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| 4.565 Ft
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| 1. | War Gewessen
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| 2. | Rhymes
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| 3. | Lunacy
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| 4. | Sandu
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| 5. | Tune Up
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| 6. | Theme
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Jazz
George Russell (p, arr)
Don Ellis (tp), Dave Baker (tb), Dave Young (ts), Chuck Israels (b), Joe Hunt (d)
This release contains the outstanding studio album "George Russell Sextet in K.C." in its entirety for the first time ever on CD.
Recorded in New York and featuring some of the compositions that the sextet was asked to play in the course of a two-week engagement at a club called the Blue Room in Kansas City.
Originally issued in LP format in 1961 as Decca DL-74183.
"These sides reflect a lighter, more casual view of George Russell. The music is aggressive but not hostile, neoteric but not neurotic, ultra-jazz yet never anti-jazz. I wish that anybody, everybody, who wants to do something new in modern music could study with George Allan Russell."
---Leonard Feather (from the original liner notes)
"George Russell was at a creative peak in the early '60s as he recorded one memorable small-group session after another. The pianist and composer wrote only one of the six songs on this 1961 session, while tackling two imaginative charts (the turbulent "War Gewessen" and the amusing Latin-flavored "Lunacy") by the young trombonist Dave Baker, who was a student of Russell's and would later become an important jazz educator in his own right. Carla Bley, who had also studied with Russell, composed "Rhymes," whose initial vamp suggests Oliver Nelson's "Stolen Moments," though the haunting unison theme by Baker and trumpeter Don Ellis takes it in a completely different direction. The leader's scoring of Clifford Brown's "Sandu" allows plenty of blowing space for the band, with a typically economical piano solo by Russell. His heated arrangement of Miles Davis' "Tune Up" is simply spectacular. Liner note writer Leonard Feather hilariously describes Russell's "Theme" as "Every Man for Himself in F Minor." This rewarding Decca LP has long been unavailable and expect to pay a premium price if you are fortunate enough to run across a copy of it."
---Ken Dryden -All Music Guide
George Russell
Active Decades: '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s
Born: Jun 23, 1923 in Cincinnati, OH
Died: Jul 27, 2009 in Boston, MA
Genre: Jazz
Styles: Fusion, Post-Bop, Third Stream, Progressive Jazz, Experimental Big Band, Jazz Instrument, Piano Jazz
While George Russell has been very active as a free-thinking composer, arranger, and bandleader, his biggest effect upon jazz has been that of the quieter role of theorist. His great contribution, apparently the first by a jazz musician to general music theory, was a book with the intimidating title -The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, where he concocted a concept of playing jazz based on scales rather than chord changes. Published in 1953, Russell's theories directly paved the way for the modal revolutions of Miles Davis and John Coltrane -- and Russell even took credit for the theory behind Michael Jackson's huge hit "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin,'" which uses the Lydian scale (no, he didn't ask for royalties). Russell's stylistic reach in his own compositions eventually became omnivorous, embracing bop, gospel, blues, rock, funk, contemporary classical elements, electronic music, and African rhythms in his recent, ambitious extended works -- most apparent in his large-scale 1983 suite for an enlarged big band, The African Game. Like his colleague Gil Evans, Russell never stopped growing, but his work is not nearly as well-known as that of Evans, being more difficult to grasp and, in any case, not as well-documented by U.S. record labels.
Russell's first instrument was the drums, which he played in the Boy Scout Drum and Bugle Corps and at local clubs when he was in high school. At 19, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis, but he used the enforced inactivity to learn the craft of arranging from a fellow patient. Once back on his feet, he played with Benny Carter, but after being replaced on drums by Max Roach, Russell began to zero in on composing and arranging. He moved to New York to join the crowd of young firebrands who gathered in Gil Evans "salon," and he was actually invited to play drums in Charlie Parker's band. But once again, he fell ill, finding himself in a Bronx hospital for 16 months (1945-1946), where he began to formulate the ideas for the Lydian Concept. Upon his recovery, Russell leaped into the embryonic fusion of bebop and Afro-Cuban rhythms by writing "Cubana Be" and "Cubana Bop," which the Dizzy Gillespie big band recorded in 1947. He contributed arrangements to Claude Thornhill and Artie Shaw in the late '40s and wrote the first (and not the last) speculatory scenario of a meeting between Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinsky, "A Bird In Igor's Yard," recorded by Buddy De Franco.
While working on his Lydian theories, Russell dropped out of active musicmaking for awhile, working at a sales counter in Macy's when his book was published. But when he resumed composing in 1956, he had established himself as an influential force in jazz. Russell's connection with Gunther Schuller resulted in the commission of All About Rosie for the 1957 Brandeis University jazz festival, and he also taught at the Lenox School of Jazz that Schuller co-founded. He formed a rehearsal sextet in the mid-'50s which became known as the George Russell Smalltet, with Art Farmer, Bill Evans, Hal McKusick, Barry Galbraith, and various drummers and bassists. Their 1956 recording Jazz Workshop (RCA Victor) became a landmark of its time, and Russell continued to record intriguing LPs for Decca in the late '50s and Riverside in the early '60s. Another key album from this period, Ezz-Thetics, featured two important progressive players, Eric Dolphy and Don Ellis.
Finding the American jazz scene too confining for his music, Russell left for Europe in 1963, living in Sweden for five years. From his new base, he toured Scandinavia with a new sextet of European players and received numerous commissions -- including a ballet based on Othello, a mass, and an orchestral suite Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature: 1980. Upon his return to the U.S. in 1969, he joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music, where Schuller had started a jazz department, and this gave him a secure base from which to tour occasionally with his own groups. Russell stopped composing from 1972 to 1978 in order to finish a second volume on the Lydian Chromatic Concept. He led a 19-piece big band at the Village Vanguard for six weeks in 1978, played the Newport Jazz Festival when it was based in New York City, and made tours of Italy, the U.S. West Coast, and England in the '80s. Among his most imposing commissions of the last decade or so have been An American Trilogy and the monumental three-hour work Time Line for symphony orchestra, jazz ensembles, rock groups, choir, and dancers. In addition to The African Game and So What on Blue Note, Russell made recordings for Soul Note in the '70s and '80s, and Label Bleu in the '90s. In addition to continuing as a faculty member of NEC during the '90s, Russell also led the big band Living Time Orchestra.
---Richard S. Ginell, All Music Guide |
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