4 The Lydian Odyssey of George Russell

Earlier I mentioned that the four key musicians responsible for the creation of Kind of Blue were Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and George Russell. Many of you are probably baffled by my inclusion of this last name. After all, George Russell does not play on the album, he is not the composer or co-composer of any of the tunes, and he is not even mentioned in the original liner notes. Yet Russell is in many ways as important to the making of Kind of Blue as the other musicians. Without him the album would never have been created.

Russell’s contribution to jazz is unprecedented. Although he has composed and arranged some of the most fascinating and powerful music of the modern era, his real lifework is not as an instrumentalist or composer-arranger; it is as a theorist, and it is in this light that Russell views the concept he has been developing for more than half a century (as I write in the year 2000). He is the author of the only major theory to arise out of jazz—though he does not consider himself the inventor of his theory so much as its discoverer. A “jazz theorist” may suggest the image of someone who has spent all his time in an ivory tower, but Russell’s theory has had an enormous, concrete effect on the evolution of jazz. Earlier we discussed the “subversion” of Western musical instruments by African American jazz musicians such as Miles Davis, Coleman Hawkins, and especially Thelonious Monk. George Russell has gone even further—his theory subverts the basic structure of Western music. Russell approaches the fundamentals of Western musical philosophy from the perspective of jazz. As the authors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD put it: “Like all great theoreticians, Russell worked analytically rather than synthetically, basing his ideas on how jazz actually was and not on how it could conform with traditional principles of Western harmony. Russell’s fundamental concern was the relationship between formal scoring and improvisation, giving the first the freedom of the second, freeing the second from being esoteric, ‘outside’ some supposed norm.” Moreover, his theory has not only influenced jazz but has also strongly affected composers in other idioms as well.

If the name of Russell’s theory—The Lydian Chromatic Concept for Tonal Organization—sounds dry and academic, just think of the music that it made possible: for example, in addition to Kind of Blue, there is Bill Evans’s beautiful “Re: Someone I Knew,” Coltrane’s A Love Supreme as well as his famous version of “My Favorite Things,” and Russell’s own classic works, such as “All About Rosie.” It is simply impossible to imagine the jazz of the past forty years or so, let alone the creation of Kind of Blue, without the contributions of George Russell.

Russell’s role in jazz history is unlike that of any other great innovator. Significant bursts of development in jazz have emerged from years of evolution rather than from preexisting theories. For example, only after bebop had become a fully mature style did anyone attempt to define it or develop a theory for playing it. Similarly, it was not until long after Ornette Coleman had been playing his unique style that he came forth with a theory to explain it—his so-called harmolodics. George Russell’s theory, on the other hand, exemplified a very different process: George was something of a prophet in that he foresaw a time when inevitable changes would take place in jazz if it continued along the same evolutionary path. He knew that jazz was concerned with two issues of the soul and heart: individual expression and freedom. And he knew that eventually jazz musicians would need to be liberated from the bonds of Western harmonic structure. Yet for many years Russell was a lone prophet in the wilderness. He simply had to wait until jazz had grown sufficiently and found itself compelled to turn to his theory for the sake of the music’s continued evolution.

As you might imagine, the life of a jazz theorist and composer is even more difficult than that of a jazz instrumentalist, and George has had a bumpy road since he first became a professional musician in the 1940s. Like so many jazz musicians, Russell certainly paid his dues, and like the music of the best jazzmen, his theory has grown over the years, becoming more expansive and continually gaining depth and universality. The theory is now as much an expression of George Russell the man as the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane is an expression of them. Yet despite his importance, Russell is an obscure figure in his own country, while he is something of a celebrity in Europe and Japan. It is scandalous that he has received so little attention here, especially given the enormous popularity of albums such as Kind of Blue and Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

George’s unceasing dedication to his theory is inspiring in this day and age. He has not tried to become rich from his theory, insisting on publishing it himself rather than selling it to a commercial publisher. His tenacity is reminiscent of such other American mavericks as Charles Ives or Harry Partch. Given Russell’s singular place in jazz history, his odyssey is especially fascinating.

George Russell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 23, 1923. His biological father was a white professor of music at Oberlin College; his mother was an African American student at the college. She was very light-skinned and came from a wealthy black family in Kentucky. They actually owned an entire town. George comments: “I was adopted a few days after I was born. My mother’s family was very conscious of its social status, and in those times it [having a baby out of wedlock] was a disgrace. They insisted that their daughter put her baby up for adoption.”

Russell was adopted by a middle-class black family. His adoptive father was a cook on the B&O Railroad. His adoptive mother was one of the first black nurses to graduate from Meharry Medical College. Both of his parents loved music; his father, when he was home, delighted in playing the piano and singing. George’s mother worked for a doctor who had a practice in their largely black middle-class neighborhood. (It is interesting to note that the doctor was an outspoken advocate of birth control despite the laws of that period.)

Because both his parents worked, George spent most of his childhood at the homes of neighbors or at a nearby boardinghouse, which proved propitious for the direction his life would eventually take. George recalls, “The boardinghouse that I stayed in housed mainly musicians. They’d have their instruments on the floor of their rooms, and they would practice all the time.”

George’s interest in music accelerated when his mother took him on boat rides in vessels that came up from New Orleans. The boats, on which jazz bands regularly played, would travel the Mississippi River to St. Louis, then they would take the Ohio River and go up to Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. “So my mother took me on the boats, where we heard all these bands. Eventually we heard the great Noble Sisle, probably the greatest name in the history of American music! I was tickled pink when the drummer for the great Noble Sisle fell for my cousin, who was staying with us for a while. I really got interested in the drums from listening to Sisle play. Then when I became a Boy Scout, I was a member of the drum and bugle corps and that, in turn, led me to playing the drums for a neighborhood band we called the Rhythm Club.”

At this time, Cincinnati was a hub of musical activity. As Russell remembers, “Cincinnati was a hell of a music center. A lot of it had to do with the boats, which were transporting various bands. Cincinnati was called the ‘graveyard of bands’ because the audience had a reputation for being so demanding. They demanded that the band be damned good.”

One of Russell’s musical associates was the nephew of the great pianist Art Tatum; and George often had the opportunity to hear Tatum play. That in itself must have been a musical education for George, especially given Tatum’s harmonic precocity. The famous Mills Brothers had ties to the neighborhood and often rehearsed there, too. George also got to know Jimmy Mundy, who was a tenor saxophonist but became more famous as a composer and arranger. (He wrote several charts for Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, and others.) Mundy perceived Russell’s fascination with music and told him, “George, you know you belong in music.”

George found high school to be a discouraging experience. Why? Because the high school he attended was integrated—an incredible irony! “That was the first time I realized I was colored, and there was one insult after another. I remember one incident while I was singing in the school choir. We were invited to sing at the YMCA and then swim in the pool. But they took the two of us who were black aside and told us that we could not go swimming after we sang. Most of my teachers discouraged me. My music teacher even told me that I would never make it as a professional musician.”

But George went on to play drums in a band made up of fellow students that was led by a pianist-composer named Harold Gaston. By the time he was fourteen, he was playing drums in a local beer joint behind a female singer. Increasingly he lost interest in school, and when he was about fifteen he was expelled for dressing “outlandishly.” His life as an iconoclast was just beginning.

George never had any formal musical training. For a while he studied with the church organist, Professor Rider: “He was very strict; he was more German than black! He would crack you on the knuckles when you made a mistake.”

But most of Russell’s education came from simply absorbing the music he heard all around him: “I found myself being really captivated and fascinated with the jazz that I heard back then. I listened a lot to Jimmy Mundy, Jimmy Crawford, Count Basie, and Papa Jo [Jo Jones, Basie’s great drummer at the time]. They were on the jukebox, and the kids sang the tunes, all the solos; we wanted to hear anything that was new. I told Professor Rider that if I had anything to say, it had to be said my way, something personal to me. I lived in a very sophisticated neighborhood. Jack White, one of those early bandleaders who did not have any profound influence on jazz, listened to me and taught me. Lena Horne lived in my neighborhood, and I learned from her, too.”

It is pertinent that George Russell never went to a conservatory or took formal lessons. If he had, he would have approached music from the point of view of the European tradition rather than that of jazz. Certainly it would have been more difficult for him to rethink the basic concepts of Western music if early on he had been trained in a conservatory. He did not even take lessons to play the drums, yet as a youth he was able to get jobs as a drummer.

If there had been any doubts in Russell’s mind about devoting his life to music, they were erased while he was still a teenager: “I was working at a department store and got a letter from Wilberforce University saying that they would give me a scholarship to play the drums for the Wilberforce Collegians, the college orchestra, if I was interested. Back then the black universities scouted for jazz musicians just as they scout for athletes now. About 1938 or ’39 I was at Wilberforce playing in their band. We traveled everywhere because we went along with the football team. For example, when our team played football against the black university of Kentucky, we also had a battle of the bands between the Wilberforce Collegians and the Kentucky State Collegians. There were players who would become big names, like Ernie Wilkins or Willy Cook [who played with Count Basie], and Lucky Thompson. Luck, the first time I met him, was with the Alabama State Collegians.”

Russell points out that Wilberforce is historically important to jazz because, among other reasons, so many great musicians have played in the Collegians at one time or another. Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Horace Henderson—the list goes on and on. Russell recalls: “Ben Webster was in that band at one time. I met Ben Webster years later in Denmark. He was pretty rough when he was drunk, and he had been drinking when I met him. He looked at me and said, ‘Who’s this nigger?’ I said, ‘Ben, I went to Wilberforce.’ He said, ‘You were at Wilberforce?’ And then everything was all right.

“I was with the band for one semester when they fired me. So I went back to Cincinnati and got my time together. Wilberforce had hired another drummer, but he was so bad that they begged me to come back. I wound up playing with them for two years. But in 1941 or so I was called up for the draft. I went down for my physical with this pianist who played in the band. We talked with a Marine colonel there and volunteered for the Marine Corps if they would let us play in the Marine band. The recruiter was very sweet, very nice. But when I suddenly heard my name being called, they told me I had been rejected.”

The reason Russell was rejected would change his life in a variety of ways: he had tuberculosis. “I guess it was kind of inevitable. After all, I had been going to school at Wilberforce as well as working from twelve to eight in the evening. And before that, I had been working two jobs while I was in Cincinnati. I would play drums at night, get home by three, and then get up at six-thirty for my other job. And while I was living at Wilberforce, I was staying in a place with no heat. I began to spit up blood.”

George was hospitalized, which became a turning point in his life for reasons other than his health: “Harold Gaston, the bass player, was also a patient. In that hospital he taught me the rudiments of chords, after which I wrote my first arrangement without a piano and sold it.

“At the hospital the lunchroom where we ate was segregated. Harold and I and a couple of other patients began to rebel about this situation. They put one TB patient in jail for doing this. And then there was something else. One of the nurses liked to cavort with the male patients. She was discovered in a compromising situation in our room, so the head of the hospital told us, ‘It’s time for you to go.’ I had to go, but I was not cured. I was still sick.”

Both Russell and his friend Gaston got jobs playing at a downtown club. In this environment they disregarded their doctors’ warnings and smoke and drank alcohol. Harold Gaston got sicker and eventually died.

Then Russell got a big break—he was hired by Benny Carter. At that time Carter was considered one of the greatest alto saxophonists in jazz. He also played clarinet and was even a fine trumpet player. Carter had a number of excellent musicians in his band, and for Russell this was just the opportunity he needed: “I traveled all over with that band. That is where I met a lot of young players. For example, [trombonist] J. J. Johnson was in that band. Finally we wound up in New York City. I was a steady drummer; I had a good beat. But I wasn’t a show drummer, and at times Benny really wanted that. So Benny told me he would keep me until he found a drummer who could fill the whole bill.

“As soon as I hit New York, I went into one of the little clubs on Fifty-second Street and listened to some music. It blew me away.” The band Russell heard was Charlie Parker’s. It was the first time Russell had heard bebop; he was thrilled by the new music and realized that New York was where he belonged.

Shortly after this experience, Russell went to Washington, D.C., with the Carter band. “It was at the Howard Theater where Benny called me and said, ‘I hate to tell you, but I have to let you go.’ And I asked, ‘Why?’ He told me, ‘I have a new drummer. His name is Max Roach.’ So I went back to Cincinnati and did a little work around there. While I was there, I went to hear the Ellington band play in Dayton. On the train back to Cincinnati, all I could think about was the figure of Ellington standing in the train. The car was filled with soldiers and members of his band, and there was Duke standing the whole way. When the band got to Cincinnati, a number of them found hotels, but four of them didn’t. And those four were Ray Nance, Skippy Williams, Betty Roche, and Al Hibbler. I took them home, and they stayed with me and my mother for four days. Ellington treated me and my mother wonderfully.”

Shortly afterward, Russell decided he had to leave home: “I finally left because I couldn’t stand the whole ugly racial thing there. I told myself that I had to get out of there. I went to Chicago.”

While he was in Chicago, he almost became a member of Duke Ellington’s band: “Duke asked me to join his band. His regular drummer, Sonny Greer, was sick then. I sat in with the band at the Downtown Theater in Chicago. But Ellington did not count off the tempo; he just gave a downbeat, and I started playing in the time I thought it would be in. The band and I were in different tempos! It was strange. I was really being a dummy, because if I had just skipped the first beat and waited to see where they were, there would have been no problem. Still, Ellington asked me if I wanted to join the band, so I must have righted up the tempo somewhere. I really am not a native drummer; I am only a passable drummer. After hearing Max play, I no longer wanted to play drums. By that time, though, I was committed to something else—being a composer.”

Despite turning down Ellington’s offer, Russell was forced to play with a band in Chicago in order to survive. The bassist Eugene Wright, who eventually became famous playing with Dave Brubeck’s quartet, had a band called the Dukes of Swing. During the three months that Russell spent with Wright’s group, he wrote his first composition, a tune called “New World.”

George continues: “Benny Carter and his band were at the Sound House Theater in Chicago, so I went down and saw Benny and showed him my tune. Benny pulled the whole band off the stand, took everybody into the basement, and we rehearsed ‘New World.’ It sounded wonderful. It was really unbelievable. Benny gave me some big money, and that started the whole thing. I was determined to be a composer and arranger.”

Russell went back to New York intent on this new career path. He sold “New World” to several bands, but the revenue from those sales was the only money he had. He became friends with the drummer who had taken his place in the Carter band, Max Roach, one of the few drummers who can safely be called a genius. “Maybe Max felt bad because he had taken my place, but I was not jealous or anything like that. He befriended me and took me on Fifty-second Street to meet everybody. Very quickly the guys accepted me. We all became quite chummy. I had written this one arrangement, and it really knocked Max out. Dizzy really loved it, too. That’s when I first got to know Bird. Nobody was like Charlie Parker. All I can say is that he lived every minute of every day. He wouldn’t go to sleep; he participated completely in life during the day and whatever that day brought—then he would finally collapse. That’s the way he lived.”

Russell got a room on Forty-eighth Street and Sixth Avenue, not far from “Swing Street”—the block of Fifty-second Street where so many clubs regularly presented the greatest jazz musicians of the day. According to George, “The owners of the Three Deuces were really beautiful men. They found out from the other musicians that I was okay, and I was admitted free. We’d be in the front row and sit up on Bird every night. Then during intermission, some of the musicians would come to my place for their ‘refreshments,’ needles and all. One time Bird offered me some, but being aware of the fragile state of my health, I had to refuse. He even asked me to play drums with his band. If I had done that, I would have died for sure, because those guys were living on the edge. So I had to say no to Bird, but it hurt. You just didn’t say no to Bird. He was a gentleman—he didn’t force it or anything. He acted like ‘This is a wonderful dessert I made and I’d like you, if you would like, to have a taste.’”

Among the musicians Russell became friendly with was a very youthful Miles Davis. “I first met Miles in Chicago when he was with Billy Eckstine. Then when I moved to New York we spent a lot of time together. This was early in 1945. He invited me up to his place. We used to have sessions together. He was interested in chords, and I was interested in chords. We would sit at the piano and play chords for each other. He’d play a chord and I’d say, ‘Ooh, that’s a killer.’ And then I would play a chord. At one of these sessions I asked Miles what he was looking to accomplish. He told me, ‘I want to learn all the chord changes. How can I go about doing this?’ And I thought about that. I didn’t challenge it. At times Miles could be very definite, but at other times he could be really obscure. I just said to myself, ‘He already knows the changes. What could he need?’ Even then Miles was noted for outlining each change, identifying it with the melody. In other words, he wouldn’t have even needed the piano player, because Miles’s melody was dictating what the chords were. He wanted a new way to relate to chords. But this question of his—about how he could learn all the chords—eventually saved my life.” Miles’s question would also lead almost fifteen years later to the making of Kind of Blue.

About this time Russell moved into a small place with some friends, but the place had no windows. For George—with his breathing problems—this was anathema. So he wound up sleeping in parks, particularly Gracie Park, where the mayor’s mansion is located. Needless to say, sleeping in parks was disastrous for Russell’s health, and after a while his condition began to deteriorate. When he went to an uptown hospital, the doctor told him that he was okay. Yet a short time later he collapsed from a hemorrhage. He was soon ensconced in Bellevue Hospital for three weeks. He was so sick that a priest came to give him last rites. “I told the priest, ‘Let me level with you—I don’t want your blessing. If I’m going, I might as well level with God because I do not believe in him.’” But Russell’s period as an atheist was brief.

Russell survived this ordeal and was sent to a sanitarium. “I ended up at St. Joseph’s Hospital, 143rd Street and Brooke Avenue in the Bronx. I was in a room with fifteen other guys who had TB. I stayed there for fifteen months, the first six of them in complete bed rest. So I thought, ‘I’ve got to start doing something constructive.’ I lay there thinking about what Miles had meant—because I already had the feeling that chords have a scale of unity, and they have a scale closer to them, to the sound of the chord, than any other scale. And that started me on the path that is here before me right now.”

When Russell was finally released from the hospital, Max Roach took him under his wing and had George move in with him and his mother: “I lived off New York City welfare. The city had a program for young people who were TB survivors. That gave me enough money to live on until I was strong enough to get a job, and it gave me the opportunity to study for a new occupation. Max’s mother kind of adopted me, and I stayed there for nine months.” This was a perfect situation for Russell to continue to work out the details of his theory: “Mrs. Roach used to say, ‘Max, that boy never sleeps!’ Max told her, ‘He’s working on his theory.’ I’d be working on it every night until around four in the morning.”

After moving out of the Roach home, George was approached by Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie was putting together his first big band and was planning to do a concert at Carnegie Hall; it would be the first time a modern jazz band played that hallowed venue. According to Russell, “Dizzy told me: ‘I have a song, and I want to make it into something bigger.’ He asked me to take his tune and turn it into a suite.”

The name of the tune was “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop,” and it was the first time modern jazz was fused with Afro-Cuban rhythms. Yet for George Russell this piece had even greater significance: “I wrote the first section based on a C seven flat nine chord. By that time I knew what the parent scale was. So all the melodies and all the harmonies came out of the B flat auxiliary diminished scale. That was the first modal piece that I ever consciously wrote, back in 1947.”

At this point Russell was living in a sleazy hotel in the Bowery: “It was the bottom of the rung. I used to walk home, and I would trip over people lying on the sidewalk.” Dizzy wanted George to conduct the band for the Carnegie Hall concert in which “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop” was to be performed. In order to do so, Russell was forced to walk all the way from the Bowery to Fifty-seventh Street. After the concert John Lewis, who was the pianist with the Gillespie band and had found out where George was living, insisted that Russell move in to his home in the Jamaica section of New York City.

It was at the Carnegie Hall concert that Russell first met Gil Evans: “Gil was impressed with what I had done with ‘Cubano Be, Cubano Bop,’ and he introduced himself to me after the concert. He said, ‘Drop by my place whenever you get the time.’ His place was a one-room apartment in the basement of the St. Regis Hotel. All the pipes of the St. Regis went through Gil’s apartment. Pretty soon I started hanging out there all the time. There were a lot of great musicians who were drawn to Gil’s place. It was kind of a haven for a lot of people. Miles and Max, of course, and the composer John Benson Brooks, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, Lee Konitz, and [singer] Blossom Dearie. We all knew something of the Claude Thornhill Orchestra [for which Evans had done several arrangements] because that was a very special band.

“When you walked into Gil’s place, you never knew who would be there. Bird might be there, lying in bed because that was about the only piece of furniture Gil had. And a lot of records. We talked music, music, music, and I often discussed my theory with Gil. He was very interested. Back then, I would show the theory to anyone who was interested. Most of them didn’t pay much attention, because I didn’t have a name or anything at that time. A lot of musicians knew about me, but I was kind of floating around. Gil would never have invited me to his place if he hadn’t been impressed with my writing. The thing he did most beautifully was his work as an orchestral composer. He himself didn’t really compose all that much, but he had an incredible talent for coloring things.” Many years later Evans recorded some of Russell’s compositions.

As already noted, Miles’s Birth of the Cool band came together out of the get-togethers in Evans’s apartment. But as Russell points out, music was not the only thing discussed in that cramped room: “People were always coming in or out of that place because it was a refuge for a lot of them. Gil became a kind of guru. All of us would come to Gil with our problems, and he always seemed like a wise man who could go to the depths of your problem and straighten you out real quick. It must have taken a lot out of him. Sometimes he would get really boggled with everyone’s problems. One day he left the apartment and just walked all around New York: down to the tip of the island, going over to Staten Island, and then coming all the way back to Harlem. And then back again. He just walked. One time he wound up knocking on the door of a friend of his. Her name was Lil, the woman he married soon afterward.”

Evans’s marriage spelled the end of the little haven under the St. Regis. Russell was present on the final day: “I was there with Dave Lambert [who would eventually become famous as a founder of the jazz singing trio Lambert, Hendricks and Ross]. He was with his wife and baby because that’s where they had been sleeping. A cop came and told us, ‘You’re all gonna have to vacate. You don’t live here anymore.’ So I said, ‘But this man has a baby.’ The cop just said, ‘You shut up, or I’ll take you downtown.’ And I shook my head and thought, ‘This is really ruthless.’”

It was all over—perhaps the closest thing to a jazz Bloomsbury that ever existed. It was finished, or at least it seemed to be. But musicians continued to find places to congregate and discuss music. For example, the mid-Manhattan bar Jim and Andy’s became a favorite haunt of jazzmen. Some of the musicians gave out the bar’s phone number as if it were their own. From the mid-1950s on, Miles’s home became another gathering place for jazzmen. But there would never again be quite such an intimate haven as Gil Evans’s tiny apartment.

Russell continued to eke out a living with occasional arranging jobs and compositions, but most of his energy continued to be devoted to working out his theory. One of Russell’s earliest and most famous compositions was “Ezz-thetic,” which he named after the boxer Ezzard Charles. “I took an arrangement of it to Bird while he was playing with strings at Birdland. He really liked it, but his manager, Teddy Reig, thought it was too uncommercial for Bird to record it. But Bird used to play it with strings all the time.”

A few years later Lee Konitz [with Miles Davis playing trumpet] recorded “Ezz-thetic.” And Russell himself recorded the tune a couple of times, the first in his landmark The Jazz Workshop album, and later as the title track of an album he made for the Riverside label. It has become a jazz classic, frequently recorded by a variety of jazzmen.

Russell also had the opportunity to do an arrangement for another jazz legend, Ella Fitzgerald: “In about 1948, after I wrote ‘Cubana Be, Cubana Bop,’ I was approached by Ella Fitzgerald. She wanted me to write an arrangement, so I showed up at the Decca studio with her; but I had sort of overwritten. I had written what she should sing on some of my choruses. She got mad as hell, and she said, ‘I give you brothers a chance, and you mess me up every time.’ She did this in front of the musicians. I was really embarrassed. And she said, ‘Let’s just use the first chorus of this.’ And that’s what they did. They used the first chorus, then she had worked out her scat improvisation. I found out that’s how she works. She had worked out her supposed improvisation at home, and she didn’t need what I had written for her. But she did use the first chorus. And she paid me something like seventy-five dollars, grudgingly. It eventually sold about ten million records. It was one of her most famous recordings, ‘How High the Moon.’ Later I ran into her and the bassist Ray Brown, her husband at that time. They said, ‘George! Come have dinner with us.’ They were going to a new club across the street from Birdland. So this was very funny—I had written her best-selling record!”

Shortly after the end of the Evans haven, Russell got a job working at a drugstore. But he continued to write and do some arranging and, of course, continued to work on his theoretical work, the Concept. For a while his living situation improved greatly: “I met a woman who really liked me, but she was living with her husband. She had me move in with her and her husband in their place on Park Avenue! So I was very comfortable right then.”

Needless to say, it must have been quite a contrast to the Bowery flophouse he had been living in earlier. It was while living in the luxurious Park Avenue setting that he composed a piece that became a kind of legend itself: “A Bird in Igor’s Yard.” The Igor referred to in this title is Igor Stravinsky. This composition was Russell’s successful attempt to fuse Stravinsky’s polytonality with Charlie Parker’s bebop—a piece clearly ahead of its time.

Russell left his job at the drugstore so he could concentrate on his music. He wanted to see whether he could make a living by writing music and work on the Concept on the side. At least he wanted to attempt it. But the reality turned out to be something else: “There was a guy who had a band that more or less imitated the Glenn Miller sound. The guy wanted all the writing for the band to have clarinet leads. This was during a time when real commercial music was making a noise. So I took an arrangement and made kind of a symphony out of it. But this guy didn’t like it because it wasn’t commercial enough. He said, ‘Take it home and do this and that to it, and we’ll see if we can play it.’ That didn’t feel right to me, so at this point I said to myself, ‘Okay, you can either do this or get a job outside of music and concentrate on the Concept.’ By that time I knew that the Concept was for real, and I knew that I wouldn’t lose anything by getting out of music, because any music that could give me a living would be compromised. I just could not do it. So I got a job at Macy’s and I stayed there for two years.” Russell was, luckily, assigned to the wallpaper section of the store. Since not many people bought their wallpaper at Macy’s, he had plenty of time to focus on the Concept.

By the early 1950s Russell’s luck with living quarters had turned again, and he was back in a hotel only a step above the place he had lived in when he was on the Bowery. He was hired by the alto saxophonist Hal McKusick to write some arrangements for an album for RCA Victor. When Jack Lewis, the A&R man for the session, heard it, he told Russell, ‘That’s wonderful.’ He was enthralled with Russell’s work. Later Lewis visited Russell at his hotel, which was half a block from the Victor studios: “Lewis was so shocked by my living conditions that he told me, ‘George, you’ve got to get out of here!’ Then he said, ‘I wouldn’t do this ordinarily, but I’m going to give you an album, and I am going to pay you much more than I would ordinarily pay in order to get you out of here.’ So that’s what happened, and after that I never had to accept anything outside my own work.”

With the advance for the album, Russell was able to get a decent apartment and live in relative comfort. While he was planning for the album, he had a fateful meeting that would eventually help change jazz history and make Kind of Blue possible: “I had met a singer from Chicago named Lucy Reed. She had asked me to do a few arrangements for an album she planned to make. I think Gil [Evans] did a few for her, too. She was in town and called me up on a Sunday and told me that she wanted to discuss something with me. She asked if she could bring a friend, which I said would be fine. She came up with this male friend of hers. I thought he was a businessman of some sort. He was very quiet, and he wore glasses. It was one of those quiet New York Sundays. I couldn’t think of anything to do, so we took the Staten Island ferry, and we had a sandwich or something. All I got out of this guy was that he played piano, and he had been in the army. He also had been in the South, although he didn’t have a particularly southern accent. Eventually the conversation sort of lapsed and finally I said, ‘I have a piano at home. I’d love to hear you play.’ We went back to this one-room apartment, and he sat down at the piano. And from then on, I closed my mouth. I mean, I was absolutely amazed. Out of this sort of nonperson came all this incredible technique and feeling and sense of orchestration. So I said, ‘Whoa—we have to work together.’”

The pianist, of course, was Bill Evans. At the time, Evans was struggling, playing whatever gigs he could find. And Russell did work with him. Evans was the pianist on The Jazz Workshop, the album Russell did for Jack Lewis at RCA. The interesting thing about Evans is that, even very early on, he seemed to play naturally in a style that had modal implications. His son, Evan, says that in his earliest practice tapes, recorded while he was very young, there is a strong sense of modality. Bill Evans would become famous for playing “rootless” chords, which implied an advanced harmonic conception and which adapted well to modes.

The Jazz Workshop album is one of the greatest albums of the 1950s, just a rung or two beneath Kind of Blue. The musicians on the album, besides Evans’s trumpeter Art Farmer, saxophonist Hal McKusick, guitarist Barry Galbraith, drummers Paul Motian and Osie Johnson, and the bassist Milt Hinton, were among the cream of the New York jazzmen. They were all sophisticated enough to work with Russell’s challenging compositions and arrangements while also being superb improvisers.

In its way, Russell’s The Jazz Workshop was a precursor of Kind of Blue in that it subjected some fine jazzmen to tunes based on modes that Russell was using as substitutes for chord progressions. Yet the album, like Kind of Blue, is not just a dry experiment. The music, both in the writing and improvising, is passionate and at times almost frightening in its reckless force. For the listener the experience is like being a passenger in a speeding car. At the same time, despite the reckless feeling, there is an overall sense of control. It is clear that on The Jazz Workshop a finely tuned musical mind is shaping the performances. Bill Evans’s playing on the album is spectacular and quite different from the impressionistic lyricism for which he eventually became famous. Here he plays with a driving energy that at times is almost hair-raising. The other soloists approach the same level of brilliance. Like Evans, Art Farmer’s solos on this album have an intensity missing from some of his later work. The alto saxophonist Hal McKusick plays way above his head, although it is clear that he is deeply influenced by the cool altoist Lee Konitz; he also plays with a vigor and drive absent from much of his work on other albums. In any case, there is little doubt that the freedom Russell’s modes gave to improvisers ignited their imaginations; this would also be the case for Kind of Blue.

Compelling as we might find the soloists, it is Russell’s writing that is the greatest revelation. Russell himself, like a superb soloist, has created a “sound” unlike that of any other jazz composer or arranger. His arrangements are some of the most intricate and inventive ever written for a small group, yet he is able to frame perfectly all of the improvisations so that they are indivisible components of the arrangement, not just a string of solos. Although this album was considered avant-garde in its time, the music is always accessible and, more often than not, viscerally powerful.

All the tunes on the album were composed by Russell while he was working at Macy’s, and the way he composed them was, to say the least, remarkable: “I’d come home after the day job and I would immediately start writing. And all of this work was a way of testing the evolution of my theory. I know this sounds kind of mystical, but answers would come when I’d ask the theory a question. If the theory got stuck, I would say: ‘I want an answer by tomorrow morning.’ When I got out of bed in the morning, I would have the answer. My ideas were continually growing. They weren’t static. And each time an idea got bigger, I would write it and then test it with a piece of music.

“The theory and I grew together. And we are still growing. My atheism was disappearing, to be replaced by a firm belief in higher forces because the ideas were truly alive. Whenever I heard a musician do something that I could not explain, I went back to the theory in order to figure it out.”

Not long after recording The Jazz Workshop album, Russell was given a commission from Brandeis University to compose a longer piece of music. This piece would be performed in concert at Brandeis along with the work of several other jazz composers, including Charles Mingus, J. J. Johnson, John Lewis, and Jimmy Giuffre. There were also pieces written by so-called classical composers, among them Gunther Schuller, Milton Babbitt, and Harold Shapiro. All the compositions were supposed to be written as a fusion of jazz and classical music. This was part of a movement that Schuller (who had played French horn briefly in Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool nonet) called the “third stream.” It was a controversial movement at the time; many of those in the jazz scene thought it pretentious, if not downright useless. Miles, for example, said that the third-stream movement made him think of “looking at a naked woman that you don’t like.”

Yet many of the pieces written under these grants were quite fine. Regardless of how Miles Davis felt about the genre, J. J. Johnson’s “Poem for Brass” is a lovely piece, with a simple lyricism similar to Miles’s own work on the Miles Ahead album—his collaboration with Gil Evans. And Mingus’s “Revelations” is a typically brilliant and ferocious composition by the great bassist-composer. But it was Russell’s piece, “All About Rosie,” that was the undeniable hit of the concert. Russell got the initial idea for the piece from John Benson Brooks: “John loved folk music and the idea of mixing it with jazz. One day he played a tape of Alabama children’s songs that Alan Lomax had made. One of the songs was ‘Rosie, Little Rosie, Rosie’s in a Hurry.’”

Russell used the thread of this simple tune to embroider a complex three-part piece, one of the most memorable of “long” jazz compositions. Each section is enthralling, and the entire piece swings like mad. It is obvious, at least on the original version, that Rosie worked up the imaginations of the soloists, which included Art Farmer, the saxophonist John LaPorta, and Bill Evans. The original version is now available on the Columbia/Legacy album The Birth of the Third Stream. One of the solos on this version is legendary—Bill Evans’s taut, tightly constructed blues solo. This solo helped establish Evans’s growing reputation—at least among musicians. And the piece itself established George Russell’s reputation as one of the most important jazz composers of the modern era.

Russell’s next important work was the album New York, New York for Decca. This album is unique in that it was one of the earliest “concept” albums. All the tunes—some of them standards, some composed by Russell—are about New York City. For this session—Russell’s first big band venture he worked with top musicians of the New York jazz scene, including alto saxophonist Phil Woods, tenor saxophonist Benny Golson, bassist Milt Hinton, drummer Osie Johnson, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans. In addition, the jazz singer Jon Hendricks wrote some patter tunes (what would be called rap today) that link together all the sections into a suite. Russell’s arrangements with their fresh tonal colors are some of the most original big band charts of the day, making New York, New York a rival for the orchestral albums of Miles Davis and Gil Evans.

Bill Evans once again plays brilliantly throughout New York, New York, as he always seemed to when working with Russell. “His time was impeccable,” recalls Russell. “I mean his time was like Philly Joe’s; he was always right on it. It is a curious thing about Bill and the Concept. I know he was interested in modes, but it seemed as if he didn’t want to acknowledge the Concept. I have a piece that he wrote called ‘Twelve-Tone Piece,’ which is harmonized traditionally, but the melody’s a twelve-tone row. I have his outlining of the piece, and he’s got all these different modes on the piece. So he did think modally. He always said that the Concept influenced him. But he never directly told me that.”

New York, New York was a relatively successful album from a commercial point of view, and it has become Russell’s most popular work. If one assumes that a piece of music based on theory is necessarily dull and lifeless, such preconceptions wither when listening to New York, New York. Like virtually all of Russell’s pieces, it is challenging and original but immediately accessible. I find most of Russell’s works among the most exhilarating in all of jazz, whether or not one is aware of the underlying theory. I have to wonder if the rather chilly thought of theory-based music turns off potential listeners before they have even given Russell’s works a chance.

By now, Russell had developed a “sound” as idiosyncratic as any of the great jazzmen, but that was never his aim: “I rebelled against style. I didn’t want to get stuck with one particular style for a lot of reasons. One of these reasons is that I could see that styles are not permanent. They tend to quickly become ‘out of style.’ Suppose in the 1960s I had wanted to join up with the ‘freedom riders,’ the free-jazz guys of that period, and go all the way outside. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t believe that was all there was to music. I wanted to be more like a panmodalist, a panthinker, pan meaning all. I wanted to be free to be this or be that, to have a mixture of different things. That would be my ‘style,’ and that is the way I want it.”

Russell continued to get together with Miles, and they challenged each other with chords. “One night Miles and I had dinner together, and we had a very serious discussion about modes. At the time, Miles was seriously looking for musicians to replace some of the guys in the band with substance-abuse problems. So we sat down at the piano and played chords. I played a chord for him, and he asked me where I got it. I tried to show him where the chord came from. And he got very interested because, by that time, I could translate any chord in terms of the Concept, and I could show Miles what its parent scale was; the scale formed a unity with the chord. Then Miles understood it. He saw that in the Concept there was an objective explanation for the chord. He saw that traditional music overlooked verticality and unity. Unity was not a factor. When musicians are talking about harmony, they mean progressional harmony. They were ignorant—and still are—about a vertical concept. The Lydian Concept is based on the unity of chord and scale. That night, when Miles saw how he could use the Concept, he said that if Bird were alive, this would kill him. And it was just what Miles needed for the direction his music was taking.”

The fact that the leading jazzman of the time had been won over to George’s Concept may have seemed like a kind of ultimate triumph for Russell. The irony, of course, is that Miles had been the musician who first set Russell off on his long intellectual and musical odyssey. But Russell still felt that he had a long way to go. He felt that his theory was in an embryonic stage, fifteen years after he first conceived the basic premise while hospitalized in a TB ward. He would continue to live a bifurcated life: on the one hand he continued to write and arrange, but his primary work continued to be his theory, which would always be the center of his life.

Whether or not you understand the details of Russell’s theory (as presented in the Appendix), there is one thing of paramount importance about it. In sharp contrast to Western theory, Russell was attempting to bring a unity to musical theory. I do not believe that this attempt, or the profundity of the Concept, is an illusion, nor is the fact that Russell’s theory was born of the aesthetics of jazz (although Russell has applied it to classical music, and it has influenced some modern composers in that tradition). Since the Eastern belief in the unity of all things is at the heart of much non-Western religion and philosophy, it should not be surprising that this first, and only, musical theory derived from the jazz tradition is based on the concept of ultimate unity. Improvisation based on modes instead of chord changes gave jazz musicians a new freedom; now their choices could be open-ended rather than shackled by the chains of chord progressions. The theory brought jazz closer to its non-Western roots and gave jazzmen the opportunity to fly into what Sonny Rollins called music’s “open sky.”

Russell says: “I am not an intellectual. I refuse to be one, and I hate to be classified as one. All of these ideas already existed. I was just stuck with the Concept until it revealed itself completely.”

Russell’s struggle was long and laborious. But in 1959 he would, finally, begin to receive the recognition for the value of this theory to which he had devoted his life. That recognition came from the making of Kind of Blue.