George Russell Sextet – Ezz-thetics

This is a memorial re-post for George Allen Russell (23 June 1923 – 27 July 2009). I originally posted a vinyl-LP rip of this classic jazz album back in September 2008. I have since found a wonderful CD-rip that you can now download here.

Musicians:

Don Ellis, trumpet
Dave Baker, trombone
Eric Dolphy, alto saxophone and bass clarinet
George Russell, piano
Stephen Swallow, bass
Joe Hunt, drums
Arrangements: George Russell
Recorded in New York on 8 May 1961.

Track Listing:

1) Ezz-thetic – 8:57
2) Nardis – 4:34
3) Lydiot – 8:06
4) Thoughts – 5:26
5) Honesty – 8:55
6) ‘Round Midnight – 6:29

In September 2007, the Concord Music Group re-issued a 24-bit remaster (from original master tapes) of this May 1961 recording for Riverside as part of their Keepnews Collection, “which spotlights classic albums originally produced by the legendary and arguably the most respected of all jazz producers, Orrin Keepnews.”

This album helped draw attention to two “significant innovators” of the period: Eric Dolphy and Don Ellis. Both men play major roles in this 1961 album by probably the best of Russell’s small groups, which includes one of Dolphy’s most lasting celebrated recorded efforts – his astonishing bass clarinet solo on the Thelonious Monk classic, “Round Midnight”.

This blogger considers Ezz-thetics to be one of the 100 greatest jazz albums of all time:

“Ezz-Thetics” is the most approachable of pianist George Russell’s run of jazz albums from 1956 – 1962 that promised a whole redefinition of what is possible in jazz. While he is known now as the educator and theorist who pioneered modal jazz, it is often forgotten that in this period before he left to live and work in Europe, he led an active and acclaimed band featuring important jazzers such as Don Ellis, Steve Swallow and Eric Dolphy.

Here, with Don Ellis (trumpet), Eric Dolphy (alto sax, bass clarinet), Dave Baker (trombone). Steve Swallow (bass) and Joe Hunt (drums), the sextet explores six themes, including Miles Davis’ “Nardis”, Thelonious Monk’s “Round About Midnight” and Dave Baker’s “Honesty,” alongside three George Russell originals “Ezz-Thetics”, “Lydiot” and “Thoughts”.

The music is challenging but understandable, expanding post bop orthodoxy in terms different to the modal experimentation of Miles Davis or John Coltrane. George Russell’s piano playing is at times close that of Thelonious Monk while Eric Dolphy is suitably tangential in his approach, especially in his take on “Round About Midnight”, transforming it from the mood piece it had become into the edgy interrogation achieved here. Yet there is no retreat “outside” into free jazz, more a series of new inspiring departures inside the blues and bop traditions.

George Russell’s masterwork “The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization”, had been influential on a generation of jazz musicians that included Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans amongst many others. However, as Richard Cook and Brian Morton succinctly point out just what is being proposed is still not well appreciated. It is certainly the case that the work is not merely attempting to recover Greek musical modes (such as the Lydian mode). As Cook and Morton observe: “Russell’s conception assimilated modal writing to the extreme chromaticism of modern music. By converting chords into scales and overlaying one scale on another, it allowed improvisers to work in the hard to define area between non-tonality and polytonality.” We explore this further in relation to Miles Davis.

This remastered re-release of “Ezz-Thetics” is a welcome opportunity to re-engage with George Russell’s music and, hopefully, the beginning point of a long delayed reappraisal of his achievement in jazz.

Biography by Richard S. Ginell

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.