Radical changes in jazz

Whilst browsing the newspaper, I came across this obit. A few minutes later a patron called, looking for the book George Russell wrote: The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation.

Coincidence.


July 30, 2009
George Russell, Composer Whose Theories Sent Jazz in a New Direction, Dies at 86
By BEN RATLIFF

George Russell, a jazz composer, educator and musician whose theories led the way to radical changes in jazz in the 1950s and ’60s, died on Monday in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. He was 86 and lived in Boston.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Alice.

Though he largely operated behind the scenes and was never well known to the general public, Mr. Russell was a major figure in one of the most important developments in post-World War II jazz: the emergence of modal jazz, the first major harmonic change in the music after bebop.

Bebop, the modern style pioneered by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others, had introduced a new level of harmonic sophistication, based on rapidly moving cycles of dense and sometimes dissonant chords. Modal jazz, as popularized by Miles Davis and John Coltrane, sought to give musicians more freedom and to simplify the harmonic playing field by, in essence, replacing chords with scales as the primary basis for improvisation.

Mr. Russell explained the concept in great detail in a book that came to be considered the bible of modal jazz, “The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation.” Conceived during bouts with tuberculosis in the 1940s, the book was originally self-published in 1953 and published as a book six years later. A final revised edition was published as Volume 1 in 2001; Mr. Russell had been working on a second volume.

Mr. Russell’s concept could be difficult for readers to absorb. “When you are trying to communicate a new theory of music,” he told The New York Times in 1983, “the whole fight is to put the sentences together so that other people understand them. Sometimes, when I read them back, I don’t understand them.”

But the basic idea behind it was simple. He believed that a new generation of jazz improvisers deserved new harmonic techniques, and that traditional Western tonality was running its course. The Lydian chromatic concept — based on the Lydian mode, or scale, rather than the familiar do-re-mi major scale — was a way for musicians to improvise in any key, on any chord, without sacrificing the music’s blues roots.

Mr. Russell proposed that chords and scales were interrelated. He sought ways for an improvising musician to play more notes that fit harmonically with whatever he was playing; to put it another way, he was trying to develop a system in which there are no “wrong” notes.

Miles Davis most famously put Mr. Russell’s ideas into practice. His “Milestones,” written and recorded in 1958, swung back and forth between two scales, rejecting the rapid chord changes that had become prevalent in modern jazz. His landmark album “Kind of Blue,” recorded a year later, is widely regarded as the first great document of modal jazz.

Subsequent recordings by, among many others, the saxophonists John Coltrane (a participant in the “Kind of Blue” sessions) and Eric Dolphy (who also recorded with Mr. Russell), helped spread the gospel of modal jazz. Mr. Russell still stayed mostly behind the scenes, and, in later years, was primarily a teacher, but his fellow musicians acknowledged and appreciated his influence.

George Russell was born in Cincinnati on June 23, 1923, and grew up in a foster home. His adoptive father was a chef on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, and his adoptive mother was a nurse. He played drums with the Boy Scouts’ drum-and-bugle corps and attended Wilberforce University in Ohio on a scholarship. At Wilberforce he played with the Collegians, the university’s imposing jazz and dance band. In 1941, while hospitalized for tuberculosis, he learned the science of harmony from a fellow patient. At that time he composed “New World” for the saxophonist and bandleader Benny Carter.

He later moved to New York to play drums with Carter’s band, but he gave up the instrument as soon as Max Roach was called in to replace him. “Max had it all on drums,” he said. “I decided that writing was my field.”

In 1947 he composed the modal introduction to “Cubano Be” and other sections of the multipart “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop,” an early example of Afro-Cuban jazz recorded by Gillespie. He later wrote “A Bird in Igor’s Yard,” an early experiment in classical-jazz crossover, for the clarinetist Buddy DeFranco.

He was part of the circle that convened around the arranger Gil Evans’s Manhattan apartment in the late 1940s, a group that included Miles Davis; returning to music after an illness, he wrote “Odjenar” and “Ezz-Thetic” for a Lee Konitz album recorded in 1951 that also included Davis.

In 1956 he began his own career as a recording artist and a bandleader with the album “The Jazz Workshop.” His other albums from that period included “New York, N.Y.” (1959) and “Ezz-Thetics” (1961).

In 1958 he taught at the Lenox School of Jazz in Massachusetts, run by the pianist and composer John Lewis, who called Mr. Russell’s Lydian chromatic concept “the first profound theoretical contribution to come from jazz.”

In 1964 Mr. Russell, who as a black man was dismayed by race relations in the United States, moved to Scandinavia. He returned in 1969 and joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory, where he taught until 2004.

He also began touring with his own groups, notably the Living Time Orchestra, a large international ensemble he led from the mid-1980s on, which experimented with all kinds of music, including funk, electronics and jazz-rock. A 21-piece version of that band recorded “The African Game,” an album for Blue Note in 1983.

Among the many awards Mr. Russell received were a MacArthur Foundation grant in 1989 and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters fellowship in 1990.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his son, Jock Millgardh, of Los Angeles, and three grandchildren.

On the first few albums released under his name, Mr. Russell composed the music and led the ensemble but did not perform, and although he later played piano in the groups he led, he did not have a high opinion of himself as a pianist. “I don’t play the piano,” he once said. “I play the Lydian concept.”

Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.

Jammin’ in the East Room

May 12, 2009, 9:45 pm

Jammin’ in the East Room

By Rachel L. Swarns

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times Esperanza Spalding started off an evening of performances at the East Room of the White House on Tuesday.

The candles flickered, the bassist strummed and, one by one, the writers and poets seized their moments in front of the microphone.

James Earl Jones served up Othello, his sonorous voice rumbling through the East Room. Mayda del Valle, a poet from Chicago, conjured her grandmother from Puerto Rico. Joshua Brandon Bennett, a poet from Yonkers, N.Y., delivered an ode to his deaf sister, his fingers flying as he translated his words into signs.

Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times First lady Michelle Obama spoke of the importance of art and culture.

It was Tuesday night, time for the White House poetry jam. A pony-tailed disc jockey hovered over a pair of turntables in the hallway, guests sipped white wine and President Obama and his wife, Michelle, celebrated the power of the spoken word.

“We’re here to celebrate the power of words and music to help us appreciate beauty and also to understand pain,’’ Mr. Obama told the crowd.

Mrs. Obama urged her guests to “enjoy, have fun and be loose” as they absorbed performances from Hawaiian, Puerto Rican, Jewish and African American writers in an event intended to showcase the diversity of American talent.

The crowd, which included the director Spike Lee and the television broadcaster George Stephanopoulos, among others, enjoyed the music of the pianist Eric Lewis and the bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding along with the writers. And while the poetry jam may well have been the hippest performance staged by the Obamas in the White House, it was just one of a series of events they have put on to celebrate the arts.

Since January, the Obamas have played host to bagpipe and mariachi bands, Irish fiddlers and poets, pop stars and jazz singers. Performers have included Stevie Wonder and Earth Wind and Fire, Tony Bennett and Fergie, the singer from the Black Eyed Peas.

Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer-Prize winning poet from Northern Ireland, has recited his verses. The rocker Sheryl Crow and the rhythm and blues singer Alicia Keys have entertained cheering crowds in the East Room.

“Our goal really is to bring the house alive,’’ said Desiree Rogers, the White House social secretary. “We’re all American, but all of us come from different backgrounds. We want to expose Americans to other Americans that are doing brilliant work.’’

Laura Bush, the former first lady, also brought writers to the White House to highlight the works of Langston Hughes, Mark Twain and the women writers of the West and others. (Mrs. Bush was forced to cancel her poetry symposium in 2003, however, when it became clear that several participants planned to protest the war in Iraq.)

It is probably safe to say that Tuesday’s event may well have been the first White House poetry jam, the fast-paced presentation of spoken verse that has become popular among young people in cities across the country. (This should not be confused with a poetry slam, which is a poetry competition.)

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, a young Hawaiian poet, talked about the struggles of finding her own identity, of living in her own skin. Lin Manuel Miranda, the creator of the Tony-Award winning Broadway musical, “In the Heights” rapped his way across the stage.

The writers, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, who are husband and wife, described how words break down barriers.

Ms. del Valle, the 30-year-old poet from Chicago, said she never dreamed that she would be invited to perform in the White House.

“To be able to go in the White House and to represent my grandmother and my ancestors, it really means a lot,” she said. “It’s a
generation of women that don’t often get heard, you know, these old Puerto Rican women that no one ever really thinks about. To be able to use my voice to represent them on this kind of platform is really powerful.”

Benny Golson's Adventure

Benny also reminded me that in 1958 -- when I was asked to phone some of the musicians chosen for the historic Art Kane photograph in Esquire magazine, "A Great Day in Harlem" -- I had told him where and when to be at 10 that morning on a Harlem street. Although Benny was a Dizzy Gillespie sideman at the time, he was not yet a member of the jazz pantheon and, he recalls, he felt like asking for autographs from such legends there as Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Roy Eldridge and Rex Stewart.

Psychiatrist's Alter Ego: Jazzman

In October 1963, a 25-year-old Johns Hopkins medical student sat at a concert grand piano in the East 30th Street studio of Columbia Records in New York and played a masterpiece of a jazz solo. Denny Zeitlin, from a Chicago family devoted to medicine and music, had come to New York for a 10-week fellowship in psychiatry at Columbia University. But the medical student, a pianist since the age of 2 and a professional musician during his high-school years, had also found time during his New York sojourn to study with the seminal composer George Russell, who became one of his champions, and to sit in with some of the city's leading jazz players.

On the Sonny Rollins composition "Oleo," Mr. Steig and Mr. Zeitlin each soloed with ferocious thrust, chutzpah, swing and – one of the most challenging accomplishments in jazz – a feeling of delirious freedom within the discipline of a harmonic structure. Mr. Rollins's tune is based on the chord changes of George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm," apart from the blues the most familiar pattern in jazz.

At 70, a Legendary Jazz Label Asks, ‘Now What?’

Blue Note records.

Oscar Peterson

Saw this last evening; masterful musicians, timeless music.

Jews and Blacks Join in This 'Yizkor'

Nat Hentoff writes an interesting piece in today's WS Journal.

There is now a recording, "Yizkor: Music of Memory" by David Chevan and the Afro-Semitic Experience (www.chevan.addr.com) – original, resonantly melodic jazz settings of Jewish prayers and psalms – that Mingus and I, if he were still here, could rise and share.

Hazzan Mizrahi's style, not often heard today, except in traditional synagogues, is Hazzanut, which startled me with its "cry" of the life force – and its vulnerability – when I was a child. Mr. Chevan calls it "a mixture of out-of-time recitative, some improvisation, and distinctive tunes." By "out-of-time," he means that "when the cantor moves from singing a tune to focus on individual words, those amazing improvised . . . highly ornamental melismas emerge. In some ways this is similar to what a gospel singer does; it is just that gospel more often stays in time."

Fascinating.

The stunning impact of the Hazzanut way of singing is also shown by Ben Ratliff in his new book, "The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music" (Times Books). Ornette Coleman, the beyond-modern-jazz icon, told of the first time he was given a 1916 recording by Cantor Josef Rosenblatt (whose 78 rpm discs I began collecting when I was 13).

"I started crying like a baby," Coleman said. "The record was crying, singing, and praying, all in the same breath. And none of it was crossing each other. I said, 'Wait a minute. You can't find those "notes." They don't exist.'"

That is amazing: Ornette Coleman listening to a cantor? and digging him?

Long ago, when I recorded deep blues singer and pianist Otis Spann for the Candid label, I asked him what the listeners at the black blues clubs in Chicago came to hear. "They wanted," he said, "to hear stories about their own lives, and hopes."

In that context, Mr. Chevan says: "One of the most important Afro-Semitic Experience concerts we have ever given was at a Saturday night concert at St. Philips Moravian Church in Old Salem, N.C. This was a former slave church and many of its worshipers were buried beneath the floor of the church in order to avoid their graves being desecrated. It was a standing-room-only audience that was on its feet almost the entire night as we played for the ancestors beneath our feet."

Happy b'day Bird

Bird lives.

Happy B'day Prez

The one. The President of the tenor sax. Happy birthday, Lester.

Lee Young Dies at 94; Jazz Man and Producer

Prez's brother, outlived his older sibling by 49 years.

Duke Ellington Orchestra

Watching and listening to a DVD of the Ellington Orchestra's concert in Holland on November 2, 1958. Just great music. Nice to get a look at the musicians. Paul Gonsalves cooks on Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue. Harry Carney is masterful. Ellington is the bon-vivant, the master if ceremonies, the conductor, and a really good piano player. O, and Mood Indigo! Quentin Jackson and John Sanders on muted and plunger trombones and Harry Carney on the baritone clarinet up front of the orchestra. John Sanders on valve trombone in Caravan. And Sam Woodyard.