I snuck out for a brisk walk before the sun left us today. I left the apartment with George Russell on my mind. I just received Eric Nisenson’s book about the making of Kind of Blue and so pulled up George Russell - Ezz-thetics in the headphones. What a trip! From there I went to Ben Folds Five - One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces. The piano solo immediately reminded me of Herbie Hancock’s classic EP solo on Freddie Hubbard - Red Clay. Listen to those two solos and try to tell me Ben Folds didn’t listen to the Hancock solo — in particular check out 2:11 from the Folds solo (though, it really doesn’t matter if he did or didn’t, the point is, they’re connected). Man, just listen to the simplicity, the grace of the little phrases with which Herbie starts that solo. Also incredible about that recording is how well they hit the climaxes at just a few points and how in control everything is immediately after — just when you think there’s nowhere left to go but for the instruments to explode, they bring it back, bring it down to ground. Impeccable. I had the sense on this listen that this whole recording is well-architected. Sidenote: the horns vamp at the climax in the EP solo echoes in how in Tower of Power’s Squib Cakes the horns vamp at the climax of the organ solo back into the head. Though with TOP (and especially live!) while still in impeccable control, everything is “turned up to 11”. But I digress.

George Russell

After returning and finishing up some work, I read from the book — there’s a chapter about Russell, called The Lydian Odyssey of George Russell. Eric Nisenson writes:

If the name of Russell’s theory—The Lydian Chromatic Concept for Tonal Organization—sounds dry and academic, just think of the music that it made possible: for example, in addition to Kind of Blue

I thought he was a businessman of some sort. He was very quiet, and he wore glasses. It was one of those quiet New York Sundays. I couldn’t think of anything to do, so we took the Staten Island ferry, and we had a sandwich or something. All I got out of this guy was that he played piano, and he had been in the army. He also had been in the South, although he didn’t have a particularly southern accent. Eventually the conversation sort of lapsed and finally I said, ‘I have a piano at home. I’d love to hear you play.’ We went back to this one-room apartment, and he sat down at the piano. And from then on, I closed my mouth. I mean, I was absolutely amazed. Out of this sort of nonperson came all this incredible technique and feeling and sense of orchestration. So I said, ‘Whoa—we have to work together.’

— George Russell, early 1950s, on first meeting Bill Evans

They would collaborate on Russell’s album The Jazz Workshop, “a precursor to Kind of Blue”. “Bill Evans’s playing on the album is spectacular and quite different from the impressionistic lyricism for which he eventually became famous. Here he plays with a driving energy that at times is alwmost hair-raising.

The following are all quotes of George Russell, from this chapter:

The theory and I grew together. And we are still growing. My atheism was disappearing, to be replaced by a firm belief in higher forces because the ideas were truly alive. Whenever I heard a musician do something that I could not explain, I went back to the theory in order to figure it out.

It is a curious thing about Bill and the Concept. I know he was interested in modes, but it seemed as if he didn’t want to acknowledge the Concept… he did think modally. He always said that the Concept influenced him. But he never directly told me that.

By that time [late 1950s] I could translate any chord in terms of the Concept, and I could show Miles what its parent scale was; the scale formed a unity with the chord. Then Miles understood it. He saw that in the Concept there was an objective explanation for the chord. He was that traditional music overlooked verticality and unity. Unity was not a factor. When musicians are talking about harmony, they mean progressional harmony. They were ignorant—and still are—about the vertical concept. The Lydian Concept is based on the unity of chord and scale. That night, when Miles saw how he could use the Concept, he said that if Bird were alive, this would kill him.

The last quote was from not long before the recording of Kind of Blue. There is also this quote, about a much earlier conversation he had had with Miles Davis:

I first met Miles in Chicago when he was with Billy Eckstine. Then when I moved to New York we spent a lot of time together. This was early in 1945. He invited me up to his place. We used to have sessions together. He was interested in chords, and I was interested in chords. We would sit at the piano and play chords for each other… At one of these sessions I asked Miles what he was looking to accomplish. He told me ‘I want to learn all the chord changes. How can I go about doing this?’ And I thought about that. I didn’t challenge it. At times Miles could be very definite, but at other times he could be really obscure. I just said to myself, ‘He already knows the changes. What could he need?’ Even then Miles was noted for outlining each change, identifying it with the melody. In other words, he wouldn’t have even needed the piano player, because Miles’s melody was dictating what the chords were. He wanted a new way to relate to chords. But this question of his—about how he could learn all the chords—eventually saved my life.