Search - George Russell :: Complete Albums Collection: 1956-1964

George Allen Russell was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger and academic who was among the first musicians to contribute significantly to the theory of harmony based on jazz rather than European music, as expounded in his book Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953). Russell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the adopted only child of a nurse and a chef on the B&O Railroad, Bessie and Joseph Russell. As a child George sang in the choir of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and listened to the Kentucky Riverboat music of Fate Marable. He made his stage debut at age seven, singing "Moon Over Miami" with Fats Waller. Surrounded by the music of the black church and the big bands which played on the Ohio Riverboats, and with a father who was a music educator at Oberlin College, he started playing drums with the Boy Scouts and Bugle Corps, receiving a scholarship to Wilberforce University. Here he joined the Collegians, a band noted as a breeding ground for great jazz musicians including Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Freeman Lee, Frank Foster, and Benny Carter. Russell served in the group at the same time as another noted jazz composer, Ernie Wilkins. In 1957, Russell was one of six jazz musicians commissioned by Brandeis University to write a piece for their Festival of the Creative Arts. He wrote a suite for orchestra, All About Rosie , which featured Bill Evans among other soloists, in a piece which has been cited as one of the few convincing examples of composed polyphony in jazz. Members of the orchestra on his 1958 extended work, New York, N.Y., included Bill Evans again, alongside John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Milt Hinton, Bob Brookmeyer, Max Roach and others, and featured wrap-around raps by singer/lyricist Jon Hendricks. Jazz in the Space Age (1960) was an even more ambitious big band album, featuring the unusual dual piano voicings of Evans and Paul Bley. George Russell formed his own sextet in 1960 in which he played piano; the 6-piece group also featured musicians like Dave Baker and Steve Swallow. Memorable sessions with Eric Dolphy (on Ezz-thetics, 1961) and singer Sheila Jordan (their bleak version of "You Are My Sunshine" on The Outer View, 1962, is highly regarded) were also witnessed. This 5 CD compilation includes all George Russell s albums as leader, made between 1956, the year of his debut, and the point in 1963 when he and his sextet relocated to Scandinavia and spent considerable time touring Europe. The set also contains a true rarity in the form of the complete recording of George Russell s Sextet playing at the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival, an event the six piece briefly returned to the US to perform at. Featuring ten originals in their entirety, all in a re-mastered format, this collection illustrates perfectly the era most enthusiasts consider to be George Russell s golden age, and certainly covers the time when this jazz genius composed and recorded his most challenging work.