This is an article I wrote for Chamber Music America Magazine fourteen years ago. If you don’t know Russell’s music, please read on, he’s someone any music lover should know about. He was born 100 years ago this year and is one of my biggest influences.
I’m reminded as I reread my piece of stories I’ve heard of some of George’s struggles—for instance his music was sometimes derided by the “jazz police” for being too brainy and not swinging enough. The truth was, according to those who played with him, he had a deep swing feel, and could play the heck out of the blues. There was a trope back then that perhaps he wasn’t “black enough.” Hard to fathom.
Late in life he was finally offered a night at Jazz At Lincoln Center with his big band. At that point he was using electric bass. When informed of this JALC told him he could not perform there unless he used acoustic bass! George refused to budge and canceled the date. Talk about standing up for what you believe. I won’t even weigh in on how medieval JALC’s stance was at the time.
George Russell was one the greatest composers the world of jazz, and the world at large, has seen. I pulled out a few of his charts recently. I tried to play along with the records. Boy, what a challenge. This music is hard—there’s intricate detail, every bit of it is thought out, and yet, like all great jazz, it feels great. Here is my piece on him—from CMA magazine, 2010—it’s geared towards that audience, so hopefully not too academic.
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I have been listening to George Russell’s music lately. A recent symposium on his life piqued my curiosity, and when I began to dig deeper I discovered a trove of fascinating music. The fact that I’d missed so much of his work was dumbfounding. However, I find I am good company. Very few people seem to know the breadth of Russell’s contribution to jazz.
Russell, who died last year, achieved early acclaim in the late 1940’s with a big band chart called “Cubano Be Cubano Bop”, written for Dizzy Gillespie, and 1957’s “All About Rosie”, which is one of the few Russell pieces that circulated widely. It is an astounding work, based on an old childrens’ song. Whirling counterpoint and astringent harmonies fly holographically over a joyous, gospel-tinged swing feel, sounding as modern today as it did 50 years ago. Russell’s sound came about through a new harmonic approach he developed called “The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization.” These ideas became his life’s mission and the textbook he wrote may be what he is known best for, partially due to his thirty three years at New England Conservatory, where many a student confronted his unusual approach. It’s said that Russell’s harmonic theories are what gave rise to the modal jazz sound that Miles Davis pioneered in the late 50’s on seminal records such as “Kind of Blue.”
The early and mid-50’s was an era when the bridging of jazz and classical music was much discussed, the dawn of the so-called Third Stream Movement. A handful of jazz musicians used to congregate in Gil Evans apartment on W.55th St., as eager to decode Hindemith as Charlie Parker. Gunther Schuller, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, Max Roach and others used Evans’ place as a kind of 24- hour workshop/ clubhouse. Russell, as much as anyone, began to produce work that elevated concepts of jazz composition to new heights. However, it turns out that Russell did not become a formative figure for many jazz musicians despite his extraordinary work. Compared to contemporaries such as Miles and Coltrane, both of whom held him in high regard, Russell was relatively unheralded. Critics were enthusiastic about his early recordings, however the public did not catch on. By the 1970’s even most critics seemed to ignore his work as too challenging.
There are reasons for this: Russell refused to publish his charts so live performances of his music have been a rarity. Also, according to Gary Giddins and others, Russell’s music had a reputation, vastly undeserved, of being overly academic and intellectual. The fact that he lived in Boston, not New York, for so long may have been a factor. We can blame Americans’ distaste for innovative music— Russell’s performances in the U.S. were exceedingly rare. He achieved much more prominence in Europe, especially Scandinavia. Our heroes in the jazz world tend to be the soloists, the virtuosi, rather than the behind-the-scenes composers. His obscurity is a shame. In some ways jazz composition is still catching up to where Russell left off.
I’m particularly intrigued by music Russell wrote between 1956 and 1964 for sextet and septet. Most of what any jazz composer needs to know is locked into these masterworks. The cd’s “Ezz-thetics,” “Stratusphunk,” “Live at Bremen,” “The Outer View,” and “Jazz Workshop” are marvels of invention. Russell was not so much creating a new language (as Ornette Coleman did) but adding layers of nuance and complexity to existing norms. His formal concepts were many and varied. There are a few particulars that set this music apart:
1. His written material, sometimes through-composed, always continues beyond the “head”, the main motif, into and through the solo sections. He thinks like a big band composer in small group settings. Background horn lines frame the soloist, tempos change as solo sections progress, counterpoint is added to a mid-piece melody, and the ending theme is not always a replica of the beginning. These are practices that classical composers take for granted but are often dismissed in jazz. All of this keeps the interest level high, while never interfering with the feeling of spontaneity in the solos. Barry Galbraith’s guitar work on Jazz Workshop is particularly beguiling. Russell wrote him into the ensemble in ways that had rarely if ever been done with guitar. The interplay and connectivity between the piano (either Russell or the astonishing Bill Evans) is one of a kind.
2. His harmony is never predictable, often pantonal and spiced with dissonance. It feels familiar yet mysterious, edgy, yet with an austere beauty. The soloists do a wonderful job of developing these advanced ideas, rather than leaning on standard bebop vocabulary. The ensemble plays as if they know the music extremely well.
3. The rhythm section crackles with swinging authority. This music is not just for the brain- the body is involved. The breadth of rhythmic variation is unusual for the time. Russell creates swaths of thorny counterpoint and harmonic density yet STILL invigorates the listener with dancing rhythm. This union is at the core of what gives this great music and all jazz its unique character. It’s interesting to note the 5/4 opening section of “Ye Hypocrite, Ye Beezlebulb” on the Jazz Workshop record presages asymmetrical developments to come.
4. Short solos! Because he often uses a sextet with three soloists, sax, trumpet, and trombone, the solos are relatively brief, not just in the studio, but live. The solos seem tethered to the writing, never arbitrary. Eric Dolphy, for instance, unleashes a pithy, incantatory blast on the song “Ezz-tthetic.”
5. Russell tends to compose, and arrange episodically, like a classical composer utilizing surprising intro’s, interludes, tempo and meter changes, and unpredictable orchestration. There is a wide range of mood. An elliptical tone poem sits beside a tuneful elegy, and then gives way to an outburst of fast, furious groove music. Note, too, that he had a sense of humor. Each cd has a moment or more that is sly, like he’s winking at us.
6. No matter how far out his harmony got Russell was a master melodicist. Check out the tune “Stratusphunk.” You may be singing it all day.
Let’s take a closer look at two compositions:
“Concerto for Billy the Kid,” from Jazz Workshop (1956), begins with a buoyant, almost ecstatic jazz-Latin vamp where an amazing amount of momentum is generated from repeating hocket-like rhythms in the three horns, guitar, and piano. As more and more tension develops, all the instruments suddenly coalesce into a unison line that stops the piece short. Suddenly we are thrust into an even funkier Latin groove, and the piano begins a remarkably long line in octaves that is based on the symmetrical diminished (or octatonic) scale. Trumpet and alto take over this line, developing it further, and then each instrument chases the other as the line splits into five parts, with jagged leaps and ascending runs leading to a cadence. After two and a half minutes of written material Bill Evans (the Billy the Kid in the title) begins a punchy, lyrical, one handed solo over stop time hits from the rhythm section. He continues over a fast walking bass line, punctuating the end with off beat, two-handed chords. The solo changes are based on the jazz standard “I’ll Remember April”, a demonstration of Russell’s belief that all innovation must be rooted in tradition. A trumpet solo ensues with a flow of background harmony in the horns, and before we know it-poof! There is a brief recap of part of the melody and the tune is done. It all goes by so quickly one wants to immediately play the piece again! Russell spares us what has become an enormous cliché in jazz, namely that the head out is the same as the head in.
In 1960 Russell produced a full-length work called “Jazz in the Space Age,” a 6 movement suite written for a 13 piece group that leapt away from convention. It doesn’t sound like Ellington or even Mingus, essentially defining its own sound world. It is organized like a large chamber music ensemble piece, influenced strongly by composer Stefan Wolpe, who Russell briefly studied with. Movement one starts with skittering, out of time percussion sounds akin to Varese, and then a brisk nine-beat rhythmic cycle enters with bass and drums. Soon we hear pianists Bill Evans AND Paul Bley simultaneously improvising together over the vamp, using thoroughly modernist harmony. The piece goes back and forth between these two poles, “spacey” percussion and sparring eruptions of sound from the pianos, with the six piece horn section only rarely involved, mostly commenting on the proceedings rather than leading the way. Anyone who feels that odd tempos, unorthodox forms, and pantonal harmonies are a recent development in jazz should check this cd out. Hearing the vastly contrasting personalities of Bley and Evans merge as if the same person is alone worth the price of admission.
Russell stated that the key to success in his approach to merging classical and jazz practices was to make even the most complex notated material sounds as if it was improvised. This is an extraordinary goal, and goes to the heart of what makes this music so important. Even the most abstract formal ideas were balanced by the joy of a beguiling groove. Russell was one of the rare jazz composers who continued to write for and perform with larger groups, despite the diminishment of performing opportunities. He never wrote trio or quartet music just so he could tour, where he would have been forced into the role of featured soloist, where the layers of counterpoint, the three or four part harmonies were sacrificed in favor of a more improvised, less notated, setting. Don’t miss his cds for twenty or more musicians such as The African Game, New York New York, and Vertical Forms.
What needs to happen so that an individual might write music as complex as Russell’s, for a seven or a ten piece group, and be afforded the opportunity to perform multiple times without losing thousands of dollars? Then and now jazz composers are forced by economics to limit group size to trios or quartet. Since our music depends on live performance for its growth, this is an enormous problem. Can you imagine a world where classical music was almost exclusively made by quartets— with almost the same instrumentation every time?
In the meantime, be like George Russell- write what you hear no matter the consequences.
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