Jazz composer and theorist George Russell passed away this Monday, July 27th. Russell began his career as a drummer, but quit the drums after being replaced by Max Roach in a band led by saxophonist Benny Carter. Russell turned his focus to harmony, which he had learned from a fellow patient while hospitalized in 1941 after being diagnosed with tuberculosis.After moving to New York in the 1940s, he fell in with a crowd that consisted of Gil Evans, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and other jazz greats. A conversation with Davis prompted Russell to develop his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. Published in 1953, the theory places the lydian mode as the scale central to jazz harmony, and allowed for a new approach to improvisation based on chord/scale relationships.
George Russell's innovations were a large part of the bridge between bebop and the modal music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and helped pave the way for contemporary theories of improvisation and composition. One of the first jazz concerts I ever attended was of Russell's 14-piece orchestra in the late 1990s.
Image Courtesy of Riverside Records
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