George Russell (born June 23, 1923, in Cincinnati, Ohio) was a unique figure in jazz. One of a rare breed of thinker-musicians, he made breakthrough contributions as a theoretician, composer, bandleader, and educator whose ideas have had a remarkable influence on the development of post-World War II music.
Starting as a drummer with the Wilberforce, Ohio Collegians in the 1940s, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis at age nineteen and admitted to a hospital, where he was taught the fundamentals of music theory by a fellow patient.
He joined the Benny Carter Orchestra as a drummer. Although he was soon replaced by Max Roach, Carter had played one of Russell’s compositions and, as Russell recalls, “Benny paid me for it. I was launched on a writing career.”
After hearing Thelonious Monk’s Round About Midnight, Russell decided he had to be at the center of things and moved to New York, where he became part of the jazz Bloomsbury who would gather at the apartment of composer-arranger, Gil Evans. Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, Miles Davis, Max Roach, and many others would drop in to be a part of the energy and excitement emanating from Evans’s one room in the basement.
When Russell asked Miles Davis about his musical goal, he gave a reply that set the composer on his own life’s work. Davis said his aim was “to learn all the changes.” Russell was puzzled because he knew Miles already knew all the chord progressions. What he eventually reasoned was that Davis was seeking a different way to relate to chords, rather than the arpeggiation approach to melody that was prevalent with soloists. Again hospitalized for tuberculosis, Russell hit upon his now widely known intuition that every chord had a scale of unity, or a Parent Scale. This theory became the basic idea of his influential book, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization.
First published in 1953, “the Concept” proposed a new set of relationships between chords and scales, opening the way for modal music and influencing Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and generations of musicians since.
In 1947, Russell was commissioned by Dizzy Gillespie to write a piece for his orchestra. Cubano Be/Cubano Bop, widely credited as the first composition to successfully fuse Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz, was premiered at Carnegie Hall while Russell was working behind a New York lunch counter.
In the 1950s Russell made a series of recordings for RCA Victor with his small group. At the same time, the “Third Stream,” a movement which sought a synthesis of jazz and classical music with improvisation an essential element, was gaining favor with composers such as Gunther Schuller.
Schuller recommended Russell for the Brandeis University Festival of the Creative Arts, which also premiered works by Schuller, Charles Mingus, Jimmy Giuffre, and Milton Babbitt. This marked the first time an American university had commissioned works by jazz composers. In 1959, Russell gathered the finest musicians in jazz to record his concept album New York, New York, with narration written and spoken by Jon Hendricks. Band members included Coltrane, Roach, Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Benny Golson, Phil Woods, Bob Brookmeyer, Doc Severinsen, Ernie Royal, Milt Hinton, Al Cohn, and Hal McCusick.
In the early ’60s, Russell continued to compose, record, and refine his theoretical work. He recorded his arrangement of You Are My Sunshine, written for vocalist, Sheila Jordan, after Jordan and Russell made a trip to her hometown in Pennsylvania, where they played and sang for a group of miners who had been forced out of work with the closing of the mines. The ironic arrangement earned Russell a citation from the United Mine Workers for paying tribute to their predicament.
In 1964, Russell and his group joined the George Wein All Stars on a European tour. Finding immediate acceptance within the new music community, he moved to Stockholm and began writing for Swedish and Norwegian Broadcasting. This gave Russell the opportunity to experiment with his concept of vertical form, which he likened to an African drum choir—layers or strata of divergent modes of rhythmic behavior built upon a tonal center, going nowhere but up or down the scale of vertical density and complexity, stopping, in effect, horizontal time.
In 1969, Russell returned to the U.S. to take a position in the New England Conservatory’s newly created jazz department at the invitation of then- NEC president Gunther Schuller. Russell remained on the faculty until his retirement in 2004. During his tenure, he continued to revise his theory, publishing a final greatly expanded volume in 2001. He also wrote and led big bands in tours of America and Europe. In 1983 he was commissioned to write what is widely considered his magnum opus, The African Game, in which the African roots of vertical form and his complex, rhythmic writing are realized in full.
The New York Times called the live recording “one of the most significant releases of the last several years,” and the release received two Grammy nominations in 1985.
Invited to tour the UK through the Contemporary Music Network in 1986, Russell brought with him a core of American musicians to join the best of Britain’s jazz players. This edition of the Living Time Orchestra toured and recorded throughout Europe and Japan for two decades, doing special projects and residencies which included the Festival D’Automne and the Cité de la Musique in Paris, the Umbria Jazz Festival, the Barbican Centre, and Tokyo Music Joy.
Among Russell’s honors and recognitions are the John and Catherine MacArthur Fellowship, the NEA American Jazz Master Award, The British Jazz Award, the Oscar du Disque de Jazz, election to the Royal Swedish Academy, the Guardian Award, the American Music Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and six grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
