George Russell

For souls loved by nature...

[The Concept] was the great path-breaker for Miles Davis and John Coltrane's modality.
- Joachim Berendt, The Jazz Book

Last month, Mats Gustafsson was back in Chicago playing at Constellation for Na Ja: A Peter Brötzmann Memorial Concert. A highlight of the afternoon portion of the concert was his solo performance of Brötzmann’s “card pieces”.

Scheduled as a duo, Mars Williams passing less than a month earlier made it a touching performance. You can see that performance at the 1:14:15 mark of this video. I liked Gustafsson’s flute playing. When I complimented him on that afterward, he told me it was his first instrument and wanted to get back to it more.

I first saw Mats Gustafsson in Chicago during the early 1990s, performing with Ken Vandermark and later with the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Octet/Tentet at places like the Empty Bottle and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Since then, he has developed into one of the real pioneers of modern improvised music. Just listen to the 40-plus musician-strong Echoes, his latest Fire! Orchestra album, released last year on the Norwegian Rune Grammofon label:

This is the Fire! Orchestra’s best release so far and one of the best jazz albums of 2023. From the album, here is ECHOES: Forest Without Shadows:

When I listen to this album, with the deep bass grooves and electronics, I hear George Russell’s Electronic Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature - in particular, the full orchestra version recorded in Sweden on October 6, 1970, released by Sonet in 1971 on The Essence of George Russell:

About his Sonata, Russell wrote:

The wedding of non-electronic pan-stylism to electronic pan-stylism was meant to convey the cultural implosion occurring among the earth’s population, their coming together. Also, it is meant to suggest that man, in the face of technology, must confront technology and attempt to humanize it: using it to enrich his collective soul… not only his purse… to explore inner, as well as outer space.

Russell’s idea that man must confront technology and use it to enrich the collective soul is interesting but not new. For example, the possibilities of electronic instruments came to the U.S. in the early 1930s, with the theremin and Ondes Martenot, two very strange instruments and tricky to play. Perhaps for that reason, they enjoyed a certain vogue during their time. However, the real breakthrough came with the invention of high-fidelity magnetic tape recorders during WWII. With this new technology, you could record whatever interested you and then transform the sounds any way you wanted. The first person to manipulate tape in this manner was Pierre Schaeffer in 1948. You can read more about this here:

Pierre Schaeffer

Russell’s Electronic Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature represents another experiment in the possibilities of electronic instruments on that Big River called Jazz.

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If you look hard enough on the internet, you can find out a lot about George Russell, yet he is still somewhat unknown.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1923, the son of a music professor, he grew up in a musical community. His next-door neighbor was Jimmy Mundy, who wrote for Benny Goodman and became one of the first black arrangers to make the big time.

Interestingly, Mundy wrote the song that became Trav’lin’ Light, recorded in 1942 by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra for Capitol Records. As the story goes, when Whiteman’s band arrived at the studio for a recording session, Trummy Young brought along his girlfriend, Billie Holiday. Songwriter Johnny Mercer, one of the co-founders of the new label, discovered that Young had a newly written tune with him. Mercer quickly wrote lyrics for it and gave it a title so Holiday could record it with the band. Here’s Lady Day with Whiteman’s orchestra:

This recording was also re-issued on V-Disc 286 in October 1944 by the U.S. War Department and shipped overseas for military personnel.

You can read more about V-Discs here:

V-Disc

Now back to Russell…

By 15, Russell was earning a living as a jazz drummer in Cincinnati night clubs. At 17, he earned a scholarship to Wilberforce University and joined the Wilberforce Collegians band, which boasts Ben Webster, Snooky Young, Frank Foster, and Benny Carter among alumni. Shortly after his 20th birthday, he left school to play drums in Benny Carter’s band. But soon he gave up performing to concentrate on composing and wrote charts for both Carter’s and Earl Hines’ bands. In New York in the late 1940s, he became part of the legendary circle of musicians, including Miles Davis, John Lewis, and Charlie Parker, who regularly gathered at Gil Evans’ apartment to discuss composing and arranging. It was here that Parker and Davis provoked Russell’s research into ancient and non-Western genres, including European plainsong, chants, and other diatonic forms of tonality. These studies resulted in his investigation of a tonal system allowing improvisers a more full expression within compositions.

It was a remark Miles Davis made when Russell asked him his musical aim that set Russell on his life’s work. Davis told him he wanted to learn all the changes; however, since Davis obviously knew all the changes, Russell surmised that he wanted to learn a new way to relate to chords. According to Richard Williams in his 2009 book The Blue Moment, “[Russell] embarked on research into the relationship between chords and scales that took him back to the ancient Greeks before leading him to a harmonic theory that would enable Davis to dismantle the harmonic boundaries within which jazz had enclosed itself. Out of this philosophy of tonality came ‘vertical polymodality’, in Russell’s phrase: a means of expanding the number of notes available to improvisors.”

Davis was one of the first musicians to embrace Russell’s new concept, which he applied on Kind Of Blue. In his autobiography, Davis reflected on this historic 1959 album, “I was trying to do one thing and ended up doing something else.” Williams described that “something else” as “…a realization of his wish to get away from and go beyond the brash athleticism of bebop.”

One of the tools Davis used to break away from bebop was Russell’s The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation. First described in a self-published pamphlet in 1953. Here is the expanded 1959 edition, released by Concept Publishing Company:

I don’t pretend to understand Russell’s Lydian Concept, so I look to others to help me understand it. For example, I think Robert Palmer’s liner notes to Capitol’s CD release of Kind Of Blue helps me understand Russell’s influence:

Consider the circumstances. Miles took his musicians into the studio for the first of two sessions for Kind Of Blue, in March, 1959. At the time, "modal" jazz--in which the improviser was given a scale or series of scales (or "modes") as material to improvise from, rather than a sequence of chords or harmonies--was not an entirely new idea. Miles himself had tried something similar in 1958 with his tune "Milestones" (also known as "Miles") and when he and Gil Evans were recasting the songs from Gershwin's Porgy And Bess around that time, they rewrote "Summertime" to include a long modal vamp, with no chord changes. Originally, the idea for this kind of playing was the concept of composer George Russell, but his program for "modal jazz" came imbedded in an elaborate, all-embracing musical/philosophical theory, the "Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization." Miles saw the approach, at least in part, as a way of drastically simplifying modern jazz, which was then pushing against the outer limits of chordal complexity. "The music has gotten thick," Davis complained in a 1958 interview for The Jazz Review.

Here’s another example from a 1986 interview with Stan Wooley’s JazzJournal International in which Russell shared this about his Lydian Concept:

Well, I don't like to brag, I think it made contemporary music, and I don't mean just jazz, conscious of modes. It introduced modal consciousness in terms which no one was thinking about, certainly not jazz musicians nor, as far as I know, symphonic musicians. The Concept simply codified the modes and introduced chord-scale unity. In other words, for every chord there's a scale of unity and this gives the jazz musician greater resources.

Miles (Davis) picked up on the idea first and he popularised it. He used it on the piece called Milestones which proved very successful and then came the Kind Of Blue album which really established it.

Miles Davis wasn’t the only jazz musician interested in Russell’s new concept, as you can see from this 1961 postcard to Russell from Eric Dolphy:

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Here’s one more for the road. In 1964, Russell went to Scandinavia and started to develop compositions he called “vertical form” pieces. Over the years he composed six. In 1968, he wrote vertical form III, Electronic Sonata For Souls Loved By Nature - 1968, highlighted above. It was first recorded by his sextet on April 28, 1969 near Oslo, Norway and released by Flying Dutchman in 1969. It was later released by Strata-East Records in 1976 and again by Soul Note in 1985. Here’s that version:

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In 1969, at the request of his old friend Gunther Schuller, Russell returned to the States to teach at the newly created Jazz Department at the New England Conservatory where Schuller was President. Russell continued to compose and perform and his 1984 Blue Note release The African Game earned two Grammy nominations in 1985. Robert Palmer described it as "one of the most important new releases of the past several decades."

I’ve always been a big admirer of George Russell. Unfortunately, I never got to see him perform. He died of complications from Alzheimer's disease in Boston on July 27, 2009. He was 86 years old. I think his work stands head-to-head with Arnold Schoenberg's "liberation" of the twelve-tone scale, the polytonal work of Stravinsky, and the ethnic scale explorations of Bartok. If you've listened to jazz during the last fifty years, you've heard a good deal of George Russell's ideas. He is one of the 20th century's great originals and one of its bravest innovators, who extended the innovations of bebop rather than simply bypassing them, as with Free Jazz.

Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll head back to Chicago and dig our paddles in to explore the world of Eddie Harris, the first of a two part journey.

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