George Russell

George Russell exerted his most profound influence on jazz not through his energetic work as a composer, arranger, and bandleader but through his quieter contributions as a theorist. The imposing volume titled The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, issued in 1953, represented what appears to have been the earliest attempt by a jazz musician to shape broader music theory; in its pages Russell advanced the notion of basing improvisation on scales instead of chord progressions. His ideas directly anticipated the modal explorations later pursued by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and he even claimed credit for the conceptual foundation of Michael Jackson’s massive single “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” which employs the Lydian scale—though he never sought royalties. Over time his own writing absorbed an ever-widening array of idioms, folding bop, gospel, blues, rock, funk, modern classical gestures, electronics, and African rhythms into ambitious large-scale pieces, nowhere more vividly than in the expansive 1983 suite The African Game scored for an expanded big band. Like his associate Gil Evans, Russell continued to evolve throughout his career, yet his music remained less familiar than Evans’s, partly because its complexities proved harder to grasp and partly because American labels documented it sparsely.

Drums served as Russell’s initial instrument; he performed with the Boy Scout Drum and Bugle Corps and in neighborhood clubs while still in high school. Hospitalized at nineteen with tuberculosis, he turned the period of enforced rest into an opportunity to study arranging under the guidance of another patient. Once recovered, he worked briefly with Benny Carter, but after Max Roach took over the drum chair Russell shifted his focus toward composition and orchestration. He relocated to New York and joined the circle of adventurous musicians who convened at Gil Evans’s informal salon; he even received an invitation to play drums with Charlie Parker’s group. Illness struck again, however, confining him to a Bronx hospital for sixteen months between 1945 and 1946, during which he began developing the principles that would become the Lydian Concept. On regaining his health he plunged into the nascent blend of bebop and Afro-Cuban rhythms, composing “Cubana Be” and “Cubana Bop,” both recorded by the Dizzy Gillespie big band in 1947. He supplied charts to Claude Thornhill and Artie Shaw in the closing years of the decade and created the speculative fantasy “A Bird in Igor’s Yard,” which Buddy De Franco later recorded, imagining an encounter between Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinsky.

While refining his theoretical work Russell stepped away from performance for a time, taking a job at a Macy’s sales counter when the book appeared. Resuming composition in 1956, he quickly established himself as a significant presence in jazz circles. Through his association with Gunther Schuller he received a commission for “All About Rosie,” premiered at the 1957 Brandeis University jazz festival, and he also instructed at the Lenox School of Jazz, which Schuller helped found. In the mid-fifties he assembled a rehearsal group that evolved into the George Russell Smalltet, featuring Art Farmer, Bill Evans, Hal McKusick, Barry Galbraith, and a rotating cast of bassists and drummers. Their 1956 RCA Victor album Jazz Workshop stands as a landmark recording of the era, and Russell went on to produce further noteworthy sessions for Decca in the late fifties and Riverside in the early sixties. Another important release from those years, Ezz-Thetics, showcased the forward-looking talents of Eric Dolphy and Don Ellis.

Finding the domestic jazz environment too restrictive, Russell moved to Europe in 1963 and settled in Sweden for five years. From that base he toured Scandinavia with a fresh sextet of European musicians and secured several commissions, among them a ballet treatment of Othello, a mass, and the orchestral suite Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature: 1980. Returning to the United States in 1969, he joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music, where Schuller had established a jazz program, thereby gaining a stable platform for occasional tours with his own ensembles. Between 1972 and 1978 he suspended composing in order to complete a second volume of the Lydian Chromatic Concept. In 1978 he led a nineteen-piece big band for six weeks at the Village Vanguard, appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival during its New York period, and undertook further engagements in Italy, the American West Coast, and England throughout the eighties.

Among his later large-scale commissions were “An American Trilogy” and the three-hour panoramic work “Time Line,” scored for symphony orchestra, jazz groups, rock bands, choir, and dancers. In addition to The African Game and So What on Blue Note, he recorded for Soul Note in the seventies and eighties and for Label Bleu in the nineties, all while maintaining his teaching position at the New England Conservatory and directing his Living Time Orchestra big band well into the twenty-first century. The 2005 release The 80th Birthday Concert, issued on the Concept label and documenting performances by George Russell & the Living Time Orchestra, honored the veteran innovator’s legacy with interpretations of several of his most influential extended compositions and arrangements. Russell died in Boston on July 27, 2009, at the age of eighty-six, from complications related to Alzheimer’s disease.