom Line, Newport, Wolftrap, The Village Vanguard, Carnegie Hall, Sweet Basil and more with his 14-member orchestra.[10]
With Living Time (1972), Russell reunited with Bill Evans to offer a suite of compositions which represent the stages of human life. His Live in an American Time Spiral featured many young New York players who would go on to greatness, including Tom Harrell and Ray Anderson. When he was able to form an orchestra for his 1985 work The African Game, he dubbed it the Living Time Orchestra. This 14-member ensemble toured Europe and the U.S., doing frequent weeks at the Village Vanguard, and was praised by New York magazine as "the most exciting orchestra to hit the city in years."
The work The African Game, a 45-minute opus for 25 musicians, was described by Robert Palmer of The New York Times as "one of the most important new releases of the past several decades" and earned Russell two Grammy nominations in 1985.
Russell wrote nine extended pieces after 1984, among them: Timeline for symphonic orchestra, jazz orchestra, chorus, klezmer band and soloists, composed for the New England Conservatory's 125th anniversary; a re-orchestration of Living Time for Russell's orchestra and additional musicians, commissioned by the Cité de la Musique in Paris in 1994; and It's About Time, co-commissioned by The Arts Council of England and the Swedish Concert Bureau in 1995.
In 1986, Russell toured with a group of American and British musicians, resulting in The International Living Time Orchestra, a group who still tours and performs today. He played with Dave Bargeron, Steve Lodder, Tiger Okoshi, Mike Walker, Brad Hatfield, and Andy Sheppard.[10]
It was a remark made by Miles Davis in 1945 when Russell asked him his musical aim that led Russell on a quest which was to lead to his theoretical breakthrough. Davis answered that his musical aim was "to learn all the changes." Knowing that Davis already knew how to arpeggiate each chord, Russell reasoned that he really meant that he wanted to find a new and broader way to relate to chords. As music scholars Cooke and Horne wrote:
The Lydian Chromatic Concept was the first codified original theory to come from jazz. Musicians who assimilated Russell's ideas expanded their harmonic language beyond that of bebop, into the realm of post-bop. Russell's ideas influenced the development of modal jazz, notably in the album Jazz Workshop (1957, with Bill Evans and featuring the "Concerto for Billy the Kid") as well as his writings. Miles Davis also pushed into modal playing with the composition Miles on his 1957 album Milestones. Davis and Evans later collaborated on the 1959 album Kind of Blue, which featured modal composition and playing. John Coltrane explored modal playing for several years after playing on Kind of Blue.
His Lydian Concept has been described as making available resources rather than imposing constraints on musicians.[12] According to the influential 20th century composer Toru Takemitsu, "The Lydian Chromatic Concept is one of the two most splendid books about music; the other is My Musical Language by Messiaen. Though I'm considered a contemporary music composer, if I dare categorize myself as an artist, I've been strongly influenced by the Lydian Concept, which is not simply a musical method—we might call it a philosophy of music, or we might call it poetry."[13]
Europe and after
But in the early 1960s, disillusionment had set in and the composer moved to Europe. Here he taught music and performed, gathering together, teaching and influencing some of the most important musicians there. Jan Garbarek was one such musician and nominated him as one of his most important influences in his own playing and composing. Russell also celebrated his years in Europe with some of his mightiest work. At Beethoven Hall (Saba, 1965) was one such record, which brought the composer together with cornetist Don Cherry. Dipping in to his Lydian concepts in Europe, Russell turned in extraordinary versions of "Bag's Groove," "Confirmation" and "'Round About Midnight." Then he turned his attention to something even more daunting and produced Othello Ballet Suite and Electronic Sonata No. 1 (Flying Dutchman, 1968). This compelling work combined the jazz, classical idioms with Shakespeare. A year later he produced Electronic Sonata, 1968 (Soulnote, 1969). This two-part, 14-event piece featured a very young Jan Garbarek on tenor saxophone and Terje Rypdal on guitars. And The Essence of George Russell (1966) featured the first big band version of "Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature."
The 70s were marked by more teaching Trip to Prillaguri (ECM, 1973), more learning and more critical acclaim, especially in Europe. First with the ECM debut and later also with Listen to the Silence. A Mass for Our Time (Concept, 1974); and Vertical Form 6 (Soulnote, 1976).
By now, George Russell was entering a new stage in his career, one that was to characterize his later—and perhaps—his most important music conceptually. This was first heard on Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature (Strata East, 1980) was released in the US. This was an ambitious, elaborate composition and it blended bebop, free improvisation, Asian musical elements and the blues, electronics—including tapes and previously recorded performances. The collision was a brilliant—some say a historic—recording that ranks with Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz (Blue Note, 1959). Then came Live in an American Time Spiral (1982), a Village Vanguard recording that was a prelude to his next enormous work.
But absolutely nothing could prepare audiences for The African Game (Blue Note, 1983). This was Russell's Magnum opus. A highly eclectic, nine-event 45-minute suite for augmented big band that depicted the dawn of human civilization from—as we now know—the correct, African perspective. The work attempts, successfully, to embrace an enormous world of sound in an open, colorful manner, with several degrees of timbral unity and emotion, to keep the various idioms from flying out of control. This is a celebrated recording by Russell—his first in 13 years, made with his latest large ensemble, The Living Time Orchestra, a unit that was to be, with personnel changes, his last and greatest big band. That record was followed quickly by So What (Blue Note, 1983). Here too, the Living Time Orchestra responds to Russell's direction with the same kick that typified his Promethean career that began in the 50s and also featured one of his last long compositions, "Time Spiral."
Then again there was a long period of inactivity, before Russell made the first of three visits to the UK. Between 1986 and 1988, he performed and put together London Concerts Vols 1 & 2 (Label Bleu, 1989). Then the recording trail went cold again. But nothing really could prevent George Russell from staying close to the music he so loved. When Gunther Schuller had persuaded him to return to the US in 1969, he did not simply come back. He joined Schuller at the New England Conservatory of Music. He played festivals and he broadcasted in North America and in Europe. His last record was the gargantuan 80th Birthday Concert (Concept Publishing, 2005). Too bad he was stricken by Alzheimer's towards the end of his life, incapacitated not unlike that other compositional genius, Charles Mingus. But it may be that George Russell may not be done after all. Perhaps he will celebrate with a chair in the sky. While down here, we in the world will wait with bated breath.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/george-russell-the-story-of-an-american-composer-by-duncan-heining.php?page=1
George Russell: The Story of an American Composer
by
This article, adapted by the author, appears in Chapter 4 of George Russell: The Story of an American Composer, by Duncan Heining (Scarecrow Press, 2010).
New York, NY
It
was May 1945, the war was still on, Bebop was at its height in New York
and George Russell and his two friends, Little Bird and Little Diz, had
just arrived in the city. With fifteen dollars in their collective
pocket, they faced a simple choice. Two of them could get a room but the
third was out on the streets. So, they moved into the Hotel Barada,
right behind the Apollo at 125th and 7th Ave. and Russell would sneak in
after dark to share the room. After a week the money had run down to
five dollars and, to make it last, they moved into a cheaper room at the
Braddock Hotel, on 134th St, one without windows. It was high summer,
which in New York is about as humid and sticky as it gets in the
Northern hemisphere, and Russell decided he would be more comfortable
sleeping in nearby Gracie Park.
It all sounds quite jolly, one of those experiences that was hell at the time but looking back was character-forming or something. The trio would eat at a local Catholic Mission for fifty cents but even that got too expensive.
What strikes about Russell's account, and that of others such as Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan, is the openness of that group. Bebop was a virtuoso music, rhythmically and harmonically adventurous and often played at breakneck tempos that discouraged all but the most confident and able. Yet, despite the cool, the hip vernacular, the drugs, the clothes and the attitude, all meant to exclude the straight world, genuine talent, black or white, was welcomed. As Russell said to this author, "The one entrée to the group was talent. So, people who later on were talented were welcomed." And musicians shared their ideas and knowledge, which was great for someone like the twenty-two year old mid-Westerner, as Russell told Ian Carr, "It didn't last but it was the prevailing feeling at the time, a feeling of great openness, you know."
Much of that spirit Russell attributes to Charlie Parker.
Although he had only been 'on the Street' a few months, Russell had by now met Miles Davis as well and by his account had been invited to join Charlie Parker's quintet on drums. That room on 48th was used by just about everyone playing the clubs around 52nd.
For some reason, Russell was unable to keep the apartment on 48th, probably because he could not make the rent. So, he moved in with a couple of other musicians who had a place over on the West side of Manhattan around the seventies. "We lived on cream of wheat every morning. We lived on Riverside Drive in a huge apartment but we didn't have any money. I remember laying out in the sun one day on Riverside Drive and this big [gurgling] in my chest started."
Russell had already been to the doctor with a nagging cough that had been diagnosed as a 'bad cold.' It was, however, his un-cured tuberculosis flaring up and that gurgling sensation was 'a haemorrhage coming on.' By now it was late summer of 1945. In just a few months, Russell had established himself within that group of musicians who were shaping the new Jazz but now he was really in a bad way. He was admitted to St. Joseph's Catholic Hospital in the Bronx and that was to be his home for the next 15 months. This time there was no private room and this time the nurses, mainly elderly nuns, reserved their hands for more strictly medical procedures. With fifteen chronically and critically ill men on the ward, Russell would turn over in his corner bed, face the wall and go deep inside his own thoughts. And that puzzle that Miles had set for him kept coming back to him.
In repeatedly playing these scales, it as if Russell was engaged in a scientific experiment, weighing notes against each other, examining sounds and tones in the most minute detail and testing their correspondence to each other. As he told Ian Carr, "And I finally decided that the major scale just doesn't cut it. It doesn't make it, you know. It doesn't sound a unity with its major chord. And then I began to look for reasons why it didn't. And then I found it wasn't a ladder of fifths. It wasn't a ladder of perfect fifths like the Lydian on the tonic because the Lydian did sound a unity. But the major scale always sounded this effortful feeling of striving for the tonic, striving to become a unity."
Russell then relates this to himself and his own sense of the world.
Apart from the diversion of occasional visits from Miles, Dizzy, Max and J.J. Johnson, Russell had little to do but continue his experiments with chords and scales. The only satisfactory way of describing Russell's breakthrough discovery is to allow him to tell it in his owns words, as he explained to Vivian Perlis.
In The Black Composer Speaks, Russell was asked what features of his music are uniquely 'black.' He replied these were the substitution of F# for F Natural and the conviction that the Lydian scale is "much more scientifically profound scale upon which to base a world of music." In relation to a question about the role of the black artist, he responded that it was to "show a new path to human evolution based upon his ancient high African Heritage." Russell had always been aware that what he was exploring was a different set of musical traditions that drew on Folk musics from around the world as opposed to the formalised musical structures of Western music. The point he is making above refers to his understanding of humanity's roots and origins in Africa, a point he would later make in interview with Ben Young of WKCR and even more eloquently in his work The African Game. What Russell is saying here is that the African-American brought with her/him a different set of musical ideas based on a different tradition and through Jazz and Blues gave those to America and the world. He is not making a political statement in any simplistic sense but is commenting on what he sees as the scientific basis of music and of his theories and their basis in natural world and the very origins of our species.
The scientific foundations of Russell's ideas are open to question. However, the approach he describes below and elsewhere of reading, studying and of experimenting musically, observing and reflecting is a scientific one. In terms of scientific research, this process would be described as inductive, that is observation leading to theorisation rather than deductive, which involves reasoning from a priori assumptions.
Grand theories, that is theories that make claims for comprehensiveness within a whole area such as Marx in Economics or Freud in Psychology, invite criticism. We will see later that Russell and his ideas have their critics. However, it suffices to note here that Russell was hearing something different in music, as well as hearing music differently. This led him to question the relationship, as traditionally understood, between chords and scales, between scales and their tonic, between different scales and how a musician or composer might move between these different scales in ways that challenged accepted notions of the antagonistic relationship between tonality and atonality.
As an aside, one of the other patients on the ward Russell befriended was Eddie Roane, the trumpeter who had played with Louis Jordan. Roane died of tuberculosis in Russell's arms. Russell was truly fortunate to survive. In fact, at one point, he recalls a priest coming to give him the last rites and shouting at him that he (Russell) was an atheist and to get lost.
We have already noted Campbell's identification of the 'Refusal of the Call' as an element within the Hero myth. Here it may be added that other aspects that he refers to are near death experiences, the inward journey and seeking of knowledge. (32) Once again, that does not make Russell's account inaccurate or mythical in itself. It may, however, mean that the construction or form of the tale has certain mythologized features to it. A more prosaic telling is actually no less remarkable. Had Russell not survived we would simply not have the Lydian Concept, Jazz would have missed out on his contribution to its development, music like All About Rosie and The African Game would have been denied to us and this book would not be written! Circumstances were such that Russell did survive and his achievements speak both of his efforts, then and later, and of our good fortune.
Russell came out of hospital around Xmas 1946 and went to stay with Max Roach and his family. Keeping track of Russell's living arrangements from the late forties into the early fifties is a demanding activity in itself. However, for much of the next period he lived variously with Roach or at one point with Roach's mother. Living conditions were quite squalid according to Russell but he is still grateful for Roach's support and generosity. He was in all respects treated as a member of the family.
Premiered at Carnegie Hall at a concert promoted by British-born critic Leonard Feather on 29th September 1947, Russell conducted Dizzy Gillespie's Big Band in front of a sell-out crowd. Charlie Parker played with Gillespie in a quintet at the same gig but sat in the audience for Russell, Gillespie and Pozo's number, and also for John Lewis}' Toccata for Trumpet. Ella Fitzgerald also sang with Gillespie and as Down Beat's headline put it—"Despite Bad Acoustics, Gillespie Concert Offers Some Excellent Music." Its critic Michael Levin saw Cubano Be, Cubano Bop as a definite 'stand-out,' writing,
The African-American contingent in the audience, however, were embarrassed by this. Looking back on the incident, Russell identifies this as a consequence of the way black people were taught to be ashamed of their culture and later in his conversation with Ian Carr, he relates this directly to a process of ethnocentricity that is 'literally messing up the planet.'
Whatever the audience's reaction, Cubano Be Cubano Bop was Russell's first significant contribution to Jazz composition and it remains a marvellous piece and, as Gillespie has noted, a wonderful collaborative effort. "That was a collaboration. That was a collaboration of all three. I think that was the most successful collaboration I've ever seen with three people. I can see what I wrote. I can see what George wrote and I can see the contribution of Chano Pozo and then George Russell came back and spread out what I had written and what Chano had done." The fact that these three, potentially, disparate elements hang together so well, is a tribute to Russell, as Gillespie appears to acknowledge in that last sentence.
Recorded in the studio on 22nd December 1947, it remains a highly symphonic work, with 'harshly incantatory ensemble passages,' 'its juxtaposition of very different textures and types of motion' and the 'disconcertedly independent of convention' ways it used the 'Jazz orchestra's resources.' As Max Harrison has noted, "It is consistent but accords with laws then unfamiliar..." Ingrid Monson's detailed analysis of the piece in the International Dictionary Of Black Composers is also well worth reading by students of music. Her final paragraph, however, suffices for our purposes.
Learn more about George Russell: The Story of an American Composer. © 2010, Duncan Heining. All rights reserved by Scarecrow Press.
It all sounds quite jolly, one of those experiences that was hell at the time but looking back was character-forming or something. The trio would eat at a local Catholic Mission for fifty cents but even that got too expensive.
"In the days I would go to one of Mrs. Kramer.... There was a woman, who owned several hotels in New York and she featured the Big Bands you know. She had nice washrooms. I'd go there to wash up."
And,
"Mrs. Kramer was a lady who owned some big hotels in town, and what she must have thought of people like me, down-and-outers, who would use those lovely lush bathrooms. So, you could stay clean, scrape a little here and there and eat at the automat. About the third night, I began to realise that I wasn't up for this kind of adventure for too long."Back in Ohio, it must have been late 1942 or more likely 1943, Russell had gone to Dayton to see the Ellington Band. Several of the musicians could not find a hotel, due to 'colour bar' problems, and so Russell invited Ray Nance, Betty Roche, Al Hibbler and Skippy Williams to stay at his home with the redoubtable and always welcoming Bessie.
"And Skippy said, 'If you're ever down and out in New York, give me a call.' That's what I did. He said, 'George, I remember you, come on over.' I stayed with him, and took my arrangement of New World over to Dizzy. He said, 'I'm glad to get this because I'm starting a big band now, I'll try this.' They tried it and Dizzy gave me like $25 or $30. I sold this arrangement to just about everybody!"In fact, Russell has telescoped events slightly here. By other accounts that he has given, to Ian Carr and this author for example, he had by that point met up with Max Roach. The drummer seems to have 'adopted' Russell as a protégé and introduced him to Bird, Diz and everyone on 'The Street.' As he once said, "When I was in New York with Skippy, I don't know what got into Max because, he didn't have to do but he introduced me to everybody as an arranger." It was Roach's introduction and the credibility that went with the title that provided Russell with the opportunity to sell Gillespie New World and, as Russell remembers, "it was kind of my passport into the group of musicians that were doing this fantastic.... that were part of this incredible revolution."
What strikes about Russell's account, and that of others such as Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan, is the openness of that group. Bebop was a virtuoso music, rhythmically and harmonically adventurous and often played at breakneck tempos that discouraged all but the most confident and able. Yet, despite the cool, the hip vernacular, the drugs, the clothes and the attitude, all meant to exclude the straight world, genuine talent, black or white, was welcomed. As Russell said to this author, "The one entrée to the group was talent. So, people who later on were talented were welcomed." And musicians shared their ideas and knowledge, which was great for someone like the twenty-two year old mid-Westerner, as Russell told Ian Carr, "It didn't last but it was the prevailing feeling at the time, a feeling of great openness, you know."
Much of that spirit Russell attributes to Charlie Parker.
"I don't know what the cause of that was particularly but, one thing, it was like Charlie Parker was the centre of that. And I think it was his spirit, and generous spirit, that encouraged very much this community feeling around what was happening mainly because of him."The money from selling New World was enough to get Russell his own room. "With the money, I moved to my own place on 48th near 6th Avenue, just one room. There's all these guys working the Street, nobody had thought to rent a room or anything. I had Bird in my room, well, a lot of other people too. The landlady was going crazy. She said, 'I don't like all of those strange people coming in here.' I said, 'They're just like me.' [Laughs] I think she didn't know I was black or something."
Although he had only been 'on the Street' a few months, Russell had by now met Miles Davis as well and by his account had been invited to join Charlie Parker's quintet on drums. That room on 48th was used by just about everyone playing the clubs around 52nd.
"Bird used to ask me, 'George, do you want some of this?' I said, 'Bird, I don't think I can take it.' He said, 'Okay.' I knew that people like Fats Navarro talented people losing 100 pounds in weight and just getting eaten up from the inside with these drugs and Bird himself. Dizzy stayed pretty free of that, though. I just knew that I didn't have the stamina to take that. Something wanted more of me than to just come have a nice time, an interesting time for half a life and die."Russell did, however, drink quite heavily during the forties and fifties. He was never an alcoholic but attitudes to drink were somewhat different back then. According to Russell's wife Alice, he told her that he would open a fifth of scotch in the morning and drink his way through it during the day. In the evening, he would go to a club and drink some more. He also smoked a pipe despite his having had TB. Again, the association between tobacco and health problems was less accepted then. And Russell also enjoyed smoking 'pot.' Dwight McPheeters remembers a car ride up to Harlem with Russell and some other guys.
"I remember when I was going to Photo School in New York, George asked me if I wanted to go up Minton's Playhouse and, so, I said, 'yes.' So, I jumped in this car with George and about three or four other guys and it was really cold and they had all the windows shut. Even with all these guys in the car and the car would heat up with all these bodies in it but they wanted the windows shut. The reason why they wanted the windows shut was because they didn't want the smell of pot to get out onto the street. George asked me, 'You coppin'?' I said, 'Uh, uh!' I got a big headache out of it, that's all, so I never got into pot. I smoked a lot of cigarettes in my life but I tried smoking pot once but it did nothing for me."Russell seems to have hit it off particularly well with Miles, although the trumpeter was three years his junior and, though still a student at Juilliard, was playing in Charlie Parker's quintet at night. "Miles and I hit it off really good. He'd invite me to get a one room apartment, in the West 90's or something, and we'd sit down and play chords. He liked my harmonic sense and I loved his harmonic sense and we tried to see what kind of chords we'd come up." It was in the course of one visit to Miles' apartment and one such conversation that Russell discovered his course in life. Russell has told this story so many times over the years. It has become one of those little legends or myths, true though it may be, that life and Jazz thrives upon, almost acquiring a Zen-like truth, a story that encapsulates something universal.
"We were having a session, you know, where musicians trade off ideas. He'd play a chord, 'How do you like that?' 'I like that' I played some chords and he, I think, he liked my harmonic sense and, of course, he was extraordinary you know. But I said, 'What's your aim musically, what do you really wanna do?' And he said, 'I wanna learn all the changes.'"Knowing that Miles was already a highly gifted melodic improviser, whose grasp of the changes was second to no-one, the trumpeter had presented Russell with a paradox. "I think everybody then who knew about Miles knew he knew how to play the changes. So, it occurred to me to look for a new way to relate to chords."
For some reason, Russell was unable to keep the apartment on 48th, probably because he could not make the rent. So, he moved in with a couple of other musicians who had a place over on the West side of Manhattan around the seventies. "We lived on cream of wheat every morning. We lived on Riverside Drive in a huge apartment but we didn't have any money. I remember laying out in the sun one day on Riverside Drive and this big [gurgling] in my chest started."
Russell had already been to the doctor with a nagging cough that had been diagnosed as a 'bad cold.' It was, however, his un-cured tuberculosis flaring up and that gurgling sensation was 'a haemorrhage coming on.' By now it was late summer of 1945. In just a few months, Russell had established himself within that group of musicians who were shaping the new Jazz but now he was really in a bad way. He was admitted to St. Joseph's Catholic Hospital in the Bronx and that was to be his home for the next 15 months. This time there was no private room and this time the nurses, mainly elderly nuns, reserved their hands for more strictly medical procedures. With fifteen chronically and critically ill men on the ward, Russell would turn over in his corner bed, face the wall and go deep inside his own thoughts. And that puzzle that Miles had set for him kept coming back to him.
"I went to the hospital at 143rd and Brook Avenue, St. Joseph's, and it was a very dreary Catholic hospital. At the first opportunity I got a chance, it was a room with fifteen patients, I got a chance to get a bed in a corner where I had no one next to me, at least on one side and made a little cosy pad for myself, and then focused on what Miles had said—he'd wanted to learn all the changes. So, I had a lot of time in bed to think about it. In the meantime, they are coming and visiting me, Dizzy, Miles, Max, which was nice, and J. J. I reasoned that if there just could be a scale that sounded, projected the sound of a chord and not in the way the major scale projects the sound of a C major chord. The scale of an almost harmonic unity. This idea just stayed with me, it wouldn't go away, that there was a scale that was closer to the sound of the chord than any other scale."The first six months involved complete bed rest, but as Russell told Ian Carr,
"Traditional music (theory) gave us the key signature and from this arbitrary key signature it build chords up from the tonic. I had a feeling that there must be another way to approach playing chordally, that's all. And the first impression, I got was that for every chord there had to be a scale that sounded [ ] a unity with that chord and that more so than any other scale it projected the sound of that chord."After those six months, Russell was able to get up and at first he used the piano in the solarium to test his ideas. Unfortunately, for the other patients who had nowhere else to go, those experiments involved fairly interminable explorations of the C Major Chord, the C Major Scale and the latter with a raised fourth. After a couple of days of this, the patients revolted and started hurling the remains of the lunchtime meal and their loved ones' gifts of grapes and other fruit in Russell's direction. Fortunately, one of the sisters of mercy came to his, or rather his fellow patients' aid and moved him into the library where he could experiment to his heart's desire.
In repeatedly playing these scales, it as if Russell was engaged in a scientific experiment, weighing notes against each other, examining sounds and tones in the most minute detail and testing their correspondence to each other. As he told Ian Carr, "And I finally decided that the major scale just doesn't cut it. It doesn't make it, you know. It doesn't sound a unity with its major chord. And then I began to look for reasons why it didn't. And then I found it wasn't a ladder of fifths. It wasn't a ladder of perfect fifths like the Lydian on the tonic because the Lydian did sound a unity. But the major scale always sounded this effortful feeling of striving for the tonic, striving to become a unity."
Russell then relates this to himself and his own sense of the world.
"And that had something to do with, in a way, this feeling that had always bothered me about life, you know, is that I was having to adopt a way of being and a way of thinking that was put on me by the church, by education, you know that didn't conform to my essence."Obviously, we all reinterpret and re-articulate our experiences in the light of a changing understanding. As Russell acknowledges, "I didn't make any philosophical associations with it early on but I was very curious that the Lydian Scale was a ladder of fifths and the major scale wasn't." It is a human quality that 'knowledge,' in particular those things we discover for ourselves, seems to resonate continually and acquire new and deeper meanings for us over time through the process of reflection.
Apart from the diversion of occasional visits from Miles, Dizzy, Max and J.J. Johnson, Russell had little to do but continue his experiments with chords and scales. The only satisfactory way of describing Russell's breakthrough discovery is to allow him to tell it in his owns words, as he explained to Vivian Perlis.
"Finally, I realized that because of the first four tones of the C major scale, the C major scale could in no way be in unity with that C major chord because of the Do-Re-Mi and Fa, Fa itself was a Do. That doesn't sound Do, a 'C' Do, that sounds the Fa Do. But what led me to play the G major scale was that the second tetra chord of C major scale is G-A-B-C, and that does sound C. The following tetra chord in G is D-E-F#-G, and that at least resolves to a tone that is in the C major chord. So, it led me to say well, let's try the G major scale. As I said, I began to accept the G major scale as actually sounding closer to the tonality of a C major chord than the C major scale. The problem, thinking practically, how can I tell musicians if you see a C major chord, play a G major scale. So, then I began to understand that the first mode of the G major scale the Ionian, playing that with the chord presented this problem of having musicians playing a G major scale. Then the Dorian, the same problem, kind of. Then the Phrygian, finally the Lydian—C-D-E-F#-G-A-B. I said, I don't care what anybody says, this isn't just the Lydian mode of the G major scale, this is the C Lydian scale, the closest scale to the C major chord."Aside from Russell's explanation of the Concept, he makes two additional side-points. The first focuses on his understanding that the Concept challenged traditional thinking; it was, if not new knowledge, knowledge that had been lost. The second point, indicates his reluctance to tell the world of his discovery. In this context, he doubted, understandably, that a black man would be taken seriously in presenting such a challenge to Western musical theory and the institutions upon which it is based. Without questioning either the issues for a black man in a racist society in facing such a challenge, the reader may be interested to note that Joseph Campbell in his examination of the 'hero myth' (see The Hero With A Thousand Faces 1993) refers to this process at some length and calls it 'Refusal of the Call.'
In The Black Composer Speaks, Russell was asked what features of his music are uniquely 'black.' He replied these were the substitution of F# for F Natural and the conviction that the Lydian scale is "much more scientifically profound scale upon which to base a world of music." In relation to a question about the role of the black artist, he responded that it was to "show a new path to human evolution based upon his ancient high African Heritage." Russell had always been aware that what he was exploring was a different set of musical traditions that drew on Folk musics from around the world as opposed to the formalised musical structures of Western music. The point he is making above refers to his understanding of humanity's roots and origins in Africa, a point he would later make in interview with Ben Young of WKCR and even more eloquently in his work The African Game. What Russell is saying here is that the African-American brought with her/him a different set of musical ideas based on a different tradition and through Jazz and Blues gave those to America and the world. He is not making a political statement in any simplistic sense but is commenting on what he sees as the scientific basis of music and of his theories and their basis in natural world and the very origins of our species.
The scientific foundations of Russell's ideas are open to question. However, the approach he describes below and elsewhere of reading, studying and of experimenting musically, observing and reflecting is a scientific one. In terms of scientific research, this process would be described as inductive, that is observation leading to theorisation rather than deductive, which involves reasoning from a priori assumptions.
"So, I began reading a little bit, books, and I found that the interval of the fifth in the overtone series is the first biased interval. Strike the fundamental, the next overtone is the fundamental an octave above and the third partial is an interval of a fifth and the tonic of an interval of a fifth, if anyone, no-one in the world would agree that it wasn't the lower note. If you build a ladder of continual fifths you don't get C-G-D-A-E-B-F (natural), you get C-G-D-A-E-B-F#. You get the Pythagorean, the start of the Pythagorean twelve tone ladder of fifths. So, that was the day when I said, a ladder of fifths confirms the Lydian scale as the scale of unity for that tonic chord.The rest of the time in the hospital was spent examining the modes of the Lydian scale and finding out what I call were their principal chords, what were the most highly evolved harmonic chords that they produced within the context of the Lydian scale and so the D7 chord—D-F#-A-C-E-G-B is the highest evolved principal chord so in my thinking the seven chord is not the dominant five it's the two chord of the Lydian scale. Each mode produces its own principal scale. Beside the Lydian, there is the 'Lydian augmented' that gives us all of the augmented chords, C-D-E-F#-G#-A-B, which gave the scale its name. Then the 'Lydian diminished' C-D-E flat-F#-G-A-B which furnishes the diminished chords with the Lydian itself producing major on I, seventh on II, minor on VI, and that scale being a complete unity with those chords."
Grand theories, that is theories that make claims for comprehensiveness within a whole area such as Marx in Economics or Freud in Psychology, invite criticism. We will see later that Russell and his ideas have their critics. However, it suffices to note here that Russell was hearing something different in music, as well as hearing music differently. This led him to question the relationship, as traditionally understood, between chords and scales, between scales and their tonic, between different scales and how a musician or composer might move between these different scales in ways that challenged accepted notions of the antagonistic relationship between tonality and atonality.
As an aside, one of the other patients on the ward Russell befriended was Eddie Roane, the trumpeter who had played with Louis Jordan. Roane died of tuberculosis in Russell's arms. Russell was truly fortunate to survive. In fact, at one point, he recalls a priest coming to give him the last rites and shouting at him that he (Russell) was an atheist and to get lost.
We have already noted Campbell's identification of the 'Refusal of the Call' as an element within the Hero myth. Here it may be added that other aspects that he refers to are near death experiences, the inward journey and seeking of knowledge. (32) Once again, that does not make Russell's account inaccurate or mythical in itself. It may, however, mean that the construction or form of the tale has certain mythologized features to it. A more prosaic telling is actually no less remarkable. Had Russell not survived we would simply not have the Lydian Concept, Jazz would have missed out on his contribution to its development, music like All About Rosie and The African Game would have been denied to us and this book would not be written! Circumstances were such that Russell did survive and his achievements speak both of his efforts, then and later, and of our good fortune.
Russell came out of hospital around Xmas 1946 and went to stay with Max Roach and his family. Keeping track of Russell's living arrangements from the late forties into the early fifties is a demanding activity in itself. However, for much of the next period he lived variously with Roach or at one point with Roach's mother. Living conditions were quite squalid according to Russell but he is still grateful for Roach's support and generosity. He was in all respects treated as a member of the family.
"Well, when I got out of the hospital, Max invited me to stay in Brooklyn with him and I stayed at his house on Monroe Street for about nine months. And it was back there, when you got out of hospital, there was a programme in place run by the New York Welfare Department where you got subsidised and they even sent you to school or something. It's through that programme that I started to study with Stefan Wolpe in New York. But they took care of the.... you know paying Mrs. Roach for my lodging and food. And so when I hear people put down the welfare system, you know, I think that's ridiculous because I know I'm a product of that."Stefan Wolpe was a German socialist composer who had worked with Hans Eisler in the workers music movement and who fled his homeland in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution both as a socialist and a Jew. Having studied with Webern in Vienna, he went first to Palestine and then in 1938 to New York. As a teacher, friend or colleague, Wolpe was a huge influence on the whole post-war generation of American composers, including Elliott Carter, John Cage (who was president of the Stefan Wolpe society at one point), Morton Feldman and Milton Babitt. Saxophonist Johnny Carisi, arranger Eddie Sauter, clarinetist Tony Scott and Elmer Bernstein also studied with him. What Russell drew from him was both the older man's life experience and his knowledge of contemporary music theory.
"He knew I was a kid who didn't know much about anything and didn't know a lot about life. My interest was in talking to him chiefly about life, but I wanted to know his principal concepts of music. The two things that impressed me, that caused me to think in a new way, were his theory of the rate of chromatic circulation as a means of destroying any tonical integrity and the principle of the thirdless sound."In fact, Russell is quite specific in identifying the Jazz Workshop album, Lydian M-1 and All About Rosie as examples of compositions that used Wolpe's ideas and influence. Along with a host of other composers and musicians, Russell provided his comments for a centennial memorial publication for Wolpe. Even allowing for the fact that such remarks are invariably fulsome in their praise of the dear departed, Russell's final words are quite touching and seem to reflect very genuinely what the young man found in Wolpe at a more personal level.
"Wolpe's overall effect on me was immensely positive. I felt a living, breathing force in this man that was extremely life-positive. You couldn't be around him without that force entering you. To that extent Wolpe and the two principles that stuck with me and his forceful being are part of me now, and they always have been, and always will be. He's alive in those of us that he touched."Despite being introduced by Roach to his peers as 'an arranger,' his only contribution to the city's music had been the piece he had written back in Cincinnati in hospital and had sold at least four or five times already. It was certainly too early for his Lydian Concept to have achieved anything other than 'work in progress' status. A pattern had already emerged where Russell would compose only when he had someone or something to write for. Otherwise his work would from this point on focus on the Concept. Now out of hospital, Russell was about to produce something that would cement his reputation even outside the Bebop inner circle.
"Dizzy approached me one day and he said, that he was getting very interested in Afro-Cuban drumming and music and there was this wonderful drummer in town, Chano Pozo, and he had a theme and maybe it would be possible for me to put a suite around it, you know, encompass it in a suite. And it was a beautiful theme. So, it didn't take long for me to get the idea of what to do with it and the whole introduction then was modal."The use of modes had been around in Jazz and in other musical forms for ages. However, what Russell did with Cubano Be, Cubano Bop was to use modes consciously and through this and his subsequent work, both as a theorist and as a composer, he made the Jazz community aware of modes and their potential in Jazz. Also, as he himself put it, "It was the first application of modality using the Concept. The Cubano Be, Cubano Bop thing sort of got the reputation rolling."
Premiered at Carnegie Hall at a concert promoted by British-born critic Leonard Feather on 29th September 1947, Russell conducted Dizzy Gillespie's Big Band in front of a sell-out crowd. Charlie Parker played with Gillespie in a quintet at the same gig but sat in the audience for Russell, Gillespie and Pozo's number, and also for John Lewis}' Toccata for Trumpet. Ella Fitzgerald also sang with Gillespie and as Down Beat's headline put it—"Despite Bad Acoustics, Gillespie Concert Offers Some Excellent Music." Its critic Michael Levin saw Cubano Be, Cubano Bop as a definite 'stand-out,' writing,
"The crowd unquestionably liked the Cubano Bop number with its added bongo and congo (sic) drum soloists the best, illustrating a point the Beat has often made that there is much Jazz can pick up on from the South American and Afro-Cuban rhythm styles."After Carnegie Hall, the band took the show up to Boston Symphony Hall and Russell travelled with the band. He recalls that Chano Pozo was sitting at the back and began this African chanting. "I said, 'Dizzy, you know, you should open the whole middle section up, bring Chano out front, let him do this.' We built a whole thing out of it, you know."
The African-American contingent in the audience, however, were embarrassed by this. Looking back on the incident, Russell identifies this as a consequence of the way black people were taught to be ashamed of their culture and later in his conversation with Ian Carr, he relates this directly to a process of ethnocentricity that is 'literally messing up the planet.'
"The black people in the audience were very noticeable because they started to laugh when Chano came out on stage in his native costume. It's like Louis (Armstrong) when they sent him to Africa, you know. Louis said, 'Damn, these people really do climb trees like monkeys.'" [laughing]Whilst it is hard to know how far Russell and Gillespie articulated to themselves at the time their purpose in including this section in the performance, it does seem that their intention was to celebrate African-ness and the origins of Jazz. In a way, and several decades before Afro-centrism emerged as an important element in American education, it was clearly an attempt to say to an audience, this is something special and something of which we should be proud. It was an early attempt to take a stereotype and transform it by framing it in a positive rather than negative context. In that sense, it links with Russell's disagreement with his friend Dwight over his playing Aunt Jemima in their school play Gone With The Wind.
Whatever the audience's reaction, Cubano Be Cubano Bop was Russell's first significant contribution to Jazz composition and it remains a marvellous piece and, as Gillespie has noted, a wonderful collaborative effort. "That was a collaboration. That was a collaboration of all three. I think that was the most successful collaboration I've ever seen with three people. I can see what I wrote. I can see what George wrote and I can see the contribution of Chano Pozo and then George Russell came back and spread out what I had written and what Chano had done." The fact that these three, potentially, disparate elements hang together so well, is a tribute to Russell, as Gillespie appears to acknowledge in that last sentence.
Recorded in the studio on 22nd December 1947, it remains a highly symphonic work, with 'harshly incantatory ensemble passages,' 'its juxtaposition of very different textures and types of motion' and the 'disconcertedly independent of convention' ways it used the 'Jazz orchestra's resources.' As Max Harrison has noted, "It is consistent but accords with laws then unfamiliar..." Ingrid Monson's detailed analysis of the piece in the International Dictionary Of Black Composers is also well worth reading by students of music. Her final paragraph, however, suffices for our purposes.
"Fifty years after its first performance, Cubano Be, Cubano Bop, remains a model of innovative writing for Big Band. Its collaborative genesis, a synthesis of Afro-Cuban rhythms and Bebop and its imaginative use of modes 12 years before the emergence of the term 'modal Jazz,' collectively explain why George Russell must be included in the first rank of composers writing for Jazz orchestra."Anyone doubting the significant advance represented by this piece should hear it followed by Gillespie and Pozo's Manteca, written around that time and in a similar vein. However well this stands on its own, compared to Cubano Be, Cubano Bop it sounds frankly ordinary.
Learn more about George Russell: The Story of an American Composer. © 2010, Duncan Heining. All rights reserved by Scarecrow Press.
http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-george-russell29-2009jul29-story.html
George Russell, a composer, educator and theorist who had a powerful
effect on the jazz forms and methods that have evolved from the 1950s to
the present, has died. He was 86.
A MacArthur Foundation Award winner, a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and a Distinguished Artist-in-Residence Emeritus at the New England Conservatory, where he taught for 35 years, Russell died Monday in Boston of complications from Alzheimer's disease.
A MacArthur Foundation Award winner, a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master and a Distinguished Artist-in-Residence Emeritus at the New England Conservatory, where he taught for 35 years, Russell died Monday in Boston of complications from Alzheimer's disease.
FOR THE RECORD:
George Russell obituary: The obituary of jazz composer George Russell in Wednesday's Section A said that among his survivors was a son, Millgardh. His son's name is Jock Millgardh. —
Russell was a rare spokesman for the study of theoretical principles in an art form that emphasizes improvisation and spontaneity. His treatise “The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization” -- first published in 1953 -- had a significant effect on the growing fascination with modal and free improvisation surfacing in the late 1950s. Elements of the concept, which outlines methods by which improvisers can free themselves from the "tyranny of chords," as Russell described it, were a factor in the modal works present in Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue," the bestselling album in jazz history.
Russell's premise that jazz improvisation could reach beyond well-established harmonic foundations further validated the methods chosen by jazz artists such as John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Don Ellis, Wayne Shorter and others. His own compositions -- beginning with the startlingly inventive music on his mid-1950s breakthrough recording, "The Jazz Workshop," continuing with his small groups of the '60s, occasional large ensembles of the '80s, and the Living Time Orchestra that he led on and off until his death -- were constantly evolving displays of the expansive possibilities of his creative overview.
"My work," he told The Times after the MacArthur grant was awarded in 1989, "tries to achieve a kind of world view or synthesis of many kinds of musics, one that doesn't ignore the sounds of our time. My hope is that it's a complete music -- physical, emotional as well as thought-provoking."
George Allen Russell was born June 23, 1923, in Cincinnati, the adopted son of Joseph, a chef on the B&O Railroad, and Bessie, a nurse. Drawn to music at an early age, he sang a number with Fats Waller at age 7 and played drums in a Boy Scout drum and bugle corps. After receiving a scholarship to Wilberforce University, he was called up for the World War II draft. But when tuberculosis was diagnosed in his examination, he was hospitalized, serendipitously with a fellow patient who instructed him in the fundamentals of music theory.
Briefly working as a jazz drummer after his release, Russell decided to explore other areas of music after hearing Max Roach play the drums, and wound up in New York City. By the mid-1940s, he had become part of an adventurous group of young musicians -- Davis, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, John Benson Brooks among them -- who frequented Gil Evan's West Side apartment. Told by Davis that he wanted to "learn all the changes," Russell interpreted the remark as a quest to find new ways to approach harmony, and he began to work on his Lydian Concept. Applying the principles he was discovering, he composed "Cubana Be/Cubana Bop" -- early examples of the blending of jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms -- for Dizzy Gillespie's big band.
In the 1950s, while still supporting himself with odd jobs, he wrote and recorded "The Jazz Workshop" album, which -- combined with the publication of the Lydian Concept -- thoroughly established his credibility as a jazz artist. A commission from the Brandeis Jazz Festival followed, along with the large ensemble album, "New York, New York," which showcased Russell compositions performed by an all-star assemblage that included Coltrane, Bill Evans, Jon Hendricks and others.
Russell led his own sextets in the 1960s, but by mid-decade, the music industry's turn toward rock music had diminished the employment potential for jazz players. He moved to Sweden until 1969, then returned to teach at the New England Conservatory.
A second volume of his Lydian Concept -- "The Art and Science of Tonal Gravity" -- was published in 2001.
He is survived by his wife, Alice; a son, Millgardh; and three grandchildren.
Heckman is a freelance writer.
news.obits@latimes.com
George Russell: the composer who thought outside the box
Sixty years after his revolutionary methods began transforming jazz,
composer George Russell is still inspiring your musicians, writes John Fordham.
American composer and orchestra leader George Russell (1923-2009)
performs at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Hague, the Netherlands on
12 July 1987. Photograph: Frans Schellekens/Redferns
When composer George Russell died in 2009, plenty of the world’s musicians and listeners remained indifferent to his achievements - or were still scratching their heads about them - close on 60 years after his revolutionary methods began transforming jazz. But plenty of others - Ornette Coleman and Jan Garbarek among them - knew exactly why he mattered. Russell didn’t believe that European music theory, with its roots in the major/minor scale system, and the cadential "urge" of its seven notes toward resolutions, could say much that was useful about jazz. So he shifted the emphasis from cadences and chords to the drifting modes of an updated medieval church music, to notions of "ingoing and outgoing" or "gravitational pull" rather than "tension and resolution".
His work inspired the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Gil Evans and Ornette Coleman, and it inspires new artists still - including young US saxophonist John O’Gallagher, a developer of Russell’s theories who has applied jazz improv to serialist composer Anton Webern’s music, and who plays Birmingham and London next week. O’Gallagher’s pianist will be London-based composer and teacher Hans Koller, himself a student of the Russell approach who nonetheless admits that first contact with it can just seem "too weird, super-confusing. We learn piano in the key of C, but with Russell, everything’s a fourth away from where it should be. But the more you get into it, you hear the beauty in it. You can use all 12 notes, the black notes and the white, as long as you have structures, and he offered those."
Russell first published his Lydian Concept of Chromatic Organisation in 1953, and its influence soon spread. Kind of Blue’s So What has two modes replacing a chord sequence. Russell’s All About Rosie has one pentatonic mode superimposed on another, and that idea of bi-modality was central to Coltrane’s later music. When Jan Garbarek, at 19, began being mentored by Russell, he realised he could tap into his own Norwegian folk music this way, using its pentatonic modes. "So rather than a constant urge to cadence, the western idea that the next thing has to keep happening quickly," Koller continues, "you can stay in one colour as long as you want, then move to another. Russell thought of a mode as colour rather than a function - or as colour on top of function, because the beauty of it is that you can combine this approach and a jazz-standards one, and have the best of both worlds. That’s why this doesn’t turn into contemporary-classical music, but keeps the jazz earthiness, in jazz you don’t throw anything out, whereas the contemporary-classical guys wanted to remove things that had been there before. And that’s why it’s liberating, and why I love jazz more than anything else."
The NBC TV show The Subject Is Jazz caught Russell at work just as his message was beginning to be heard by likeminded musicians - five minutes into a 1958 edition of the show, he appears on some of his classic themes with pianist Bill Evans, trumpeter Art Farmer and others, representing The Future of Jazz.
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/377/
News About this Fellow
March 26, 2014
The Guardian
George Russell , 1989 MacArthur Fellow
July 29, 2009
The New York Times
George Russell , 1989 MacArthur Fellow
July 29, 2009
George Russell , 1989 MacArthur Fellow
https://necmusic.edu/faculty/george-russell
George Russell
- Jazz Studies
For almost 40 years, every jazz student at NEC was exposed to Russell’s music and ideas, even if they did not work with him directly as a studio teacher. Up to his retirement, Russell spent almost every spring semester with the players of the NEC Jazz Orchestra, studying and rehearsing his music for a traditional end-of-semester concert. Due to the aleatory elements in Russell’s music, this nuanced composer/performer experience prepared generations of NEC alumni to be uniquely qualified interpreters of these large-scale works.
A hugely influential, innovative figure in the evolution of modern jazz, Russell was one of its greatest composers, and its most important theorist. His 1953 book The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization is credited as a great pathbreaker into modal music, as pioneered by Miles Davis and John Coltrane. His second volume on the Lydian Concept, The Art and Science of Tonal Gravity, was published in 2001. All of the music’s most important developments—from modal improvisation to electronics, African polyrhythms to free form, atonality to jazz rock—have taken cues from Russell’s pioneering work.
Russell's Living Time Orchestra has performed throughout the world, including the Barbican Centre and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the Festival d’Automne and Cîté de la Musique in Paris, and Tokyo Music Joy. His career as a leader is preserved on more than 30 recordings, including work with such musicians as Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, and Jan Garbarek.
Among Russell's awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, the NEA American Jazz Master Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, six NEA grants, three Grammy nominations, the American Music Award, the British Jazz Award, the Kennedy Center Living Jazz Legend Award, the Swedish Jazz Federation Lifetime Achievement Award, and election to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. NEC bestowed an honorary Doctor of Music degree on George Russell in 2005.
Russell's commissions include the British Council, Swedish Broadcasting, the Glasgow International Festival, the Barbican Centre, and the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. He taught throughout the world, and was a guest conductor for Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, German, and Italian radio. Russell has been the subject of documentaries by NPR, NHK Japan, Swedish Broadcasting, and the BBC.
in photo: George Russell conducts in NEC's Jordan Hall in 2003 as part of celebration of Jordan Hall centennial (photo by Tom Fitzsimmons)
For further reference
2011-11-08
Read NEC's press release following the death of George Russell.More about George Russell.
http://www.furious.com/perfect/georgerussell.html
GEORGE RUSSELL
interview by Jason Gross
(April 2014)
Even though he had over two dozen albums to his name, history is going to remember jazz pianist/composer/arranger George Russell for something other than the music that he made. Instead, Russell's 1953 book The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization is what history will remember him for and he knew that. There, Russell made the radical leap in music theory to ditch chords for scales, finding there was a great freedom to this new way of seeing and making music. Later in the decade, his theories led to modal music that Miles Davis and John Coltrane embraced on their own recordings. Amassing not only a MacArthur Genius grant but also more than one Guggenheim fellowships among his awards, Russell was a restless soul who not only keep his own band going (the Living Time Orchestra) through the 1980's but was also working on a second volume of his book right up to his death on July 27, 2009.
Several years before that, hanks to master jazz scribe Gary Giddins, who was then a columnist and editor at Village Voice, I was lucky enough to get an assignment for the paper's Jazz Supplement to cover Russell and his career. I met up with him at his downtown apartment in January 2003 with his wife Alice in attendance. She warmed me beforehand about doing the interview- ‘you'll have to speak up when you talk to him- he's spent years on bandstands' (indeed, I had to repeat some questions to him, even when sitting next to him). When speaking to Russell himself, he had his own cautionary note for me. ‘I have to apologize for these lapses between thoughts. I got a lot up here,' he said, pointing to his head.
He wasn't kidding either. I tried mightily to keep up with him as he described the genesis of his theory and its development over the years. The second volume of his book was something that he had been working on for years, promising that it would include ‘more examples' of his theory and analyze all types of music with it. He was very proud of the book, keeping a copy there at his side, noting that it was ‘what I had to show for my life' as he pointed to it.
I also couldn't resist asking him about the ‘Lincoln Center incident' in 1992 where they bristled at him using an electric bass in his work for a 70th birthday performance. He called the whole thing ‘frivolous' and noted that he wasn't interesting in articles/publications or the radio. Instead, he said that he just wanted to focus on ‘finding new ideas.'
When I asked him about his legacy, as I wrote in my article, he replied:
"I'd hope that what I've done with the concept would be remembered as my gift. And that it did work. And that I was someone on the side of unity and that I bring music closer to unity."The Voice article came out in June 2003 and Russell told me that he appreciated my piece. While the article only included a handful of quotes from our interview, I wanted to present the full interview itself to let Russell tell the story of his work and career in detail himself.
PSF: If you were to describe your theory to a layman, what would say about it?
GR: You can think of it as this- you're going down the river in a local steamboat. The towns along that river (are) chords. The boat would stop at each chord. The captain would have some melody that caused the genre of the chord to be heard as such. Continuing down the river, that's the way the melody would be received. Each town has its own sound. The captain, let's call him... John Coltrane. (laughs) If you think of his famous solo on "Giant Steps." He's stopping at every chord/town along that river. (He's) playing a melody that centers the listener right on that chord/town. Then to the next one. That's the way he gets down the river. Lester Young got down the river in a faster, express boat. It did not stop at each chord/town. It stopped only at the larger cities. He had to depend more on time. Forward movement, time itself to make that journey. But he would sound a melody for the listener, over a number of chord towns that center on the... might call it the final, to which those chord towns resolve.
PSF: So it's a destination then?
GR: Yes, that's right. Immediately, he's sending a message that these four/five chord/towns are final and he goes down the river, stopping at those larger cities.
PSF: After you work and published this theory, did you see your work as a break from the tradition of bebop?
GR: It doesn't fight anything. What I was looking for is how melody behaves. At first, you might say how it behaves in a jazz sense. Lester Young didn't mind choosing a final chord, a larger chord town in which the smaller towns resolves. Coleman Hawkins represented another school- he was an originator of what I'd call vertical playing. He and Lester were each indicating tonal center. With one, the river was the tonal center, the other was a final chord, a major and minor one.
PSF: So you see the theory as a natural progression of what was happening then?
GR: Well, what was happening, the horizontal way of playing really came out of slavery. Blacks were denied musical instruments. It comes out of church music, which is so prominent these days in commercials. It kind of became a hierarchy and sort of a duel with the vertical way of playing, performed mostly by Coleman Hawkins. The vertical players had a term for the horizontal players- they called it 'shucking.' (laughs) They weren't sounded the genre of each small town along the river. They were only sounding the genre to which those chords ultimately resolved. By that, they automatically had to be playing a melody that would indicate that chord-town over the vertical melodies. So you have the horizontal players who the vertical players said that they didn't go to school but that wasn't true. Lester Young really had both sides down and he used it to show occasionally that he had the chords down.
They were also the supra-roles for certain players and these were people who reached beyond the horizontal and vertical, combined them and actually created what I call 'secondary chords,' like Ornette. He floats down the river. He's just out there! (laughs) He had a huge influence on jazz. Bebop is basically based on all kinds of show tunes. "What Is This Thing Called Love" is actually a horizontal melody. Bebop was a very vertical music for a number of reasons, some not having to do with music.
After World War II, black soldiers came back to find the same old thing, nothing had changed for them. Black intellectuals, which I'm not, didn't go too far up in the educational field. I made the choice to drop school and go it on my own. People kid intellectual people all the time so I laugh when I get called that.
Ornette was the first one to change melody, change rhythm, change form and brought all of that with him and used it in music. In concept terms, he would be a supra-player.
PSF: Do you think your theories affected his work or vice versa?
GR: No, because I started into this whole effort to change music... I personally felt that traditional music was not the explanation of what was right.
PSF: What do you mean by that?
GR: I mean that... with the four modes- Dorian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Phrygian- each one of them had a secondary mode. So the Dorian and the secondary mode started the 4th interval below the authentic mode. The church's modes were what were called the authentic modes. Each authentic mode Dorian had D,E,F,G,A,B,C,D. Its authentic mode, its real mode, began on A, which would be the Aeolian in traditional music theory. Its final was also D. If that's the case and that's the way it was, then the Phrygian would have a scale beginning on C, that's a C major scale. You really need a piano to see this. It's really strange to see the major scale, the Ionian mode, was considered an authentic (odd numbered) mode. It was considered a Plagal mode, which a different final.
Modes or Church Modes are divided into Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian. Each of those modes have a Plagal mode, a secondary mode, starting a fourth below its final. But also having the authentic modes as its final, meaning that the Plagal mode on C would be CDEFGABC or the major scale as it's called now.
PSF: So your argument with this is that there wasn't unity to it?
GR: Yes, something like that.... I lost my thought there! (laughs) It'll come back to me.
PSF: Approaching these modes, you were looking for unity between chords and scales, right?
GR: Yes, unity was what I was trying to get at. In the 15th century, secular music was becoming more major scale. So the church was running into problems. It didn't want to but it had to include the Ionian mode. They adopted the major scale and then, the major scale became THE scale of music. That was not right because the major scale in music... if you're looking for a scale on which you can build a pyramid, which covers all music, you can't have the major scale. It's not in the overtone series. Lydian is. The mode that made the Lydian scale the F sharp is in the overtone series.
It's very difficult to talk about this or write about it. But it's what I'm doing so I have to go back to fundamentals where I'm writing the 2nd volume now. It's taking me a little time to go back and refresh my memory.
I found that in the Lydian scale, a scale that to my surprise also covered what's called classical music. It's simple. I don't think anyone has approached music that way before. We just accepted the fact that the major scale is THE scale of Western music. It is in terms of its popularity and I'm not arguing against it or trying to kill the major scale. It's an important scale. But it represents the horizontal aspect of music. In other words, it's a duality. CDEF- you play that and F is at the top, the tonic. GABC- C is the top. So it's actually two different chord/towns. In a sharp direction of the piano, it's actually back again to this Plagal mode, this CDEF is the Plagal mode of the C major scale, the first four notes of it. This is as it was in the 15th century.
The Lydian scale is in complete unity with itself. The major is getting there, but not quite there. That's its function. The first four notes of the C major scale, which end on F. It's the horizontal scale of music. It works in a function of time.
PSF: As opposed to the Lydian scale?
GR: The Lydian's function is over in a nanosecond, because it's in unity with chords. First of all, it's in unity with the major chord. The first overtone is C. The first four tones in the F Lydian scale is all white notes (on the piano). To me, that's the birth of tonal gravity. The integral of the fifth supports the entire overtone series.
PSF: As you were working on your own theories, I'm thinking that you must have known about classical composers (i.e. Cage, Stockhausen) that were also working away from major scales, right?
GR: Sure, I know about them and they were searching, like I was. Why were they searching? Because the major scale doesn't do it. The major scale breaks off at a certain point, that's the fourth degree. It's not a unity, it's a duality.
They all were searching and I'm saying that the major scale does not support the whole cosmos of music. I have to say that the Lydian does.
I knew Stockhausen- he got me a Guggenheim. I did a concert with him. They did his symphonic piece for two orchestras. I did a piece with my sextet.
PSF: So you did know about the similar aims of classical composers?
GR: Well, that was taken for granted. The only music I ever studied was from Stephan Volpe. God knows he was out there but we didn't talk about music too much. I knew he was an innovative composer. When I got the opportunity, the impulse... I realized that something happened that was in the way of developing new music.
PSF: That goes back to what you were saying about the major scale?
GR: Yes. You can't build something... There's something wrong with basing a theory, any kind of theory on something that's a duality. You have to have some way to unity as your basis. That's what the concept is about. You have to start with unity- you can't start with duality. Duality is a separate thing. It's on the move, it's connected with time. If I play a C major chord, then I play a Lydian scale, then instantly, it's in unity. If I play a major scale in thirds, a C major chord... it's a very outstanding duality. And another thing is that the Lydian scale eventually includes the major scale.
PSF: After you put out this theory, how did you see that it was picked up by musicians?
GR: The only way I know to answer that question is to say I'm with Miles. We used to get together around 1947 and I asked 'what's your aim?' He said 'I want to learn all the chords.' That didn't make sense to me because I knew something about Miles before he was with Diz and on 52nd Street. I knew, and everyone else knew, that if there's one thing that Miles knew, it was the chords. He knew how to melodize the chords.
So I was in the hospital with Tuberculosis for about 15 months. I had to make a decision- they had given me last rites. I kept dwelling on what Miles said, he wanted to learn all the chords. But my idea was 'how did he really go about that?' First of all, I thought he knew them. Then, I wondered how one would go about this. So I started out with the major chords. While immersing the people in the solarium, as everyone else was sitting around smoking and playing chords, I'm there playing the major scale and the Lydian scale over and over and over. They had a right to do what they did, which was to throw rotten bananas at me! (laughs) I understand, it would drive me nuts too. The major scale... it was something that I had to do. That's where the piano was.
One of the sisters was there and I asked if there was any other piano. There was one in the library. Well of course nobody used the library so it was a wonderful chance to come to this situation, this idea and realize that this was something big. It saved my life.
PSF: What was your intention with this initially once you realized it? To come out with this theory and publish it? It was meant for musicians, to maybe change their way of thinking?
GR: It gets to be esoteric. When I was at the hospital... It didn't make a change right away. You still had people playing essentially vertical. I had to make a decision. I will say that the late John Lewis was the first one to say 'this is really something.' He convinced me of that. I hadn't really studied music. I was a drummer for Benny Carter for a while.
I had to make a decision. In one sense, the Church had to give in to the major scale being the popular scale. But that was a subjective move on their part. It didn't have anything really to do with music. The Lydian scale is a very, very powerful scale, it's very strong. It supports the overtone series and it comes from the overtone series. It's the most natural scale.
So, John helped me make a decision. I thought "this is not meant to be kept a secret. This is something that is objective. It proves that gravity exists in the universe as a force. I can't keep this. I have to let this go." It was a hard decision. But yeah, I did. I think I did the right thing because the situation was that the major scale really didn't work for everybody so they had to develop their own styles. But if you're asking someone, "hey what are you doing, what are you working on?" nobody would give away their secret. I did though!
PSF: So it was published and out there in the world, then what did you see as the fruition of that?
GR: It hadn't finished. It was just beginning. It wasn't something that was finished- I think of it as something that's still evolving.
PSF: When did you see that people were starting to pick up on it though?
GR: I think you have to ask individuals because... I would think that the people who did become influenced by this, like someone would say that he was influenced by the concept. Over the years, Miles would say 'this is the motherfucker who taught me how to write.'
I went to his house one night and he had a note on the door that said 'if you ring this bell, it's war.' He was having a down time, around the '60's maybe. I took the note off the door because... he's Miles. He was pretty hot at the time, rock had come out. He did make a comeback. He got out of music for a while then when he came back, his heart was in it. I went to see him at a show and I went backstage and he gave me a hug.
(Russell went on to recount the story of a Yugoslav dissident who had been prosecuted under Milosavic. He met Russell during a tour of Europe and showed him a copy of a book that was dear to his heart- a Slavic translation of the Lydian concept)
It's hard to say how or who my work influenced because it's a non-stop procedure. In the work I'm doing now, I'm analyzing things like "The Rites of Spring."
PSF: Did you see your theory as advancing jazz in a way that gave it a serious aura that classical music already had?
GR: There's some truth to that. That was another reason I said (to myself) 'you can't keep this in.' You don't work on this for years just to have it for yourself. You have to give it to humanity. You have to share it. You have to make what it says (real). It has a way of saying things. It really speaks of unity. Duality is where you say one thing one way and you also say the opposite.
PSF: You seem to be almost professing this as a religious doctrine. Did you ever see it that way?
GR: Yes. You have to consider the circumstances where it came about. Miles said that he wanted to learn all the changes. I was lying in St. Joseph's Hospital on 143rd and 5th Ave (New York) and I was hemorrhaging, saying to myself 'there's a way out of this other than giving up.' There was 15 guys in the room but I had a corner so I just turned my back and it was all private. I would think and think and think. It saved my life. What I learned from it was that nothing is going to make sense until we have unity.
PSF: How would you characterize your relationship with Miles?
GR: Miles respected me. I think he respected my effort. Obviously, he respected the outcome of my respect. He said I made an influence on him. I was as close a friend as anybody to him. I don't make it a race of that to find out who was closest to Miles. Sometimes I'd just say to him 'come up to the house.' (laughs) But he's never been ashamed of saying that I was an influence (on him).
PSF: What did you think of him personally?
GR: I had the highest regard for him as a creative musician. He satisfies the intellect, he satisfies the emotions, he satisfies the movement. That's what music should be.
PSF: A lot of people see you mostly as a theorist. What do you think about that yourself?
GR: (bristling a bit) No, not totally. I've won various awards. I think that I'm not so well known in America but I wouldn't say that of Europe. My band works all the time in Europe. We did just an Italian festival and in June, we played the Barbican (London) last June. I've been working with the same band for a while- five or six Americans and the rest from Europe- and that makes it nice and easy.
If people see something wrong (in Europe) with an orchestra, they're not afraid to come out and say it. In this country, you're completely ignored. Sometimes the record companies themselves get in the way.
One of my most important pieces, that I consider, is "the African Game." There's a lot of hilarity in there. You have to let it out. You can't keep it in.
PSF: You were part of musical salon of people including Evans, Roach, Miles, Bird where you'd all get together and talk. How would you characterize these get-togethers? What would you talk about with them?
GR: We would talk about women! (laughs) And then maybe music. But what was there to say? You had Bird and Max there. It was music sometimes but it was about music, saying 'we do we go? Where do we go from here?' There was no looking back or sliding back. The whole atmosphere was wonderful. All I know is that somewhere along the line, it ceased to be an adventure and innovative.
PSF: When did you see that happen?
GR: That's a hard one to explain but I think it started... The ‘70's were wonderful. There were some things in rock that I liked. I liked the bass. I liked Aja (Steely Dan). I thought that was a step in the right direction. I liked to dance. (laughs) I liked (Marvin Gaye's) "What's Goin' On." Then around the ‘80's and into the ‘90's, it seemed like there was a downslide.
PSF: Could you talk about when you left the States for Europe for a while in the 60s?
GR: I didn't feel that I fit into what was going on (here). With some players, the music didn't have any kind of law at all or any kind of law.
PSF: You mean free jazz?
GR: If you want to call it that! (laughs) The drummer would play bluh-luh-luh-la-la, bluh-luh-luh-la-la! I said that I don't want to learn music (like this). The concepts taught me that everything in the universe in under a law. Freedom only comes when there are good laws and it's lost when there are flawed, small laws. So I did have the opportunity to go to Europe with an all-star cast.
PSF: When you find was different about musical climate in Europe as opposed to the States?
GR: I found that they really, really knew jazz. Especially at the Golden Circle (club), everyone used to come there. Ornette had played there (recording two albums there).
PSF: So you think the people there respected jazz more?
GR: Well, the first thing that happened was the Swedish Radio Jazz Orchestra got permission to play music- old piece and new pieces. They had a tremendous respect for me and other musicians. In Norway, there was a festival and a young guy comes out who's about 20 years old- he just played... It was Jan Gabarek. It was just beautiful. I just really felt respected there.
PSF: What led you to come back to the States?
GR: America seemed to be searching for its identity. The young people understand that. That generation wanted a change, wanted to do something. Music was an outlet for them. You couldn't stop that. I felt that Scandinavia had given me so much and that I should go home. Changes were going on. That was the Vietnam War. The sextet I had with Gaberek- we recorded in the oldest church in Norway.
PSF: When you came back, you also took up teaching at the New England Conservatory and you've worked there since then. What are you thoughts about your work there?
GR: Well actually Gunther Schuller sent me a telegram (saying) 'We'd like to have you on the staff.' I realized that by that time, the Lydian Concept could not be put down, could not be left. It was saying 'there's more here.' I didn't want to play clubs all over America and do that. I had a steady place to live, a place where I can keep the concept. It ended up with me being there 31 years.
PSF: When you teach there, what do you feel that you get out of it?
GR: Essentially... security. A guaranteed chance to evolve in music. To try different things. I consider this project (points to the book), my number one goal. I work hard at it, on the new work.
PSF: Do you also have a sense of satisfaction of working with students and passing along knowledge?
GR: The students are serious, they've gotten into it. It's something to be proud of. Not only survive. For those who get it and make an effort.
PSF: Could you talk about the time that you took off from playing and composing and performing so that you could write about your theory? Is it because the work is so intensive that you feel that you have to push everything aside?
GR: I do that all the time. I have to. When I was a kid, my biggest question was 'what am I doing here? What am I supposed to do?' (laughs) I always sort of had an inner voice that I used and developed in this concept. If I had a problem, I'd say to myself 'in the morning before 11 o'clock, I'm going to get an answer.' And it happened. I know that sounds extremely esoteric. I have to make choices.
PSF: You've said that you're working on a second volume of your book to explain and expand on your scale theories. When do you think this will be coming out?
GR: Some time! When it's ready. (laughs) The more I'm into it, the less I can tell.
PSF: How did the Living Time Orchestra come together? Could you talk about your work with this band?
GR: I was taking bands to Europe in the ‘80's. It's a good idea for me because I'm not out on the road really. I'm only on the road when there's a show. When we are, we do it style. It's terrific. Alice holds the whole thing together for me. She does. Taking care of the hotels and making sure it's not a drag.
PSF: How do you balance out time between composing, the orchestra and teaching?
GR: Priorities. This takes top priority (points to the book). Actually, a band in the Ellington sense... he had to travel, he had to compose. I don't need to do that.
PSF: So you're there with the band all the time?
GR: Yes, I'm there conducting the band all the time.
PSF: You're just saying that you don't have to do this year-round?
GR: Yes. I'm not committed to playing one night here and another night there. We ended up doing that this summer, doing five nights though.
PSF: How often do you do shows now throughout the year?
GR: A handful but they're usually in close together places. They're very, very important places that we play. We were the first jazz orchestra to play in the place where Stravinsky premiered "The Rites of Spring." We played places like that. The audience expects us to be something else and we expect them to be on another level.
PSF: How would you like to be remembered?
GR: I would hope that it would be in a positive way and with the work that I've always been doing with the concept.
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Monday, June 13, 2016
"George Russell Finds Music's Missing Link" by Bob Blumenthal
© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.
GEORGE RUSSELL
The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has made a concerted effort to post as much of the Jazz literature on composer-arranger George Russell that is available in print as its way of archiving published works on this significant but often overlooked figure in the development of the music.
Much of what has previously posted were writings about Russell’s early career with a particular emphasis on the evolution of his seminal Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization and how it was applied to various compositions in the Third Stream movement of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s and on George’s own sextet recordings from this period which appeared primarily on the Decca and Riverside Records labels.
The following piece by the distinguished, award winning author Bob Blumenthal first appeared in The Boston Phoenix on April 24, 1973. It contains the most detailed interview with George Russell available in print in terms of a career overview, Russell’s own explanation of his approach to Jazz and how he views himself in relation to the music.
After you’ve read Bob’s article, I think you’ll agree with my assessment that it is the most comprehensive essay ever written about George Russell and his approach to Jazz.
What’s more, we are very lucky to have this piece for as Bob explains in the note that accompanied it:
“My old copy was so faded that I realized I had to retype it, which I have done, leaving everything as it originally appeared save for a few typos ….
My questions have been omitted, but it's pretty easy to get the gist. I obviously had a negative reaction when George referred to his approach as a "technology," which set him off. He also refers to my earlier review of "Living Time,' which, if I'm not mistaken, stated that several of Bill Evans' portions seemed out of place against the orchestrations.
In any case, I hope I'm not too late with this for your purposes. I think it's as good as any interview with George that I recall seeing.”
© -Bob Blumenthal, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the permission of the author.
The man who writes for the band is usually the last to receive his proper share of recognition. George Russell is woefully ignored if only considered as one of the finest composers and arrangers Afro-American music (he dislikes the word “jazz”) has produced, but George is much more than a great composer. In 1953, he published The Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization, the first theoretical-philosophical approach to the music and, 20 years later, still the most important work of its kind. The book places great stress on the use of scales (modes) in place of the traditional chord-change harmonic framework, and particular emphasis to the Lydian Mode (FGABCDEF). The entire approach anticipates by almost a decade the radical changes that were to take place in the music, and had an important impact of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and other innovators more famous than Russell.
A brief biography/discography might be in order. Born in Cincinnati in 1923, Russell started as a drummer with the Benny Carter band but gained his first notoriety by writing “Cubano Be” and “Cubano Bop” for Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra in 1947. The next several years were spent on the book, which appeared in 1953. About 1955, Russell began to work full-time on the writing of music. His “All About Rosie,” written in 1957 for a Brandeis concert series, is one of the major extended compositions of that decade, and he followed “Rosie” with two extended albums for Decca featuring such luminaries as Coltrane, Bill Evans and Paul Bley. By 1960, he decided to put “the concept” to work in a combo setting. The combo eked out an existence through four years and half a dozen albums for Decca and Riverside; participants included Eric Dolphy and Don Ellis. George left for Europe early in 1964, where he spend several years under far more encouraging circumstances, and completed three major works: “Othello Ballet Suite,” “Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature” and “Listen to the Silence.” By 1970 he was back in the United States and spending much of his time in Boston teaching at the New England Conservatory. Living Time, his collaboration with old friend Bill Evans, was a highlight of 1972; currently, he is preparing Volume Two of The Lydian Chromatic Concept and continues to teach at NEC.
Finding Russell’s music can be difficult, since much of his best work is out of print. His pieces for the Gillespie band can now be had cheap at places like Harvard Square these days, and a couple of the Riverside packages still surface in the cutout bins. Otherwise there is “A Bird in Igor’s Yard,” one of his finest charts from the forties on the flip side of Lennie Tristano’s Capitol reissue; Othello and the combo version of Electronic Sonata, recorded in Europe and released here on Flying Dutchman, and the Living Time album on Columbia. JCOA has just made a European double album available, The Essence of George Russell, which contains the orchestral “Electronic Sonata” and two other extended pieces. Available from JCOA Record Distribution Service, 1841 Broadway, New York City 10023, it is Russell’s finest collection from his European stay. The word from Decca is that the important New York, N.Y. and Jazz in the Space Age are being prepared for double-album re-release; Milestone’s reissue series of the old Riverside label has not, however, seen fit to provide us with any George Russell.
What follows are George Russell’s words, responding to my questions about his life, his views, and most of all his concept. George is the most open of men and could speak on many subjects; for our first meeting, however, I asked him to speak about himself. The printed page often makes men appear too preoccupied with their own work, but remember that people are only responding to questions. And George Russell has much to say.
“I was always working on the book, but I wasn’t working in music, in terms of turning out compositions or performing, before 1955. After that, I found that you only need to do one or two projects a year to live in a state of genteel poverty. I formed my group in 1960, and we played when we could get work through 1964. After the ’64 Newport festival, where the band got one of its best receptions, I became deathly ill and needed three operations. By the time I recovered, George Wein asked me to be on his European tour. I left with every intention of staying there. There were things in Europe, like Penderecki, that I wanted to know about; and the groundwork of notating for orchestra had been done three years before.
Europe made me come to terms with myself as a person, and not with “making it.” The whole struggle of competing for work in those filty U.S. jazz clubs, for example, is beyond me. I finally came back because important things were happening in this country that weren’t happening anywhere else. It all started with [Martin Luther] King.
Now I’m working on a second book of the Lydian Chromatic Concept. I won’t write music and a book at the same time and this book will take quite a while. The idea for the first book was conceived in about 1945, and was worked on in such a way that I was always using music to test it out. It was on a level where it needed that; it’s not on that kind of level any more. Its theories are very set. I needed it in order to internalize the theory, and music helped me to do that; and the book needed it to see if the theories worked in practice. The fact that there had been no previous theoretical approach, and the ignorance surrounding that kind of approach, is what made the prospect so exciting. There were a lot of people who felt that if a black got involved in this kind of activity, he was either aping white technology…or being very stiff. But it’s my feeling that it should be possible to come up with an approach to music that’s as beautiful as music itself.
There was a very strong emotional reason why I had to do this, and that was to teach myself, because I couldn’t adapt to what the music schools were teaching – not that I had the opportunity to go to those music schools. I never did, but the little I knew about those schools gave me the feeling, like Ellington said, “It’s not for me.” Then the question became how to educate myself, and I found ways, but there were certain things in those ways I found important enough to try to communicate to other people. I seemed to infer that there was a lot of falseness in traditional theory, and I think by now that I’ve proved that.
Unless we’re talking about an art that’s totally primitive - and when I say “primitive” I don’t mean the so-called primitive societies, because they have highly sophisticated art – any art that’s sophisticated has a technology. Or any artist, like Charlie Parker, had a technology, has a way of dealing with the existing technology. A man has to have some knowledge about music, and either he accepts the existing knowledge or he takes it and works it his own way. I think it’s very primitive to say that art doesn’t have a technology; even the most subjective art is loaded with technology. The whole feeling that prevails, especially in this country, that art has come in tiger-skinned tights and swinging off the vines – I have to say that’s very primitive. All the artists I know have really worked out their technology. And I don’t use the word apologetically; I think Lester Young was totally into technology, very heavily. It’s a racist argument in fact, like saying that if you’re black you’re not supposed to have a technology. But I don’t blame you for suggesting that argument, in a way, for what technology has meant to the Western world has been a rather close-minded, single-minded way of life that hasn’t solved anything at all. It may have alleviated some suffering here and there, but it hasn’t really solved any problems, and it probably has created as many problems as it has solved, if not more. So I don’t blame you for having that fear of the word “technology.” I feel that I actually stumbled on something that’s technology but it’s more.
What the books are about doesn’t need explaining. On the most basic level, it initially had to do with musicians educating themselves, primarily jazz musicians. It’s a break with Western music theory, and it argues that Western music theory is only half right, and there’s a lot that it missed. It only works up to a certain point, then it doesn’t explain things at all. The music gets very chromatic, like the music at the latter part of the nineteenth century, before Schoenberg came along and broke the whole thing down. The book says that instead there is one concept that fits all equal-tempered music that has been produced in Western civilization – there is one view that fits the whole thing. It’s probably the first technical book ever to come out before the music was a fact. In 1953, when the book was published, it suggested that musicians could convert chords into modes that sounded closest to the chords. It proved that particular modes were closest to the sound of the chords, and that was about six years before anybody popularized that particular idea; Miles popularized it in ’59 [Kind of Blue LP]. Of course, you have to have Miles’ innate strength and talent as an artist to make something out of anything. But if a young Miles had gotten into that in 1953 he would have had to go through all that ridiculous computing to make it fit traditional theory.
I’m always enlightened by what people have done with the concept. People always ask, “You must have debated a long time before deciding to give that away?” because everybody had their own thing, and it was their secret. Like Duke never told anyone how he voiced those chords; the prevailing attitude was “never give anything away,” especially because whitey would pick up on it. But I sensed, with the concept, that just the few facts that I had in ’53 made it imperative that I present it. And I’ve never regretted it. But even today, some students [at the New England Conservatory] are coming up with facts that are enlightening me and will appear in the second volume…
When ‘Trane played with me [in 1959], I could sense what he was going through, and where he had to move if he would remain true to his music. I can’t say anything about the reaction between ‘Trane and myself, but I can say that we talked. I explained the concept to him in about ’59. He would play on two chords by substituting his own four chords to get to what he was doing, but he didn’t even have to think about chords, there was a whole universe of chords there. He did move in the modal direction, and further into the chromatic thing later on. But I’m not out to convert people; most students come to me, I don’t seek them.
The concept is, I hate to say it, so big that it doesn’t really create a style. You couldn’t detect that somebody had studied the concept by the way they played. A guy who studied with me might go out and play like Louis Armstrong, and still be playing the concept. Some people, like Jan Garbarek, the European tenor player, have studied nothing but the concept, but you can’t detect that either. The concept is about music, but it’s about a little more, too. Lately I’ve realized that it has a social content, it has a philosophical content. From a social standpoint what I think it represents is black technology. It’s a black man’s view of the science of music. This has always been a closed door in a black person’s mind, because he doesn’t think he has a technology. You ask, “Could it make a Charlie Parker?” but what made him Charlie Parker is that he had an advanced technology, he had a way of doing things that nobody else had. What made ‘Trane ‘Trane was that he had an advanced technology…I understand that he would hardly ever go to bed; he used to stay up reading mathematics. It’s ridiculous to pigeon-hole artists into a bag which would cut them off from technology, when they are expressing technology on an extremely high level, because art deals with levels of reality that people don’t know much about. My own effort, for the past twenty years, has been a black technology.
The second volume will devote quite a few chapters to showing where traditional music got off, and it got off because it couldn’t quite accept that fourth mode of the major scale. Starting on F, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, it couldn’t make that false fourth from F to B. That’s the Lydian mode of the major scale. I like to call it “the nigger mode,” because that mode was kind of forbidden – the Church didn’t encourage writing in that mode. But that mode had so much information, it had the information that would have enabled them, had they been open-minded, to link and come up with a real music theory.
When I say it’s the nigger mode, I mean that it paralleled life in a way. Any phenomenon that you subjugate, and mistreat, and make subordinate … I won’t say that it places that phenomenon close to truth, but that’s about as close as I can get to it. It picks up some strength and some power the oppressor doesn’t have, and one day it can overcome the oppressor, because it’s got a certain slant on life. I’m not saying that the Lydian mode is the mode of rebellion or any shit like that, but I am saying that there is good reason to call it the nigger mode. It did suffer a lot of prejudice, and at the same time it had within it the most profound meaning in music. People will say, “George Russell always writes in the Lydian mode;” hell, I hardly ever use it. But theoretically it’s the most important mode; it’s so latent with fantastic facts and it’s the missing link between tonality and so-called atonality.
The concept’s nearest relative is Pythagoras. It links directly to the way he was thinking, tuning in fifths. The origin of the term “octave” is in philosophy and mathematics, and then the term got applied to music. Pythagoras was already involved in linking music with the way the universe behaves. Now his cues must have also come from Egypt and the great African dynasties, because each person gets the knowledge he needs, and that knowledge existed before. I don’t want to make this a racist thing, but because of what they have had to endure, black people have a great technological talent that they could bring to every field. Because the way it is now, it’s going to kill all of us…
I did some albums for Riverside [1960-1963] which convinced me that there was a way of scoring for big band that would really free the music up. Whenever you hear a big band, whether you like the music or not, it always sounds like people are reading it; stiff, unless the band has played together for a long time, like Basie – I’m talking about the old Basie band. I thought there was a technique I had to learn to score this kind of music, and of course with my way of thinking, I had to dig in and get the technology out. So I came up with rhythmic modes, and how rhythm behaves, and then I found how to incorporate this and how to score it. The first project was Othello [Flying Dutchman 122] recorded in ’67, then the big band Electronic Sonata, then a work for choir and Afro-American music ensemble called Listen to the Silence which will also come out soon. It has culminated in Living Time [Columbia 31490], but all of them are scored the same.
The atmosphere on the Living Time date was like one big family. When the date was over, at the end of the fifth and final session, all of the musicians, from Snooky Young to Tony Williams, stood up and applauded. For the first half hour or so of the first session, it was hard for most of them to get with what they had to do; but once they got with it, they…I’ll bet they would all say that they had a lot more freedom than they had ever had on a big band date. They had to put themselves into the music.
You didn’t like Bill Evans on the record, but I think you’re forcing Bill into a category and being very rigid. I find it very enjoyable when he ends the events in his very romantic and very beautiful way. After all that has gone on, he sums it up. It was written there to say “Well, here we are, we’re back. We’ve gone on our trip, and we’re back.”
Generally in this country we have a tremendous problem with music. We’re so information-laden; I mean shit is pushed on us that’s incredibly bad. I don’t care what label you want to put on it, musically it’s just horrible. We get it on the radio, we get it when guys write in newspapers that something is great when it’s really horrible – we don’t know where we are any more, musically. We get the whole gamut of crap that the record companies throw out on us, so it’s very difficult for me to take criticism very seriously here. I’ll take it from people I know in Norway and Sweden, who are into some music. They’re a little more careful about letting their music get so polluted.
I’m not against rock. I like “Papa was a Rolling Stone”…I like the Temptations when they do that. I like Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield. I love Sly. I have my favorites. But most of the music situation is quite polluted. There’s some excellent, beautiful music around, but you really have to look for it. This is not an era where there is no good music, but there’s so much crap and the crap is what’s making it. The value judgments are completely turned around.
I never thought I’d live to see the day when the music I heard in what we called “Black Bottom” in Cincinnati, the black-assed ghetto…when nice little bourgeois white kids from Scarsdale would be shakin’ their ass to that, and that’s what’s happening. That music got the white race to shakin’ its ass – they used to dance really corny. Some of the white music is very timely, especially the lyrics. What’s interesting is that the lyrics the people like Dylan write often have a depth that the music doesn’t have. I started dancing to rock in 1953; in fact, all my compositions from “Cubano Be” and “Cubano Bop” [1947] on have bass lines. I could never get away from that. So I never felt distant from rock, because that was the kind of music I grew up around.
The accent today is more on the content of the lyrics than on the structure of the music. There are some slight innovations, but there isn’t much a musician can learn by listening. Unless you want to learn how to make some money. But once the lyrics are not so interesting, musically it doesn’t hold up at all. It had to be fed periodically, because there’s not enough substance to it. So a Miles comes along…to give it some life, some musical life. Otherwise, it’s just being held up by all those people who invested money in it…
There was a time when I had the boyhood notion that my dream come true would be to be a leader. I felt I had to do it, but now I’ve grown progressively more disenchanted with that. But I know Gil Evans loves to lead a band; he loves to hear his music played. For me, it’s gotten to the point where I feel that I don’t need to hear my music that much. The most important thing to me now is dealing with the laws of music, as they relate to higher laws, ethical and philosophical laws. There’s an electronic music studio in Stockholm where I could satisfy myself aesthetically for the rest of my life without having to deal with one musician. The book is another of my projects; I have a lot of “in” projects that aren’t dependent on anybody else. It’s okay to get together and have a band, but the highest aesthetic satisfaction for me doesn’t come from performing or hearing my music performed at a concert. It comes from the very private work that I’m doing.
I haven’t regretted my life, and I’m glad I survived it. I’m glad about the trip the concept has taken me on, and I’ve enjoyed it. I don’t think I belong to any specific period – wherever I am now, I feel that a few people in 1980 will be listening to it. I’m not my own connoisseur, but my older music will be available because I’m an educator. It simply isn’t famous because I won’t dance.”
THE MUSIC OF GEORGE RUSSELL: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH GEORGE RUSSELL:
George Russell Sextet - Stratusphunk
George Russell & The Living Time Orchestra – The African Game1985/1997--Full Album
George Russell Sextet - Ezz-thetics (1961) - Full Album
George Russell "Electronic Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature
George Russell and the Big Bang Band of 1967 - live at Circus in Stockholm, Sweden
George Russell - Round Midnight
GEORGE RUSSELL blues in orbit (1962)
stratus phunk (1960) FULL ALBUM george russell sextet
George Russell, Living Time Orchestra - It's About Time, Pt. 1
George Russell - Jazz in the space age (1960) Full vinyl LP
George Russell Sextet - Concerto for Billy the Kid
The Essence of George Russell - Electric Sonata for Souls .
George Russell: Manhattan
George Russell - Lydiot
George Russell "Listen To The Silence - A Mass For Our
George Russell The future of jazz interview [excerpt]
George Russell Big Band - Manhattan
George Russell Sextet - Ezz-thetics
George Russell Sextet At The Beethoven Hall II
George Russell - Waltz from Outer Space
george russell & his orchestra - 5. waltz from outer space
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Russell_(composer)
George Russell (composer)
George Allen Russell (June 23, 1923 – July 27, 2009) was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger and theorist. He is considered one of the first jazz musicians to contribute to general music theory with a theory of harmony based on jazz rather than European music, in his book Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953).[1]
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|---|
| Birth name | George Allen Russell |
|---|---|
| Born | June 23, 1923 Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | July 27, 2009 (aged 86) Boston, Massachusetts |
| Genres | Jazz |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, composer, arranger |
| Instruments | Piano |
| Website | www |
Contents
Early life
Russell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio to a white father and a black mother,[2] later the adopted only child of a nurse and a chef on the B & O Railroad, Bessie and Joseph Russell. Young Russell sang in the choir of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and listened to the Kentucky Riverboat music of Fate Marable.[3] He made his stage debut at age seven, singing "Moon Over Miami" with Fats Waller.
Surrounded by the music of the black church and the big bands which played on the Ohio Riverboats, and with a father who was a music educator at Oberlin College, he started playing drums with the Boy Scouts and Bugle Corps, receiving a scholarship to Wilberforce University, where he joined the Collegians, a band noted as a breeding ground for great jazz musicians including Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Freeman Lee, Frank Foster, and Benny Carter. Russell served in that band at the same time as another noted jazz composer, Ernie Wilkins. When called up for the draft at the beginning of World War II, he was quickly hospitalized with tuberculosis, where he was taught the fundamentals of music theory by a fellow patient.
Early career
After his release from the hospital, he played drums with Benny Carter's band, but decided to give up drumming as a vocation after hearing Max Roach, who replaced him in the orchestra. Inspired by hearing Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight", Russell moved to New York in the early 1940s, where he became a member of a coterie of young innovators who frequented the 55th Street apartment of Gil Evans, a clique which included Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, and John Lewis, later the music director of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
In 1945–46, Russell was again hospitalized for tuberculosis for 16 months. Forced to turn down work as Charlie Parker's drummer, during that time he worked out the basic tenets of what was to become his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, a theory encompassing all of equal-tempered music which has been influential well beyond the boundaries of jazz. The first edition of his book was published by Russell in 1953, while he worked as a salesclerk at Macy's. At that time, Russell's ideas were a crucial step into the modal music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis[1] on his classic recording, Kind of Blue, and served as a beacon for other modernists such as Eric Dolphy and Art Farmer.
While working on the theory, Russell was also applying its principles to composition. His first famous composition was for the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, the two-part "Cubano Be, Cubano Bop" (1947) and part of that band's pioneering experiments in fusing bebop and Cuban jazz elements;[4] "A Bird in Igor's Yard" (a tribute to both Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinsky) was recorded in a session led by Buddy DeFranco the next year.[5] Also, a lesser known but pivotal work arranged by Russell's was recorded in January 1950 by Artie Shaw entitled "Similau"[6][7] that employed techniques of both the works done for Gillespie and DeFranco.
Russell began playing piano, leading a series of groups which included Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, Barry Galbraith, Milt Hinton, Paul Motian, and others. Jazz Workshop was his first album as leader, and one where he played relatively little, as opposed to masterminding the events (rather like his colleague Gil Evans). He was to record a number of impressive albums over the next several years, sometimes as primary pianist.
In 1957, Russell was one of six jazz musicians commissioned by Brandeis University to write a piece for their Festival of the Creative Arts. He wrote a suite for orchestra, All About Rosie, which featured Bill Evans among other soloists, and has been cited as one of the few convincing examples of composed polyphony in jazz.[8]
Members of the orchestra on his 1958 extended work, New York, N.Y., included Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Milt Hinton, Bob Brookmeyer, and Max Roach, among others, and featured wrap-around raps by singer/lyricist Jon Hendricks. Jazz in the Space Age (1960) was an even more ambitious big band album, featuring the unusual dual piano voicings of Bill Evans and Paul Bley. Russell formed his own sextet in which he played piano. Between 1960 and 1963, the Russell Sextet featured musicians like Dave Baker and Steve Swallow and memorable sessions with Eric Dolphy (on Ezz-thetics) and singer Sheila Jordan (their bleak version of "You Are My Sunshine" on The Outer View (1962) is highly regarded).
Europe
In 1964, Mr. Russell, who as a half black man was dismayed by race relations in the United States, moved to Scandinavia.[9] He toured Europe with his sextet and lived in Scandinavia for five years. Through the early 1970s, Russell did most of his work in Norway and Sweden. He played there with young musicians who would go on to international fame: guitarist Terje Rypdal, saxophonist Jan Garbarek and drummer Jon Christensen.
This Scandinavian period also provided opportunities to write for larger groupings, and Russell's larger-scale compositions of this time pursue his idea of "vertical form", which he described as "layers or strata of divergent modes of rhythmic behaviour". The Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature, commissioned by Bosse Broberg of Swedish Radio for the Radio Orchestra, was first recorded in 1968, as an extended work recorded with electronic tape. It continued Russell's continuing exploration of new approaches and new instrumentation.
Russell returned to America in 1969, when Gunther Schuller assumed the presidency of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and appointed Russell to teach the Lydian Concept in the newly created jazz studies department, a position he held for many years. As Russell toured with his own groups, he was persistent in developing the Lydian Concept. He played the Bottom Line, Newport, Wolftrap, The Village Vanguard, Carnegie Hall, Sweet Basil and more with his 14-member orchestra.[10]
Later works
In the 1970s Russell was commissioned to write and record 3 major works: Listen to the Silence, a mass for orchestra and chorus for the Norwegian Cultural Fund; Living Time, commissioned by Bill Evans for Columbia Records; and Vertical Form VI for the Swedish Radio.
With Living Time (1972), Russell reunited with Bill Evans to offer a suite of compositions which represent the stages of human life. His Live in an American Time Spiral featured many young New York players who would go on to greatness, including Tom Harrell and Ray Anderson. When he was able to form an orchestra for his 1985 work The African Game, he dubbed it the Living Time Orchestra. This 14-member ensemble toured Europe and the U.S., doing frequent weeks at the Village Vanguard, and was praised by New York magazine as "the most exciting orchestra to hit the city in years."
The work The African Game, a 45-minute opus for 25 musicians, was described by Robert Palmer of The New York Times as "one of the most important new releases of the past several decades" and earned Russell two Grammy nominations in 1985.
Russell wrote nine extended pieces after 1984, among them: Timeline for symphonic orchestra, jazz orchestra, chorus, klezmer band and soloists, composed for the New England Conservatory's 125th anniversary; a re-orchestration of Living Time for Russell's orchestra and additional musicians, commissioned by the Cité de la Musique in Paris in 1994; and It's About Time, co-commissioned by The Arts Council of England and the Swedish Concert Bureau in 1995.
In 1986, Russell toured with a group of American and British musicians, resulting in The International Living Time Orchestra, a group who still tours and performs today. He played with Dave Bargeron, Steve Lodder, Tiger Okoshi, Mike Walker, Brad Hatfield, and Andy Sheppard.[10]
Music theory
Russell's Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization re-conceptualized the matching of scales with chords. While the conventional approach to the diatonic major scale is founded on the tones of the Ionian major scale in accordance with classical theory (C, D, E, F, G, A, B for the C major scale, etc.) the LCC derives the scales based on the series of fifths stacked from the root tones of chords with a major third. In the key of C, the stacked fifth series includes C, G, D, A, E, B, and F#, which provide an alternate seven tone division for the C major scale with a raised, or augmented, fourth tone. The resulting scale, with an augmented fourth (F#) instead of a perfect fourth (F), has more consonance than the conventional Ionian diatonic major scale over chords, avoiding the dissonant half-step from the major third (E). With the conventional major scale, dissonance is avoided by omitting the perfect fourth; by using the Lydian mode with the more consonant augmented fourth, the player or composer gains the tonal freedom that facilitates modal playing over chords with a major third. Lydian major-third chords are specified with a #11, which is equivalent to the #4 in the scale.
It was a remark made by Miles Davis in 1945 when Russell asked him his musical aim that led Russell on a quest which was to lead to his theoretical breakthrough. Davis answered that his musical aim was "to learn all the changes." Knowing that Davis already knew how to arpeggiate each chord, Russell reasoned that he really meant that he wanted to find a new and broader way to relate to chords. As music scholars Cooke and Horne wrote:
Russell codified the modal approach to harmony...inspired by a casual remark the eighteen-year-old Miles Davis made to him in 1944: Miles said he wanted to learn all the changes and I reasoned he might try to find the closest scale for every chord...Davis popularized those liberating ideas in recordings like Kind of Blue, undermining the entire harmonic foundation of bop that had inspired him and Russell in the first place.[11]Miles reportedly summarized the LCC succinctly by saying, "F should be where middle C is on the piano" [white notes: F-F = lydian, rather than major = C-C].[11]
The Lydian Chromatic Concept was the first codified original theory to come from jazz. Musicians who assimilated Russell's ideas expanded their harmonic language beyond that of bebop, into the realm of post-bop. Russell's ideas influenced the development of modal jazz, notably in the album Jazz Workshop (1957, with Bill Evans and featuring the "Concerto for Billy the Kid") as well as his writings. Miles Davis also pushed into modal playing with the composition Miles on his 1957 album Milestones. Davis and Evans later collaborated on the 1959 album Kind of Blue, which featured modal composition and playing. John Coltrane explored modal playing for several years after playing on Kind of Blue.
His Lydian Concept has been described as making available resources rather than imposing constraints on musicians.[12] According to the influential 20th century composer Toru Takemitsu, "The Lydian Chromatic Concept is one of the two most splendid books about music; the other is My Musical Language by Messiaen. Though I'm considered a contemporary music composer, if I dare categorize myself as an artist, I've been strongly influenced by the Lydian Concept, which is not simply a musical method—we might call it a philosophy of music, or we might call it poetry."[13]
The major scale probably emerged as the predominating scale of Western music, because within its seven tones lies the most fundamental harmonic progression of the classical era....thus, the major scale resolves to its tonic major chord. The Lydian scale is the sound of its tonic major chord.[14]George Russell died of complications from Alzheimer's disease in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 27, 2009, according to his publicist.[15]
Awards
He received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1989. In his career, Russell also received the 1990 National Endowment for the Arts American Jazz Master Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the British Jazz Award, among others. He has been elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy, won the Oscar du Disque de Jazz Award, the Guardian Award, the American Music Award, six NEA Music Fellowships and numerous others.[10] He taught throughout the world, and was a guest conductor for German, Italian, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish radio groups.
Discography
- 1956: The Jazz Workshop
- 1959: New York, N.Y.
- 1960: Jazz in the Space Age
- 1960: George Russell Sextet at the Five Spot
- 1960: Stratusphunk
- 1960: Things new
- 1961: George Russell Sextet in K.C.
- 1961: Ezz-thetics
- 1962: The Stratus Seekers
- 1962: The Outer View
- 1964: George Russell Sextet Live in Bremen and Paris 1964
- 1965: George Russell Sextet at Beethoven Hall
- 1967: The Essence of George Russell
- 1968: Othello Ballet Suite/Electronic Organ Sonata No. 1
- 1968: Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature[16]
- 1970: Trip to Prillarguri
- 1971: Listen to the Silence
- 1972: Living Time with Bill Evans
- 1977: Vertical Form VI
- 1978: New York Big Band
- 1980: Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature
- 1982: Live in an American Time Spiral
- 1983: The African Game
- 1983: So What
- 1988: New York
- 1989: The London Concert
- 1996: It's About Time
- 2003: The 80th Birthday Concert
References
- Berendt, Joachim (1976). The Jazz Book. Paladin. p. 357.
- "George Russell". hilobrow.com. Retrieved December 19, 2015.
- Pettinger, Peter (1998). Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings. Yale University Press. pp. 31–32. ISBN 0-300-07193-0.
- Ratliff, B. George Russell, Composer Whose Theories Sent Jazz in a New Direction, Dies at 86, NY Times, July 29, 2009
- Harrison, Max (March 1983). "George Russell – Rational Anthems: Phase One". The Wire. Retrieved June 21, 2011.
- Martin, Henry; Waters, Keith (2005). Jazz: the first 100 years. Wadsworth Publishing. p. 160. ISBN 0-534-62804-4.
- Artie Shaw: The Last Recordings, Volume II: The Big Band, MusicMasters Jazz BMG, CD (1990) OCLC 27649009, track No. 14, "Similau"
- Harrison, Max (1976). The Brandeis Festival LP in A Jazz Retrospect. Quartet. pp. 177–179. ISBN 0-7043-0144-X.
- "George Russell, Composer Whose Theories Sent Jazz in a New Direction, Dies at 86". nytimes.com. Retrieved December 19, 2015.
- "About George Russell". Georgerussell.com. Retrieved January 15, 2015.
- Mervyn Cooke, David Horn (2003) The Cambridge companion to jazz, p.191. ISBN 0-521-66388-1.
- Harrison, Max (1976). A Jazz Retrospect. Quartet. p. 58. ISBN 0-7043-0144-X.
- "Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization". Georgerussell.com. Retrieved January 15, 2015.
- Cooke & Horn (2003), p.192.
- Jazz Composer George Russell Dies at 86 Archived July 30, 2009, at the Wayback Machine. All About Jazz. Retrieved on July 28, 2009.
- Ron Wynn. "Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature - 1968 - George Russell - Songs, Reviews, Credits, Awards - AllMusic". AllMusic. Retrieved January 15, 2015.
- Russell, George (2001) [1953]. "Chapter 1 The Lydian scale: The seminal source of the principal of tonal gravity". George Russell's Lydian chromatic concept of tonal organization. Volume One: The art and science of tonal gravity (Fourth (Second printing, corrected, 2008) ed.). Brookline, Massachusetts: Concept Publishing Company. pp. 1–9. ISBN 0-9703739-0-2.
- Katsui Sudo's George Russell discography
- George Russell
- Lydian Chromatic Concept
- ModalJazz.com
- George Russell music
- Jazz Portraits from the WGBH Archives: George Russell a radio documentary from WGBH Radio Boston
- George Russell – Daily Telegraph obituary
