George Russell

New York, N.Y. (1958) A–

The 80th Birthday Concert (2005) A–

1. Manhattan
2. Electronic Sonata for Souls Beloved by Nature
3. Sippin' at Bells
4. Big City Blues
5. The African Game

Russell was the avant-garde's leading theorist back in the Fifties; as far as I can tell, the influential part of his Lydian Chromatic Concept wasn't any of his particular scales but his conceptualising of "gravity" -- that distances were more important than particular harmonic structures -- which made Davis and Coltrane (the latter of whom saves Russell's classic arrangement of "Manhattan" from Jon Hendricks) that eschewing chord changes would open up endless possibilities for the soloist. Russell ditched the States in '63; in between revolutionising jazz in several Scandanavian nations, he composeded sporadically but probably spent more time refining the Concept. On The 80th Birthday Concert, his big band, runs through his major European works, including an excellent "Electronic Sonata" and a definitive "African Game", demonstrating his ideas work dandily on large canvases. Trumpeter Stanton Davis, in particular, keeps things on edge.