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Remembering George Russell

I just heard that the jazz composer George Russell died 2 days ago. George was a very significant person in my musical life, and I’m sorry that he’s not with us any more.

I first heard his music in 1974 or so, when I was 14 or 15 years old and living in London. I would occasionally hang out with my father’s friend and colleague Erik Edvardsen, an electronic engineer. Erik lived in Brixton (which meant I got to go on the then-new Victoria Line to visit him, kind of a treat) and he had an adventurous taste in music. Over time, he lent me a whole bunch of albums which I took home and listened to. The ones I liked a lot, I’d record on cassette. I still have a lot of those cassettes, although I don’t have a way to play them now.

Some of the music he lent me I found inaccessible at first, and George Russell’s music fell into this category. Something about it held my attention though, and kind of riveted me to my spot and forced me to listen. I think Erik had a few of the early 60s albums in there — Stratusphunk, Sextet at the Five Spot. Anyway, I kept listening, and I began to connect with it, to the point where I didn’t really want to hear anything else for a while. Then I started getting hold of his other recordings. George’s writing became then, and still is, some of my favorite music of all time. It has a startling freshness, a willingness to explore, an openness to tonal possibilities, that to me has rarely been equaled in jazz or in music of any genre. And for all of its modernity, George’s music is never dry or academic: it’s emotional, hard-swinging music that has a lot of feeling. Another thing: there is nothing extra or gratuitous in it. Everything that is there is there for a reason, and you can directly experience those reasons by listening.

A couple of years later, as I continued studying and playing music while attending high school in Lexington, Mass., I learned about his “Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization” — a system of thinking about harmonic and tonal relationships that changed the thinking of a lot of well-known jazz musicians from Miles to Coltrane to… well, a whole lot of people. I knew that George Russell lived in Cambridge and somehow screwed up my nerve to look him up in the phone book and call him up. I remember that it was kind of a weird stilted conversation, because I didn’t really know what I wanted to say to my idol; I guess this makes me kind of a teenage George Russell stalker. I think I stammered out something about wanting to find his book on the Lydian Concept, and he got me off the phone quickly and gracefully by telling me I could find his book at the Busy Bee bookstore (if I remember the name right), which was on Hemenway St. near Berklee College of Music. I drove into Boston and bought it immediately.

The book was a revelation to me. It instantly unified and clarified of a whole current of confused and half-formed thoughts that had been running through my brain about scales, chords, and above all, tonality: the concept of music “being in a key”. A whole lot of junk dropped away and what seemed like a Rube Goldberg apparatus of chord symbols and modes turned into a much simpler way of looking at things.

There’s a lot that could be and has been said about George’s theory, and I’ll try to use my own language to hint at what he did that was so important to me and to others. In essence, George had a way of considering sets of tones (like notes in a melody, in a chord, or in a scale) as intervallic structures. He had rules for what one might call “orienting” these structures: determining what tones in a structure act as a harmonic foundation for the others, and how those other tones relate to the foundation. He also laid out some rules for how tonal structures related to each other in terms of a kind of “distance”. These rules had a way of reducing myriad musical ideas and variations into a much smaller number of essential forms that could be thought about much more easily, and could then be used to generate even more ideas. They corresponded in an obvious way to inner musical perceptions familiar to jazz improvisors. George’s concepts anticipated later work in tonal perception by theorists inside the academic community like Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendorff: work that has yet to catch up with George’s theories, if measured by its practical value to musicians. I think the fact that academics did not openly acknowledge or build on George’s work left a bad taste in his mouth, although it was hard to be sure.

Fast forward two more years: In 1979, I left Wesleyan after a dismal year of liberal arts education for the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, to study piano and composition and make a musical life for myself. The fact that George taught there was no small part of this decision. I knew I’d be able to take his class (which I did) and that I’d have a chance to study composition privately with him (which I also did).

I found out some important things by studying music with George. I did learn a bunch more about his system of thinking, but perhaps the most surprising and hardest-to-accept lesson was that the things I loved the most about his music did not come from his theory, were not acknowledged by him in any explicit way, and could not be learned from studying with him. There is a kind of essential pride in his music, a matter-of-fact willingness to make a musical statement boldly, asserting itself according to its own musical logic, in fact, defining the very terms of that logic. This pride, this courage, the simultaneous respect for and departure from convention — they can be married with the materials of his theory, but they are not by demanded by that theory (and do not require its adoption). These qualities are there in his work and they were there in his life. George was fond of saying, “You play off the top of your knowledge.” In other words, knowledge determines your starting point for creation, but where you finally end up is the result of playing — and I mean, literally, engaging in unconscious, joyous play — with that knowledge.

Thank you, George Russell, for everything you did. Your thinking and your artistry had a huge impact on me. I will miss you.

Here is the melodic statement from George’s Stratusphunk, one of the first pieces of his that I remember hearing. It’s a simple and economical theme, moving around only a little bit. Nevertheless, in its economy, it generates an entire world of surprising implications when heard against the surrounding blues harmony.

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