Collection: George Russell

George Russell never set out to be a bandleader. He spent the mid 1940s in and out of hospital with tuberculosis, and it was during one of those stays that he began working out the ideas that became "The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization", a self published 1953 theory of harmony built from jazz rather than imposed on it from European classical tradition. The book reframed how musicians thought about scales and chords, and its influence ran straight through to "Kind of Blue": Bill Evans absorbed Russell's thinking directly, and Miles Davis built an entire modal language on ground Russell had already mapped. Russell's own recordings as a leader are where the theory becomes audible. "New York, N.Y." (Decca, 1959) and "Jazz in the Space Age" (Decca, 1960) put his orchestral writing on record with Evans, Bill Evans, Paul Bley and a young John Coltrane passing through the personnel. His Riverside sextet years that followed, particularly "Stratusphunk" (1960) and "Ezz-thetics" (1961), with Eric Dolphy, are the records most collectors come looking for first. He later relocated to Scandinavia and then to a long teaching post at the New England Conservatory, but it's this late 1950s and early 1960s run that defines what's stocked here.