In a letter to the editor of the journal The Black Perspective in Music, George Russell (1923-2009), an African American musician identified as both a composer and teacher in the publication, expressed his displeasure with the title given an interview he had granted. It was published in Spring of 1974. “The only thing about the forthcoming article . . . that I take issue with is the title ‘A New Theory for Jazz.’ It places a limit on the ‘Concept,’ it does not have. . . . In fact, the purpose of the study is to close the cultural and intellectual gap between so called Jazz and European Music.” Russell lays out his future projects that include a book analysis of the music of Bach, Stravinsky, Webern, and Berg, among others with respect to his, by then, famous Lydian Chromatic Concept, otherwise known as the “Concept.”
In the introduction to his book, Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, first published in 1953 and revised in 1959, Russell, nonetheless seemed to have been targeting jazz musicians and their quest for ideas to improve their improvisations when he wrote:
The Lydian Chromatic Concept is an organization of tonal resources from which the jazz musician may draw to create his improvised lines. It is like an artist’s palette: the paints and colors, in the form of scales and/or intervallic motives, are waiting to be blended by the improviser. Like the artist, the jazz musician must learn the techniques of blending his materials. The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization is a chromatic concept providing the musician with an awareness of the full spectrum of tonal colors available in the equal temperament tuning.
Perhaps because of interest and acceptance of his musical ideas in Europe—he lived there between 1964 and 1969—Russell’s beliefs about the universal potential of his work beyond the American jazz world had grown since the fifties when the book first appeared. The bebop movement inspired Russell, as it had many artists. When he began to write for various groups, Russell contributed a memorable song to the book Dizzy Gillespie’s big band: “Cubana-Be, Cubana-Bop, a composition built on Afro-Cuban rhythms. The flatted fifth’s ubiquity in bebop’s harmonic language led him to explore and develop a theory based on the Lydian scale.
After achieving a certain degree of success composing, Russell said that he began to think about the United States as “a closed door for what I wanted to do.” He believed that there were only two viable musical routes for him to pursue at that time: the “freedom direction” and the “commercial” direction. The freedom direction included some of the free jazz players, who in Russell’s estimation was “a kind of stream of consciousness playing, very angry music and very intense—you know, shouting, screaming—with free use of all kinds of musical resources.” He didn’t like it. The commercial route for him as composer represented “the Hollywood scene.”
Europe provided the outlet he desired. He toured his own band, made connections with the Western art music world of experimental music. As Russell wrote in the letter to the editor, Danish radio produced two performances of Stockhausen’s Piece for Three Orchestras with a strategic performance of his own sextet between them in 1965. He and Stockhausen developed a friendship and discussed on Danish television the mutual influence between contemporary jazz styles and what he called “New European Music.” Europe, in Russell’s estimation provided him the appreciation and attention for his experimentalism that the United States did not. “I had to leave because my inner self didn’t feel that that [i.e., the existing state of jazz] was a very comfortable position for me to be in.”
There’s much evidence that affirms why Russell was a singular avant-garde, both musically and socially. He believed that, unlike other music theories, the Concept was both a pedagogical tool and a prescriptive theory for creating music and not an explanation of the syntax and grammar of compositional practices already in existence. Like Charles Ives, he composed primarily outside the typical political economies of the art world, a fact that allowed him greater freedom. He didn’t consider himself to be a regular participant of the music business and could, thereby, freely create from his inner impulse. He believed in a hierarchy of creativity in art. From top to bottom these were: artist-philosophers, the artist, the popularizer, and the incompetent. No contentious artist, Russell believed, should think about staying in the status quo to please audiences; artists should continue to grow. This view, of course, goes against the grain of a huge part of the logic of the music industry, which is based on regulation and predictability.
Russell believed in breaking with received notions or “laws” in music, particularly in the case of The Concept, which eschewed jazz’s reliance on the major/minor modes. There was a parallel to this for black people in the social world outside of music. Russell thought that his work in tearing down systems in the music world could serve as a model for blacks generally: don’t accept one’s socially position as the ironclad rule. Break the law. Resist the powers that be. And think outside the box, seemed to be his mantras. Russell said, “So if it’s O.K. to talk about black liberation and black this-and-that, but nothing is going to change fundamentally in this society which is ruled by laws that are so precious to their makers. One has to question laws.”
It’s instructive to think about pushing the envelope of what jazz was in the context of Russell’s music and theories. Listen to two compositions “Ezz-thetic” recorded in 1956 and “Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature” from 1969. Indeed, one must break laws or, at the very least, question them in order to grow. We owe it to the music and to ourselves.
Tags: avant garde jazz, black perspectives in music, george russell
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