mandorla music

All compositions by George Russell

Stratusphunk

The Outer View

D.C. Divertimento

Thoughts

Concerto for Billy the Kid

A Lonely Place

Blues in Orbit

Pan-Daddy

Ezz-Thetic

THE SMALL BAND MUSIC of GEORGE RUSSELL

George Russell (1923–2009) was a composer, bandleader, pianist, teacher, and theorist. As a child in Cincinnati, he sang and played drums, and would recall the influence of exuberant music in church, the Fate Marable riverboat band on the Ohio River, and interactions with leading jazz performers of the late 1930s who passed through town—including Art Tatum, Fats Waller, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. It was his neighbor, the arranger Jimmy Mundy, who suggested that Russell consider pursuing music. Russell began to work professionally in clubs at around age fifteen. As a young man, he enrolled at Wilberforce University in Ohio, playing drums in the dance band, the Collegians. He was unable to enlist in the Marines following the attack on Pearl Harbor because he had contracted tuberculosis. The illness would weaken his body, making drumming more difficult and eventually leading him to turn toward composition. He did join Benny Carter’s band on drums for a short while, eventually moving to NYC in 1945. During this period, he turned more permanently to composing and theory. Russell also stayed with Max Roach in Brooklyn for nine months during this period, and was present during the musical and cultural revolution known as bebop.

Russell’s professional career as composer and arranger began in New York City in 1947. Though the work was not financially lucrative, he sold works and contributed to groups led by Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy DeFranco, Artie Shaw, and Charlie Ventura. When he was 24, his tripartite collaboration with Chano Pozo and Dizzy Gillespie, “Cubano-Be / Cubano-Bop,” was performed in Carnegie Hall by Gillespie’s band in a concert including Charlie Parker, and also recorded by Gillespie for RCA Victor. Russell was at the heady crossroads of new directions in big-band music, with the rise of Bebop and Afro-Cuban modernist styles and the influence of contemporary European classical aesthetics; He studied composition with modernist Stefan Wolpe. Russell wrote his classic melody “Ezz-Thetic” during this time. Despite his critical success, not a lot of paying jobs came his way, and as he didn’t want to go in a commercial direction, he stepped back from composition to work on his theoretical studies.

The music on today’s program comes from the next phase of Russell’s work, from 1956 to 1962, in which he returned to composing in earnest. His first album as a jazz composer and bandleader was The Jazz Workshop (RCA Victor) in 1956. Early in 1956, alto saxophonist Hal McKusick commissioned several works from Russell for his own RCA Victor recording session (“The Day John Brown was Hanged” and “Lydian Lullaby”). That led to Russell securing a contract for his own RCA Victor album, which included twelve original pieces and was recorded in three sessions over the course of the year. As a modern jazz composition-focused album, it was unique for its time in that Russell was not a performer (except for playing a set of pitched percussion instruments called boobams on one piece). This project launched Russell into a phase of small-band writing, bandleading, and piano playing during which he moved from RCA Victor to Riverside Records. Subsequent albums were Stratusphunk (1960), Ezz-Thetics (1961), The Stratus Seekers (1962), and The Outer View (1962). This was a particularly fruitful period for Russell as a performer and teacher. He toured in Germany, France, and Sweden in 1964 with a sextet, settling in Sweden and Norway for a time, then returning to Boston in the fall of 1969.

NOTES ON THE PIECES IN THE PROGRAM

George Russell’s “Stratusphunk” first appeared on a Hal McKusick recording from 1958, and then on Russell’s 1960 Riverside album Stratusphunk. It was a staple of both his small band and jazz orchestra repertoire, and Gil Evans and J.J. Johnson both wrote arrangements for their own jazz orchestras. Although the form is essentially a 12-bar blues, the walking bass we hear at the beginning and end is a composed line that is integral to setting the mood, suggesting a hazy and heavy blanket of clouds. The horn section statements in this piece are a combination of pointed percussive and dissonant phrases, varied later by more traditional blues and gospel-inspired riffs. Each soloist is heard improvising in a variety of contexts, progressing from the spacious early section, to a double-time tempo, and then back to the medium tempo. After a series of solos, the piece ends as it began, with the ominous walking bass tones fading into the distance. In later years, when Russell would conduct the piece with the NEC big band, he used a particular set of dance-like hand-gestures and cues that seemed essential to the performance.

Both “The Outer View” and “D.C. Divertimento” were issued on the 1962 Riverside album The Outer View. Here Russell uses frequent changes in tempo, from slow and deliberate to fast and aggressive. The bold and brash unison line in “The Outer View” is heard at varying speeds, creating a feeling of anticipation and shifting perspectives. What makes the music exciting—and challenging—is the way different players cue new tempo changes and moods; we can imagine Russell as pianist and conductor. “D.C. Divertimento” was commissioned by B.M.I. for the First International Jazz Festival, held in Washington, DC, in the summer of 1962. It is complex longer form piece, made up of several changes in mood and ensemble texture, with a segment for the piano at the beginning, then a variety of ensemble passages in shifting tempos, moving to a long section in 3/2 meter with individual soloists taking their turns, and concluding with a quintessential Russellian call-and-response between the rhythm section and horns. The mood moves from serious and stark to joyous and optimistic, reflecting the social climate of the early 1960s, including battles around civil rights and the growing threat of nuclear war.

“Thoughts” was first heard on the Ezz-Thetics album of 1961. It is slow, brooding, and moody, with tempo changes that shift throughout, contributing to an interesting through-composed series of episodes. After four composed sections in four different tempos, the piece moves to freely improvised solos, with the horns quoting “Down By the Riverside” as a background figure during improvised solo sections. A faster section in 3/4 meter is followed by a return to the slow, dissonant, bluesy 4/4 music of the opening, concluding with a sonority that is pure Russell. As in other pieces, the title seems to suggest a composition based on a variety of ideas and feelings, all quilted together. The music is very narrative, in the tradition of Ellington, perhaps, and filled with unexpected interjections.

“Concerto for Billy the Kid” was a feature for Bill Evans on piano on The Jazz Workshop, and is also documented in a televised appearance on the NBC program The Subject Is Jazz (1958). Despite this music’s composed nature, Russell has said he was concerned with creating a rhythmic drive, full of freshness and spontaneity, improvisation and swing. It’s rare that such intricately composed material could convey this effect, but Russell succeeds. The composition begins with a long ostinato from the bass and a drum groove marked “Samba” in the score, with the layering of riffs by the ensemble compounding into a signature George Russell melodic variety; a mix of blues and bop-like lines running through over a beat that Paul Motian originated in the first recording from the Jazz Workshop album. As the piece develops to feature the pianist, stop-time choruses allow the soloist to really stand out. The solo form changes are borrowed from Gene de Paul’s popular tune “I’ll Remember April” from the 1942 film Ride ‘Em Cowboy, a favorite jazz standard of the 1940s and ’50s. The ensemble portions in the latter half of the piece include a catalog of Russell’s composition techniques: an intensely contrapuntal style, harmonizations of melodic lines in parallel 4ths and 5ths, pan-tonal effects, and other unexpected adventures in tonality.

The next three selections were recorded January 31, 1962, and heard on the album The Stratus Seekers. “A Lonely Place” is, for Russell, a relatively short and serene ballad composition, featuring first the tenor saxophone melody, and then solos by trumpet and trombone over dissonant ensemble interjections. The soloists are instructed to “improvise on intervals” in a free manner. Full of minor-seconds and other jarring dissonances, the piece somehow manages to project a romantic spirit.

“Blues in Orbit” is an unusual 12-bar blues with time signature changes that require the players to adjust in ways that are not at all expected. The angular and rhythmically quirky melody is challenging, which leads to some solos by the ensemble, with background figures that help along in a way that is quite similar to “Stratusphunk.” It’s a classic example of Russell’s modernization of the blues aesthetic, full of challenging dissonances, bi-tonality, and shifting meters, however, all is ultimately rooted in the sense of the traditional blues and swing feeling.

“Pan-Daddy” is another very through-composed longer form piece, again with many changes in tempo and mood throughout. A slow and dissonant opening leads to more boppish lines, with many back-and-forths between slow and fast tempos, which continue to develop dramatically as soloists take their turn. Players are instructed to improvise over a tonal center of D minor. The piece ends with a statement of the first melody with some fresh concluding material.

Ending the program, “Ezz-Thetic” is Russell’s oldest piece heard here today. It is one of his most well-known tunes, and most recorded pieces. It’s a true bebop-era composition that doesn’t in fact sound at all like Parker, Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, or Tadd Dameron, but is pure Russell. It’s often played extremely fast and aggressively, though a slower tempo allows the appreciate for some of the unusual combinations of intervals and scales in the melody, which follows the chord structure of Cole Porter’s pop song “Love for Sale.” The title is a nod to the Cincinnati boxer Ezzard Charles, and Russell’s roots. “Ezz-Thetic” was copyrighted 1949, was first recorded by Lee Konitz and Miles Davis in 1951, and subsequently on Russell’s Jazz Workshop. In short order Max Roach’s group with Sonny Rollins and Kenny Dorham recorded it, and it seemed on the way to being a kind of jazz standard. Russell’s sextet recorded the work in 1961 with Eric Dolphy, Don Ellis and David Baker. Russell had written an arrangement for Charlie Parker’s strings group that was never recorded, but may have been part of their repertoire at Birdland in the early 1950s. The melody is expansive, surprising, and leaps much more widely than most typical bebop style melodies; Russell’s appreciation of Lennie Tristano may be at the root of some of the phrases. While the soloists improvise over the conventional structure of Porter’s tune, the character of the melody pervades the work.

To sum up, we end this program with Russell’s oldest piece in the set, and feel the connection to his unique and inspired music from the 1950s and early 60s. It’s an honor and humbling experience to perform this music, and we appreciate you, the audience.

Long live the music of George Allen Russell.