NY TIMES ARTICLE  11/11/83 "GEORGE RUSSELL: HIS BIG BAND AND HIS BIG THEORY"

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/Cubano 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.''

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 Terje 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.''

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 11, 1983, Section C, Page 20 of the National edition with the headline: GEORGE RUSSELL: HIS BIG BAND AND HIS BIG THEORY.

Excerpt from "The Gravity Man" by Alice Dragoon

It was 1943 and 20-year-old George Russell was making his living playing drums with Benny Carter's band. ("It was the war years," he jokes). Then Max Roach came along, and Russell was replaced. "I knew I could never be the best drummer-I'd just heard the best," he says. Russell turned instead to writing and arranging and moved to New York.

Roach introduced him to everybody on 52nd Street and Russell became part of the inner circle that included Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. One conversation with Davis left him stunned. Russell asked the young trumpeter about his chief aim in music. "Miles said he was going to learn all the chords, " Russell remembers. "Well, everyone in music thought Miles knew how to play all the chords." Most musicians at that time relied heaving upon arrpegiating to create melodies, so Davis's goal stuck in his mind. "I wondered how he would go about doing that, and what he meant by it," Russell recalls.

Russell's wondering led to his famous intuition that every chord had a scale of unity, or a parent scale. Long about then, he became ill and had to forego an opportunity to join Charlie Parker's quintet. While hospitalized, Russell was experimenting with the Lydian scale, a tonal progression that had been largely ignored since the 18th century. One day he played first the C major scale and then the C Lydian scale in thirds and immediately realized that the major scale seemed incomplete and unresolved. By comparison, the Lydian structure sounded unified with a C major chord, or the tonic C. For Russell, it became obvious that the "natural" forth of the major scale prevents it from sounding final. Since the scale does not resolve until it reaches its tonic major chord, the major scale is marked by a sense of striving. This is very obvious when the major scale is played in thirds. Conversely, the Lydian scale sounds resolved when played in thirds because its raised fourth completes a ladder of perfect fifths. The power of the Lydian mode, Russell realized, is freedom from time's restraints. The major scale is in a state of becoming. The Lydian scale already is. This being-there versus getting-there discovery led Russell to articulate the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, which defines music as "cosmic gravity manifesting in the realm of sound." Arranging the tones of the Lydian scale in a ladder of fifths, the theory goes, creates a unified tonal "gravity field." Every tone in a ladder of fifths is supported by the lowest rung of the ladder because the lower tone of an interval of a fifth is always the tonic of the interval. The lowest tone of a ladder of fifths, therefore, is the fundamental "do" for the series of tones above it, whether it is a Lydian scale or the entire Lydian chromatic order--essentially a ladder of fifths that ascends above the Lydian scale with the potential of spanning every note on a piano keyboard, or all of equal temperament. Russell classifies music--or, for simplicity's sake, a melody, in terms of its relationship to the fundamental "do," which he calls the center of gravity. The higher the Lydian chromatic ladder ascends, the weaker the relationships of the tones to the fundamental "do." Melodies like "The Star Spangled Banner" that stay within the first seven tones of the Lydian chromatic order of fifths (the Lydian scale) are called "ingoing" and tend to sound what is traditionally called harmonious. As a composer expands to a universe that includes all 12 tones of the Lydian Chromatic Scale, the melody becomes "outgoing" and starts to sound more expansive and less familiar. Part of what makes Russell's theory so interesting is his contention that even he most "outgoing" music conforms to the laws of gravity. Although the relationship may be distant and thus difficult to perceive, the melody always relates to a tonic. "Just because it's night does not mean the sun is not still there," goes his argument against atonality. "The sun is still the center of gravity, holding the planets together." Russell's paradigm is also intriguing because nothing is ever "right" or "wrong," just justified and organized. Once composers and improvisers understand the structure, they are free to choose whether to be ingoing or outgoing or both. Russell maintains that every piece of music has a tonic and fits into one of three structures controlled by the laws of gravity: vertical (the melody relates to each chord), horizontal (the melody foreshadows the cadential, or tonic station, chord), or supra-vertical (horizontal, vertical, ingoing and outgoing).

Any confusion fades away as you listen to Russell's music. For the ground breaking composer of "Cuban Be/Cubano Bop," "A Bird in Igor's Yard," and "The African Game," theory and composition have become one. First published in 1953, Russell's book fundamentally changed the nature of jazz by providing an objective framework for analyzing all music. That objectivity, Russell contends, empowers creativity. Jazz history ha proved him right. His first book sparked a revolution of modal improvisation that influenced the likes of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Art Farmer and every subsequent generation. Japanese composer, the late Toru Takemitsu, made his own translation of the book and was greatly influenced by it. Miles Davis remarked to Russell, "George, if Bird were alive, this would kill him." As Russell looks to the future, he urges those who would be leaders in jazz (and, indeed, in all music) to avoid being content with interpreting and perpetuating the classics. Part of what killed Charlie Parker be maintains, was frustration that his playing was not evolving. Russell fears that the commercialism of jazz has made it more difficult for innovators because the parameters of marketable music have been so well defined by record producers. "I think we have to try to keep ourselves from becoming mechanical. We have to fight for our innate essence, keep it alive. I don't know if I've done that, but in the Concept, I know I've provided a way for other people to renew themselves."

Ultimately, musicians must achieve a balance between innovation and marketability, just as the ideal music must, In Russell's view, balance the "getting there" quality of the major mode with the "being there" nature of the Lydian mode. In fact, he suspects that higher levels of organization may dominate other disciplines and life, in general. "You can't get to unity by just the horizontal force alone. People need unity--to feel in touch with life, the world, nature." In his view, life and gravity are inexorably linked. "I don't know specifically how, but I feel it in my soul. It's all one, anyway. Music should be a part of the whole."

Excerpted from "The Gravity Man" by Alice Dragoon, NEC Notes
© by the Trustees of the New England Conservatory of Music