[Dixielandjazz] George Russell Obit.

[Stephen G Barbone]

Composer George Russell was little know among jazz audiences and trad  
jazz musicians. But, he changed the way post bop jazz was played,  
using the Lydian scale (mode) as a model for improvisation. "Kind of  
Blue", the 1959 Miles Davis album, is perhaps, the seminal work of  
"modal" jazz, based upon Mr Russell's lydian Concepts. It is the top  
selling jazz album in the world.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


July 30, 2009 - NY TIMES - By Ben Ratliff
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.”

Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.