George Russell - The Remasters (All Tracks Remastered) '2021

Tracks list

Tracklist:

01. The Stratus Seekers (Remastered)
02. Honesty (Remastered)
03. Chromatic Universe, Pt. 1 (Remastered 2017)
04. Blues in Orbit (Remastered)
05. Round Midnight (Remastered)
06. Kige's Tune (Remastered)
07. Chromatic Universe, Pt. 2 (Remastered 2017)
08. Pan-Daddy (Remastered)
09. Thoughts (Remastered)
10. Stereophrenic (Remastered)
11. The Lydiot (Remastered 2017)
12. Nardis (Remastered)
13. Waltz from Outer Space (Remastered 2017)
14. Ezz-Thetic (Remastered)
15. Chromatic Universe, Pt. 3 (Remastered 2017)
16. D.C. Divertimento (Remastered)
17. Stratusphunk (Remastered 2016)
18. You Are My Sunshine (Remastered)
19. Bent Eagle (Remastered 2016)
20. The Outer View (Remastered)
21. Kentucky Oysters (Remastered 2016)
22. Zig-Zag (Remastered)
23. Lambskins (Remastered 2016)
24. Au Privave (Remastered)
25. Things New (Remastered 2016)


 Read Full BiographyRussell's first instrument was the drums, which he played
in the Boy Scout Drum and Bugle Corps and at local clubs when he was in high
school. At 19, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis, but he used the enforced
inactivity to learn the craft of arranging from a fellow patient. Once back on
his feet, he played with Benny Carter, but after being replaced on drums by Max
Roach, Russell began to zero in on composing and arranging. He moved to New York
to join the crowd of young firebrands who gathered in Gil Evans' "salon," and he
was actually invited to play drums in Charlie Parker's band. But once again, he
fell ill, finding himself in a Bronx hospital for 16 months (1945-1946), where
he began to formulate the ideas for the Lydian Concept. Upon his recovery,
Russell leaped into the embryonic fusion of bebop and Afro-Cuban rhythms by
writing "Cubana Be" and "Cubana Bop," which the Dizzy Gillespie big band
recorded in 1947. He contributed arrangements to Claude Thornhill and Artie Shaw
in the late '40s and wrote the first (and not the last) speculative scenario of
a meeting between Charlie Parker and Igor Stravinsky, "A Bird in Igor's Yard,"
recorded by Buddy De Franco.

While working on his Lydian theories, Russell dropped out of active music-making
for a while, working at a sales counter in Macy's when his book was published.
But when he resumed composing in 1956, he had established himself as an
influential force in jazz. Russell's connection with Gunther Schuller resulted
in the commission of "All About Rosie" for the 1957 Brandeis University jazz
festival, and he also taught at the Lenox School of Jazz that Schuller
co-founded. He formed a rehearsal sextet in the mid-'50s that became known as
the George Russell Smalltet, with Art Farmer, Bill Evans, Hal McKusick, Barry
Galbraith, and various drummers and bassists. Their 1956 recording Jazz Workshop
(RCA Victor) became a landmark of its time, and Russell continued to record
intriguing LPs for Decca in the late '50s and Riverside in the early '60s.
Another key album from this period, Ezz-Thetics, featured two important
progressive players, Eric Dolphy and Don Ellis.

Finding the American jazz scene too confining for his music, Russell left for
Europe in 1963, living in Sweden for five years. From his new base, he toured
Scandinavia with a new sextet of European players and received numerous
commissions -- including a ballet based on Othello, a mass, and the orchestral
suite Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature: 1980. Upon his return to the
U.S. in 1969, he joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music,
where Schuller had started a jazz department, and this gave him a secure base
from which to tour occasionally with his own groups. Russell stopped composing
from 1972 to 1978 in order to finish a second volume on the Lydian Chromatic
Concept. He led a 19-piece big band at the Village Vanguard for six weeks in
1978, played the Newport Jazz Festival when it was based in New York City, and
made tours of Italy, the U.S. West Coast, and England in the '80s.

Russell's most imposing latter-day commissions included "An American Trilogy"
and the monumental three-hour work "Time Line" for symphony orchestra, jazz
ensembles, rock groups, choir, and dancers. In addition to The African Game and
So What on Blue Note, Russell made recordings for Soul Note in the '70s and '80s
and Label Bleu in the '90s, while continuing to teach at the New England
Conservatory and leading his Living Time Orchestra big band into the 21st
century. In 2005 George Russell & the Living Time Orchestra's The 80th Birthday
Concert, released on the Concept label, celebrated the legendary octogenarian's
contributions to the art of jazz with performances of some of his most
groundbreaking extended compositions and arrangements. George Russell died in
Boston on July 27, 2009 of complications from Alzheimer's disease; he was 86
years old. ~ Richard S. Ginell

Related artists