George Russell
George Russell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States on June 23rd, 1923 and is the Pianist. At the age of 86, George Russell biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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George Allen Russell (June 23, 1923 – July 27, 2009) was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, and theorist.
In his book Lydian Chromatic Organization (1953), he is one of the first jazz players to contribute to general music theory with a model of harmony based on jazz rather than European music.
Early life
Russell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on June 23, 1923, to a white father and a black mother. He was adopted by a nurse and a chef on the B & O Railroad, Bessie and Joseph Russell. Young Russell performed in the choir of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and listened to Fate Marable's Kentucky Riverboat music. He made his stage debut at age seven by appearing on "Moon Over Miami" with Fats Waller.
surrounded by the sounds of the black church and the Ohio Riverboats, and with a father who was a music instructor at Oberlin College, he started playing drums with the Boy Scouts and Bugle Corps, earning a scholarship to Wilberforce University, where he joined the Collegians, including Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Freeman Lee, Frank Foster, and Benny Carter. Russell performed in the band with Ernie Wilkins, another well-known jazz composer. He was hospitalized with tuberculosis at the start of World War II, and during which he was taught the fundamentals of music theory by a fellow soldier.
Early career
After being released from the hospital, he performed drums with Benny Carter's band but decided against drumming as a career after hearing Max Roach, who had been recalled in the orchestra. Russell grew up in New York in the early 1940s, where he became a member of a group of young innovators, including Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, and John Lewis, later the music director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, inspired by the music director of Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight."
Russell was hospitalized for tuberculosis for 16 months from 1945 to 1946. During that period, Charlie Parker's drummer had to work out the basic tenets of what was going to become his Lydian Chromatic Organization, a term that has influence well beyond jazz's boundaries. He also studied composition with Stefan Wolpe during this time. Russell's first book was published in 1953, when he was working as a Macy's salesclerk. Russell's plans, released in 1991, were a significant step forward in John Coltrane and Miles Davis' classic album, Kind of Blue, and a reference for other modernists, such as Eric Dolphy and Art Farmer.
Russell was also applying its principles to composition while writing about the theory. Charles Wilson's first composition for the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, the two-part "Cubano Be, Cubano Bop" (1947), as part of the group's pioneering experiments in fusing bebop and Cuban jazz elements, was recorded in a session led by Buddy DeFranco next year. In addition, Russell's less well-known but pivotal work "Similau" was recorded in January 1950 by Artie Shaw and used techniques from both the Gillespie and DeFranco designs.
Russell began playing piano, leading a number of groups including Bill Evans, Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, Barry Galbraith, Milt Hinton, Paul Motian, and others. The Jazz Workshop was his first album as leader, and it was one in which he paid hardly less than the event itself (rather than colleague Gil Evans). Over the next few years, he would release a number of excellent albums, most as the primary pianist.
Russell was one of six jazz musicians asked by Brandeis University to write a piece for their Festival of the Creative Arts in 1957. He wrote a suite for orchestra, All About Rosie, which featured Bill Evans among other soloists, and has been cited as one of the few good examples of composed polyphony in jazz.
Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Milt Hinton, Robert Brookmeyer, and Max Roach were among the orchestra's members on his 1958 extended work, as well as singer/lyricist Jon Hendricks' wrap-around raps. Bill Evans and Paul Bley's unusual dual piano voicings were included on Jazz in the Space Age (1960) on a much more ambitious big band album. Russell created his own sextet in which he played piano. The Russell Sextet's legendary session with Dave Baker and Steve Swallow, as well as the successful sessions with Eric Dolphy (on Ezz-thetics) and singer Sheila Jordan (1962) is highly regarded).