Piano and Composition | 1923-2009

George Russell changed jazz from the inside, not the bandstand. Hospitalised twice with tuberculosis in the mid 1940s, he spent the recovery time working out a theory of harmony built on the Lydian scale rather than the major scale that European classical music had always assumed, publishing it privately in 1953 as "The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization". Bill Evans absorbed the theory directly and brought it into Miles Davis's circle, where it underpinned the modal approach Davis and Evans developed on "Kind of Blue". Russell's own recordings put the theory into practice on record: the Decca orchestral albums "New York, N.Y." (1959) and "Jazz in the Space Age" (1960) featured Evans and a young John Coltrane among the personnel, while his Riverside sextet sides, "Stratusphunk" (1960) and "Ezz-thetics" (1961) with Eric Dolphy, remain the most collected entries in his catalogue. He later taught for decades at the New England Conservatory, where he trained generations of musicians directly in the Concept. Russell died on 27 July 2009, aged 86.