Audio
Edward Tatnall Canby : October, 1957

Well, darn it, they will keep sending me these jazz items and I can’t help listening, out of curiosity. For good reason though – the Canby musical subdivisions very seldom follow the standard lines and I see no particular reason for not listening to a disc like this merely because it sports a black label instead of a red one.

Truth is, jazz is on the way to becoming our own special “classical” music, and this sort of disc is a vinylite straw in the wind. Egg-head jazz this, and the composer (he is a composer mind you, who writes down his improvisations) says things like this in his own written notes:

“The Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization acknowledges the existence of a central tonality and an underlying tonic tone (or primary axis) for a whole area regardless of the degree of dissonance used in the area.”

The guy is definitely eggy, but what he says in words makes a lot of sense – in part, that the best written-down jazz sounds improvised, that therefore in effect composed jazz can retain the musical expression that jazz has developed. Good! This is simply restating what music as a whole has gone through in Western civilization these thousand years. Improvisation – music made up, like speech, at normal speed – has always come first; writing it down is a more elaborate and artificial approach since it’s done, so to speak, at a crawl; but it does allow greater freedom to develop big music, in the end, in jazz as anywhere else. Who could improvise a whole novel, without writing it down?

The Russell sound? I sort of like it though it has the dry, somewhat self-consciously intellectual feel that is now in vogue. It’s not nearly as intellectual in the listening as it makes out to be and the best thing to do is – as with all music – just to listen. Excellent for sound, with neat, close-up recording of the half-dozen-odd players.

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Cashbox : 06/15/1957

From Victor’s “Jazz Workshop” comes this extremely adroit jazz session under the direction of arranger George Russell. The “smalltet” as it’s referred to contains an admirable collection of top jazz names (bassist Milt Hinton; Barry Galbraith; and drummer Joe Harris, among others) in 12 glowing, ever-ingenious creations from Russell. Fascinating, expertly performed jazz platter.

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Cincinnati Post
Dale Stevens : 07/13/1957

With so many jazz albums being released these days, you find yourself thinking in terms of a “comer” of a fellow who has already arrived. It’s especially true of Cincinnati’s George Russell.

The 34-year-old 1941 Withrow graduate came up through the formative years of bop by writing such items as Ezz-thetic, named after Ezz Charles and performed by Lee Konitz and Charlie Parker, and Cubana Be and Cubana Bop, for Dizzy Gillespie.

More recently, he has written extensively for Hal McKusick on Hal’s Coral and RCA-Victor albums. That’s when you’re inclined to think of him as a comer. But now, Russell has an album of his own for Victor’s “Jazz Workshop” series, and his face on the cover of an important 12-inch LP makes it clear – George Russell is “here.”

George is a composer and arranger. For McKusick, he wrote originals as well as arranging standards such as Serenade in Blue. More than being a composer, George Russell is a serious jazz composer who in the past nine years has evolved his own writing system which he labels the Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization.

He quickly denies that he is of the “experimental” school of jazz writers. “To experiment means you don’t know where you’re going. I know where I’m going at all times.” And obviously he does. Using American folk music and blues, he fashions a written form of jazz within what he terms his “disciplined freedom in composing while maintaining a central tonality,” or key.

That sounds esoteric and far-out, I admit. But in talking with George Russell, and more important, listening to his music, you find intelligence, subtlety and swing.

For instance, he gets through to you with these observations about composing serious jazz:

“A composer has a responsibility to communicate with people; to let them know what he’s trying to say without lowing his own standards…

“In jazz, some people perform, some write; there’s a great difference. A writer has to be patient. Many performers don’t have patience. A writer is an improviser, too; blowing all the horns with a pencil. In writing for an alto sax, he must become an alto…

“When I’m writing, I try to improvise sounds. I always allow space for solos…

“Everything is aimed at producing music, not numbers. I’m not working by arithmetic. I try to produce emotion and swing; to carry the listener on a little adventure. I’m very conscious of the listener. I write as a fan – what I’d like to hear if I were listening to jazz.”

George, a relatively quiet guy, also a drummer, a profession that has been interrupted twice by sanitorium sieges with tuberculosis. Soon he’s going to resume drumming with a group of his own.

That’s a talent that goes back to his drum and bugle corps days here in Cincinnati with the Boy Scouts. As a 15-year-old, he was playing in local night spots. Before he was out of high school, he was given a scholarship to play with the orchestra at Wilberforce University.

From Wilberforce, he joined the Benny Carter band, then went to Chicago to write for the Earl Hines band. Nine months later “I heard my first bop. I was impressed, so I went to New York.” There, Max Roach introduced him to Dizzy Gillespie and a writing career was launched. He also wrote for Charlie Parker, one of the two or three more important men jazz has ever known.

It’s important in the story of George Russell to note that he has learned almost everything by ear. His only formal study was a scholarship with Stephan Volpe in New York.

But if his works on jazz records aren’t enough indication of his stature, this fact is: He was one of three jazz men to be commissioned, along with three classical writers, to do a score for Brandeis University which will soon appear on a Columbia album. The other jazz writers chosen by Brandeis were Jimmy Giuffre and Charlie Mingus.

College, Russell feels, is the new hope for jazz, and all of American culture. “Jazz has migrated from the night spots onto the campus. It means a wider acceptance of jazz, a better understanding of it.”

But will the vast American public ever accept anything subtle? “I think there’s a good chance,” Russell said. “Americans are making more money, they have more spare time. So they’re investigating culture.”

The future of jazz itself? “More subtlety, more depth. It will be on a higher artistic level in form, rhythm, tonality and composition. But it will always swing in the tempo of the times.”

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Cincinnati Post
Dale Stevens : 07/20/1957

When a composer says he uses his own Lydian concept of tonal organization, you wouldn’t think he could swing. But George Russell does.

RCA-Victor let George do it in a Victor Jazz Workshop album with a group he calls a “smalltet” – Art Farmer on trumpet. Hal McKusick on alto, Barry Galbraith on guitar, Milt Hinton on bass, Bill Evans on piano, and Osie Johnson, Joe Harris and Paul Motian on drums.

In the liner notes, Russell, a native Cincinnatian, explains that “the Lydian concept of tonal organization acknowledges the existence of a central tonality and an underlying tonic tone, or primary axis, for a whole area, regardless of the degree of dissonance used in the area.”

Translated into music, it is an interesting, challenging journey into jazz in which Russell sometimes swings lightly a la chamber music, probes boldly and humorously, romps mightily, then paints with a sensitive, colorful jazz brush.

His Ezz-thetic is a real swinger with a bop flavor. His Fellow Delegates delves into chromatic drums and wood blocks. Knights of the Steamtable takes you into two keys at the same time. Night Sound and Jack’s Blues are folkish, yet contrapuntal and contemporary.

As with all jazz, the important thing is that it all swings. It might take several listens before you get Russell’s message, but while you’re trying, the toes will be tapping. Recommended highly for modernists.

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Indianapolis Star
Polly Cochran : 08/04/1957

If most jazz reviewers champion experiments in music just to be sure of staying ahead of the jazz cause, as George Wein, director of the Newport Jazz Festival has charged in print, let it be known that this column is busy enough keeping up with what’s happening.

Particularly it is difficult when an album appears which, while fine in performance and intent, insists upon using a language clear only to a Ph.D. in advanced theory and harmony. George Russell’s Jazz Workshop is a superb case in point.

There is much to enjoy and admire about this LP, whose musicians are among the best in the field. But one look at the complicated liner notes and comes the feeling that your pleasure and/or disappointments are those of a retarded mind. You’re not hip.

To appreciate Russell‘s album fully, one most know all about polytonality, atonality and the Lydian concept of tonal organization. He must approach jazz with the cold logic of a scientist in a laboratory. Naturalness, spontaneous emotion are out. And what is gained is an involved, interesting but often esoteric music form.

Still, these are the growing pains jazz must suffer. And composers such as Russell help to nurture that growth. Appearing in this latest of the Workshop series are (Tracks 1-4): Barry Galbraith, guitar; Art Farmer, trumpet; Hal McKusick, alto; Milt Hinton, bass; Bill Evans, piano; Joe Harris, drums. Tracks 5, 6, 8, 12: newcomer Paul Motian replaces Harris. Tracks 7, 9, 10, 11: Osie Johnson sits at the drums and Teddy Kotick takes the bass.

Among the 12 selections, Night Sound carries a unique blues sound with a shifting background, and Round Johnny Rondo holds excitement in its intricate swinging.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 08/25/1957

This is an attempt on the part of George Russell to take jazz definitely out of the realm of casual improvisation and into that of serious composition. In my opinion, it is remarkably successful and serves to open a definite field for indefinite development of a serious jazz form. (In the notes, Russell points out that the jazz connoisseur must come to consider “form” a verb, not a noun.)

This is definitely “far out” music yet is completely comprehensible, I think, to the fan with either jazz or modern classical background. The modern classicist might start with Ye Hypocrite, Ye Beelzebub or with Jack’s Blues; the jazz fan with Ezz-thetic (which Russell originally wrote for Parker or with Night Sound.

The musicians are from RCA-Victor’s excellent jazz team, including Galbraith, Art Farmer, Hal McKusick, Milt Hinton, et al.

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Saturday Review
Nat Hentoff : 06/29/1957

In his first album under his own name, Russell provides a significant, multiple evocative program of modern jazz composition that is rooted in basic jazz and pre-jazz material such as the blues and spirituals but is also consistently and cohesively personal. There is incisive drama, humor, moving lyricism, and the emergence of a compositional style that is composition and is also jazz. Mr. Russell’s exemplary associates are Barry Galbraith, guitar; Art Farmer, trumpet; Hal McKusick, alto; Milt Hinton, bass; Bill Evans, piano; and Joe Harris, drums. Victor, whose jazz line has not been especially distinguished in recent years, is to be congratulated for being so valuable a catalyst in this case.

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Down Beat : 08/08/1957
Leonard Feather : 5 stars

In the latest and most exciting of RCA’s Workshop series, arranger George Russell has managed to prove several points concerning what is sometimes know as “far-out” jazz that may have bothered a number of listening laymen and musicians. First, the music in almost every piece swings just the way conventional jazz swings. Second, true improvisation abounds and there is the sense of organized looseness that one finds in the more tonal jazz combos. Third, the works are neither too long nor overpretentious structurally, as has so frequently been the case with experiments of this kind. Fourth, they have a challenging sense of form without stiffness or overorganization. Fifth, one never has to worry about intonation or any aspect of musicianship or performance; clearly the quality of the personnel and the quantity of rehearsal met the stern demands of Russell’s writing. Sixth, the writing is harmonically venturesome without resorting either to complete atonality or to the Schoenberg mathematics of the juggled twelve-tone row.

It is on this last level that Russell has succeeded completely in lifting his album to a unique status and stature. His writing is bad on the “Lydian concept of tonal organization,” a theory on which he has worked for years, which was heard in his sole track on the Teddy Charles Atlantic LP, and which unfortunately George completely fails to explain here in his well-intended but elliptical liner notes.

Obviously nothing as radical as this can be summed up in a sentence, but one of the basic factors is the building of keys by picking the notes in rising fifths; thus the notes in the key of C are C, G, D, A, E, B and F Sharp. There is a great deal more to it than that, but we’re saving it for a feature story in which George will try to elucidate a little. Suffice it for now that there is a sense of tonality, of the feeing of a certain root in every passage. One of the pieces, Ezz-Thetic, because it was written some years ago, is closer to normal tonal jazz than the other tracks. There is a Tristano-like air to the ensemble unisons in this number and to Knights of the Steamtable.

The moods are many. Round Johnny Rondo swings the most. The ethereal Hix Blewitt has a simple long-note melody that gives the effect of a distant horizon seen opaquely through a veil. Fellow Delegates is the only track on which Russell himself plays, using a set of chromatically tuned drums of California redwood that achieve an odd and attractive garbage-can tone, recalling the Calypso steel drums. Billy The Kid packs a mad wallop, especially when Bill Evans spurts out a series of solo breaks as smoothly as a Texas gusher. The Sad Sergeant struck me as a little meaningless and pretentious, alone among the dozen tracks; perhaps a week from now it will be my favorite.

Farmer and McKusick acquit themselves superbly; as Hal said, “It was like learning another language,” and they both speak it fluently. Galbraith‘s comping is as exciting as his solo work. All three rhythm sections cook; Motian is particularly impressive on Witch Hunt. As you’ll have gathered, I dig Mr. Russell as a jazz composer who has found a new path without going off the main jazz route. Such men must be guarded with care and watched with great expectations.

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Liner Notes by George Russell

The challenge which is presented to the composer of modern music who has been traditionally educated is that of either refining and reshaping his traditionally learned techniques, or constructing new techniques that will enable him to capture and enhance the vital improvisational forces so abundantly inherent in much of the good music of today. To impose old orders and old techniques upon vigorous and willful young music is to burden and stifle it rather than to channel and lead it and be led by it.

Because the best written jazz sounds improvised, it may be concluded that the best of our jazz composers, down through the years, have: (1) embraced the instrumental improvisation that jazz is so noted for, (2) captured the vitality of its strongest improvisers and (3) proceeded to improvise, with greater and greater subtlety, jazz compositions that sound as fresh and as uninhibited as a compelling solo by an inspired jazz soloist.

All this has highlighted the fact that a jazz writer is an improviser, too. Given a set of musical facts (just as a soloist is given a sequence of chords) he can, in the same way that the soloist improvises upon chords, improvise upon these musical facts pertaining to his composition and produce a swinging, logical, vital-sounding piece of new music.

The emergence of the jazz writer as an improviser has served to close the long-standing gap between written jazz and improvised jazz. It has, at the same time, enriched the Jazz Language immensely, producing new rhythms, new tonal combinations and, particularly, new forms which grow directly from the composition’s semantic as well as musical needs.

One may not start with a formal sketch or plan, but it is the intrinsic logic in the growing composition that must be given the freedoms to expand as it wishes. It would be unwise to sacrifice this intrinsic logic merely to prove the righteousness and infallibility of a preconceived formal plan.

As Gunther Schuller points out in his probing article, “The Future of Form in Jazz” (Saturday Review of Literature; January 12, 1957): “We must learn to think of form as a verb rather than a noun.”

My six months of study with the highly accomplished modern composer and teacher, Stefan Wolpe, were most rewarding in that I learned several extremely important principles of his own music-philosophy that are uniquely applicable to all music, but especially to modern music. The rest of my music education has been strengthened by the contributions of many jazz contemporaries to the art and, further, through the influences of Stravinsky, Bartók, Berg and Ravel.

However, in the main, my education has evolved from a ten-year project concerned with the development of several different theories: one includes several methods of entering into composing a piece of music; one pertains to rhythm; but, the mostly highly organized of these theories is what I choose to call “The Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization.”

The Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization acknowledges the existence of a central tonality and an underlying tonic tone (or primary axis) for a whole area, regardless of the degree of dissonance used in the area.

The following are the compositions and the performing personnel:

Ye Hypocrite, Ye Beelzebub
Jack’s Blues
Livingstone I Presume
Ezz-thetic

Barry Galbraith … Guitar
Art Farmer … Trumpet
Hal McKusick … Alto
Milt Hinton … Bass
Bill Evans … Piano
Joe Harris … Drums

On the following bands –

Night Sound
Round Johnny Rondo
Witch Hunt
Concerto for Billy the Kid

the personnel remains the same as above except for the drumming, which is supplied by newcomer Paul Motian.

Barry, Art, Hal and Bill, supported by Osie Johnson, drums, and Teddy Kotick, bass, perform on the following bands:

Fellow Delegates
The Sad Sergeant
Knights of the Steamtable
Ballad of Hix Blewitt

All the compositions in this album were approached in the same way. A preconceived plan which contained a thematic as well as an emotional objective was devised. Some followed the original plan while others exerted their own inherent will.

Side I
1. Ye Hypocrite, Ye Beelzebub
The first section of this piece is based on an ancient spiritual of the same name and attempts to project a swing based on a 6/4 meter. The second section is devoted to solos on a chordal frame that turns against the underlying meter, after nine and a half bars. The third section is a restatement of the first.

2. Jack’s Blues
This piece represents an attempt to express several moods in a short composition. Its thematic development is based on the interval of a major second.

3. Livingstone I Presume
The first section strives for a “jungle” sound. This is followed by a jazz section which ultimately goes back to the jungle sound and fades.

4. Ezz-thetic
A relatively unchanged piece which is about ten years old. It follows the traditional jazz form for the most part. This piece was performed many times in the early 50s by the late Charlie Parker and strings.

5. Night Sound
A blues theme is developed in a setting that is largely chromatic because of its constantly shifting tonal centers.

6. Round Johnny Rondo
This piece is primarily contrapuntal in nature, venturing into areas of dissonant contrapuntal by-play between alto and trumpet.

Side II

1. Fellow Delegates
The momentum or swing that carries this piece is not of a jazz nature. It features an improvised section in which Osie Johnson on wood drums supplies a supporting figure to the blue scale that I employ on the chromatic drums. The tunes drums and chromatic drums are a creation of David Wheat’s Musical Engineering Associates of Sausalito, California.

2. Witch Hunt
Attempts to carry the original theme stated at the beginning of the composition by the trumpet on an adventure that returns ultimately to the starting point.

3. The Sad Sergeant
A mood piece based again on the spiritual Ye Hypocrite, Ye Beelzebub with military overtones. The guitar, in the opening section, carries the melody of the spiritual punctuated by military-sounding drum and trumpet patterns. A piano and a bass figure are added to the overall mood. The military and blues theme is maintained throughout the composition.

4. Knights of the Streamtable
Once again the theme is stated at the beginning of the composition and it is given the freedom to develop as it wishes. The trumpet solo flows into a polytonal solo section where the trumpet is improvising an A-minor blues against an essential B-flat minor background.

This number is dedicated to the countermen of Local 1199, Retail Drug Workers Union, of which I am a member.

5. Ballad of Hix Blewitt
This composition is dedicated to the memory of a friend who possessed a legendary quality. In trying to sum up the essence of him, I felt that he was a combination of the West, the blues, and good Dixie humor. The composition strives to capture those feelings in that order.

6. Concerto for Billy the Kid
Attempts to supply a frame to match the vigor and vitality in the playing of pianist Bill Evans.

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All of the musicians who perform on this album did so admirably. However, guitarist Barry Galbraith in particular had the lion’s share of responsibility in having to assume the part of a single horn or a whole section.

Engineer Ray Hall worked tirelessly to achieve acoustical perfection in the studios and in the playback rooms.

I was assisted in the orientation of my theories by my teacher and friend, George Endrey, and I received great support – both personally and musically – from my wife, Juanita Russell.

My thanks go to Mrs. Dorothy Goebel for her invaluable assistance in the preparation of these liner notes.

Art Famer was made available through the courtesy of Prestige Recording Company.

Bill Evans performed through the courtesy of Riverside Records.