Appendix

George Russell’s long stay in the hospital during the mid-1940s turned out to be a blessing because it gave him more time, the thing he needed most, to embark on his mental journey into the heart of music.

As Russell explains it: “Miles had said he wanted to learn all the chords. So I decided to look first at the major chord and play the major scale against it. The major scale did not sound related to the major chord, in the sense that it was in unity with it. The F natural in the C-major scale was definitely the note that made the major scale sound a duality. It sounded two tetrachords: C-D-E and F, of which F was a duality. And then I started to play the Lydian scale right on the piano in St. Joseph’s Hospital solarium. I would sit there playing, surrounded by fifty patients smoking cigarettes. They had TB, but they were smoking!

“It was there in the solarium that I began to play the Lydian scale. I took the second tetrachord at the G-major scale: G-A-B-C, in a C-major scale. I said to myself, ‘That sounds the unity.’ Then, logically, I just ran the second tetrachord at the G-major scale: D-E-F-G, and I said, ‘Damn! The major scale sounds more of the unity with C than the C-major scale!’ Because at least the D-E-F sharp and G resolves into a tone that’s in a C-major scale, C-F-G. And the scale just absolutely sounded closer to the tonality of a C-major scale.

“Then I began looking at the modes of the G-major scale. The Ionian mode was G-A-B-C-D-E-F sharp-G. The Dorian was D-E-F-G-A-B-C sharp-G and A. The Phrygian, E-F-G-A-B-C sharp-G-A-B-C. Instead of telling musicians, ‘When you see a C-major chord, play a G-major scale,’ I could say, ‘Play a Lydian scale.’ I lifted the Lydian scale of G out of the G-major scale and put it on the tonic of C, which I called the ‘C Lydian scale’ forever after. It is a scale of unity with the C-major scale.

“Now that proves that a ladder of fifths is the strongest—the first interval, or the first tonically based interval to enter into the overtone series. In the overtone series, you have one C and then an octave C, which is the same note, and then a fifth of C to G. With the tonic of an interval fifth, you can go anywhere in the world and play a fifth. You can ask people to sing the note that sounds the tonical integrity of a fifth, and they are going to sing the lower tone. If you take a ladder of fifths: C-G-D-A-F sharp, the scale would be C-D-E-F natural-G-A-B. It would sound completely as if it has little to do with the unity of a C-major chord. It is not unity; it is supposed to be a duality. It is supposed to resolve to C.

“Traditional European harmony overlooked a lot. Harmony was viewed in a progressional manner, going from one chord to the five-chord and back to the one. That was considered ‘harmony.’ But the dictionary says that ‘harmony is unity.’ People completely overlooked the individual chord as a viable and individual entity that has unity and could evolve into a Lydian chromatic scale, which is all of equal temperaments.

“Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was recently analyzed in some bullshit way, like ‘Oh, this is the first theme, and then he repeats the second in bars three and four’ and so on. But what is really going on in the music? Analysis like this has no name for it.

“Ornette Coleman asked me in 1959, ‘What’s the tonic?’ That was a hell of a question, but back then I could not answer it. Now I would say, ‘It’s the sun; it is the center of tonal organization in a Lydian chromatic scale. It is like gravity.’

“The Concept defined the meaning of ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ playing. These terms depend on how the musician relates to the chord of the moment. The vertical player depends on the chord of the moment to access a scale that will enable him to sound the genre of the chord in an artful way. The horizontal player depends not on the chord of the moment, but rather, the chord to which chords are resolving. The non-final chords resolve to a final, and the horizontal player depends on that final, of which he picks the scale to sound over. Musicians have always chosen styles that are either vertical or horizontal. Out of a certain kind of snobbery, Coleman Hawkins, for example, liked the vertical. The vertical players had to be reasonably sophisticated musically. That went well with the bigger cities in the country—New York, Chicago, and so forth. Horizontal playing had to do with the cotton fields, and the black interpretation of English ballads. That is where the blues come from. Lester Young was the grandfather of the horizontal, and he also played vertically in a beautiful way. Bird personified the melding of horizontal and vertical.

“Western traditional music theory overlooked the vertical aspect of music, which means it left out one-third of music. The Concept is the first theory to address that missing third. No reason was ever given for why an F-major chord resolves very nicely to a C-major chord. The Concept does, because it is based on gravity. Everything I say is provable.”