I’ve long been fascinated by the so-called minor players in the history of jazz, particularly those whose influence is disproportionate to their popular renown. With a name like George Allan Russell, you might expect a quietly spoken, pipe-smoking clerk in a council office, not a quietly spoken, pipe-smoking composer, arranger, theorist and educator. Much like Woody Allen’s character, the ubiquitous but shadowy Zelig who was there at so many key moments in history, George Russell was a kind of éminence grise of modern jazz, the composer who helped deliver Cubop or Afro-Cuban jazz in the late ‘40s, and the theorist behind Miles Davis’s and John Coltrane’s experiments with modal jazz in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.
Russell’s life story is an interesting one. He started off as a drummer (with the Boy Scout Drum and Bugle Corps in his native Cincinnati), but his whole career path was thrown off kilter by a diagnosis of tuberculosis when he attempted to enlist in the marines during World War II. During the first of his two lengthy stays in hospital, a fellow patient taught him the basics of harmony. Following this revelation, he sold his first composition and arrangement, ‘New World’, to the great Benny Carter. He then joined Carter’s band as drummer, only to be replaced by Max Roach, whose brilliance convinced the young Russell that maybe he wasn’t cut out to be a jazz drummer. On moving to New York, reputedly after hearing Monk’s ‘Round Midnight’, he fell in with a crowd that included Roach, Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan that would gather in Gil Evans’ basement flat on 55th Street. Nine of the young innovators would go on to make up the little big band responsible for Birth of the Cool. Although Russell wasn’t part of that eventual Miles Davis Nonet, the band explored the kind of territory in which the young composer revelled and you can hear echoes of his own signature sound in some of the arrangements.
During a second spell in hospital for TB, this one an eternity of 16 months between 1945 and 1946, he kept his musical mind active by working out The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, which he published eventually in 1953. I don’t profess to understand its technicalities, but it postulated that all music is based on ‘the tonal gravity of the [seven-note musical scale] Lydian mode’. Trumpeter Art Farmer contended that it opened the door ‘to countless means of melodic expression’, and the writer J.E. Berendt suggested that ‘Russell’s concept of improvisation, “Lydian” in terms of medieval church scales yet chromatic in the modern sense, was the great path-breaker for Miles Davis’s and John Coltrane’s modality.’ It was the first theory to explore the vertical relationship between chords and scales and perhaps neither Kind of Blue nor Giant Steps, two of the most preeminent (modal) jazz albums ever recorded, would have been created without the conceptual work of George Russell.
Back on the streets of 1940s New York, Russell was commissioned to write something for Dizzy Gillespie’s new ground-breaking orchestra. The resulting ‘Cubano Be/Cubano Bop’ would be forever associated with Dizzy, his conguero Chano Pozo and the birth of Cubop. In 1949, putting his Lydian theory into practice, he wrote ‘Bird in Igor’s Yard’, fusing elements of Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinski, and no doubt capturing the imagination of young musical explorers like Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
For all the innovative work that he was doing behind the scenes, like many a pioneer, Russell struggled to turn a passion into a career. He self-published his Lydian Chromatic Concept and took a series of odd jobs in the 1950s until the release of his first record as leader, The Jazz Workshop. This may well have been the last album I listened to while under the influence of a mind-expanding herb and, even allowing for the inevitable tendency for hyperbole, I was transfixed by the intricacy of the playing and the arrangements for ‘Smalltet’ on numbers like ‘Ezz-Thetic’, ‘Round Johnny Rondo’ and the Bill Evans feature, ‘Concerto for Billy the Kid’.
The apogee of Russell’s small-group work was probably 1961’s Ezz-thetics, but it was his marvellous second album, New York, N.Y., a paean to his adopted city and featuring poetic commentary by Jon Hendricks (‘Get to the wicket/Buy your-self a ticket…’), that cemented my love of Russell’s music and demonstrated his capabilities in what seems his natural context of a big band. For the rest of a surprisingly prolific career, Russell worked mainly in this context – illustrated here by a live version of part of his Grammy-nominated album for Blue Note in 1985, The African Game. As was often the case with Russell’s music, the band itself is more a multi-faceted instrument for the arranger than a conglomeration of individual stars (apart from Andy Sheppard in this case, the featured Bristol-based tenor saxophonist who would lead his own successful big band, the Big Co-motion).
Like so many American jazz musicians in the 1960s, during the primacy of rock, Russell became frustrated with the lack of opportunities and acclaim. As did Ben Webster, Dexter Gordon and others, he found his way to Scandinavia. Between 1964 and 1969, he lived and worked in Sweden and Norway, where he was championed by the Swedish Radio director of jazz, trumpeter Bosse Broberg. Quite apart from several new commissions he gave Russell (including such catchy-sounding pieces as the Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature), Broberg recorded just about everything that the composer wrote. Russell taught his Lydian Concept in Stockholm and toured Europe with Scandinavian musicians, working with such future stars as saxophonist Jan Garbarek, guitarist Terje Rypdal and drummer Jon Christensen.
Back in the U.S.A., he took a permanent teaching job at the New England Conservatory in Boston that allowed him intermittently to lead and tour with various big bands. He toured Britain on at least two occasions and it was probably this version of his Living Time Orchestra with Andy Sheppard that I recorded on cassette tape from a Radio 3 concert at a time when I was storing up cinema and music culture for France Profonde.
George Russell’s music contained elements of jazz, blues, gospel, rock and latterly African music, and his 1983 album, The African Game, incorporated all such elements in dramatising the evolution of humanity in the African cradle. Like his namesake Bertrand, Russell was a bit of a philosopher. He called himself a jazz evolutionary rather than a revolutionary: his music always sounded modern and sometimes ‘out there’, but he never negated the jazz tradition, he suggested, he merely added dimensions to it.
It seems particularly cruel that this deep thinker who had such a profound influence on so many of his own and later generations should die at 86 of complications linked to Alzheimer’s Disease.
