Q&A with the late George Russell

You may be a jazz heavyweight. You may be a jazz lightweight. You may be late to jazz, or you may be steeped in jazz from before you could walk. So some of you may relate to my latest jazz learning experience, but some of you may not. But from out of nowhere, I’ve found out about this guy who’s name was George Russell. I’d only heard of him in passing for the first time a few months ago, as I noticed one of his recordings on the core collection list, my own collection of which was nearing completion and conspicuously missing his recording.

And I couldn’t find it anywhere, or at least, not anywhere for less than $75 or so. But when I started to read and learn about George Russell, like so many things jazz before this, I wondered how I’d missed him this whole time. I won’t go on about George. You can go to Wikipedia or his eponymous website to learn all you want about him.  As for me, a student in my last semester of jazz class, second straight semester of jazz improvisation, I’m a little aggravated to have all this awareness of George and his contributions to jazz sideswipe me this late in my education. So much so, I had dreams of George’s face talking to me from the psychedelic purple cover of his complete Bluebird recordings (the long version of the CD that is really hard to get).

So, to be honest, I don’t know very much about Mr. Russell, yet, but I plan to learn everything I can about him as quickly as possible. In the meantime, the little exercise below is merely for entertainment and to hopefully clear my dream state of Mr. Russell’s all-knowing, ghostly-yet-serious face. If you know about George Russell, you may even get a couple of my puns/jokes/inferences. To obtain the maximum visual effect, imagine the interview being conducted by Connie Chung in a dark suit from Chanel. (George is in black and white tweed, just like on the cover of “Jazz Workshop”, which is same as the picture above. Also, if you notice, George is not resting his head on his chin, but is, in fact, showing you his fist a good ten inches away from his body..."Watch it, buddy!")

Connie: Thank you for agreeing to talk with us, and thank God for allowing us into heaven to interview you, Mr. Russell.

George: George.

Connie: George.

George: Hmph.

Connie: So, tell us about the afterlife.

George: It sucks. Wrong kind of music, everywhere. It’s like I’m trapped in an ethereal universe above the clouds with a bunch of singing angels and every song is the Oratorio from “The Messiah”…oh, … wait…

Connie:  What’s different about the music?

George: Everything’s Ionian and straight up. I keep begging for somebody to play something in Lydian, or even Dorian, or to at least swing a little bit, but no.

Connie: It sounds positively heavenly here. What’s wrong with that?

George: Nothing, really, but I’m going to throw up if I hear the four chord resolve to the one chord one more time.

Connie: Would you explain that for the beginning jazz musicians in our audience?

George: No.

Connie: Maybe God would let you arrange an angelic choir sometime?

George: Meh! Who’s got time for that?

Connie: Don’t you have an eternity?

George: Yeah, but I’m busy working on another edition of my book.

Connie: Let’s talk about your book. I’ve noticed that on Amazon, first editions of the spiral bound, Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, are going for anywhere from well north of a hundred dollars, all the way up to $500.

George: Really? Damn. I could’ve used some of that scratch while I was alive. But what’s my book doing in Brazil? I didn’t know they sold books in the rain forest.

Connie: Yes, … but don’t you feel that the title of your book might be a little off-putting to the average jazz musician?

George: I hope not. The editor scrapped my title for it.

Connie: What was it originally called?

George: Conceptualization of Asynchronous Harmony from Chromatic Permutations of Lydian and Mixolydian Flat-6 Tonalities Derived Using Tonal Organization of Synchronous Patterns and Sonic Causations of Melodic Structures.

Connie: That’s quite a mouthful.

George: Please, don’t say “mouthful”, Connie. Anyway, it had a subtitle.

Connie: Which was…?

George: Cool Sounding Jazz Music.

Connie: Yes, um, er, okay. So, on another subject, is Bill Evans up in heaven with you?

George: I thought this was a serious interview.

Connie: Sorry. Why do you think your CD’s are so hard to find back on earth?

George: “Kind of Blue” is hard to find? I heard it’s the most popular jazz recording ever.

Connie: It is, but that’s a Miles Davis record.

George: Yeah, right. Good one.

Connie: Okay, why do you think jazz recordings – with your name on them – are so hard to find at reasonable prices back on earth?

George: My recordings are selling at a premium, too? Goddammit! Oops. Anyway, I’m going to talk to the land Lord when this interview is over about getting a few minutes back downstairs. Got to be a few royalty checks bouncing around with my name, somewhere.

Connie: Do you need money in heaven?

George: I wouldn’t if Jesus would stop cheating at cards. He deals off the bottom, that Son of a …ah, um, God.

Connie: Do you think the average man on the street will ever be made aware of all your contributions to the field of music in general and specifically, jazz theory?

George: No.

Connie: Why not?

George: Well, how many people alive today do you think know about my work?

Connie: Well, a precious, but lucky, few.

George: Hmph. And how many people read this “Blog” magazine you’re interviewing me for?

Connie: Um, it’s a website, and well, not many.

George: Whatever. How many readers, exactly?

Connie: Well, um, basically, one. The author’s parents and siblings don’t even read it.

George: Really? Wow. Must be crap!

Connie: Well, we are interviewing you.

George: Point taken.

Connie: Well then, what would it take for people to become more aware of your contributions to jazz?

George: Let’s see... Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber doing a duet of my “Ezz-Thetics” arranged by Ozzy Osbourne on the first ever joint Grammy/Academy Awards show. Hosted by Charlie Sheen, of course.

Connie: I thought you wanted this to be a serious interview?

George: Pink and that other Justin then. I’ll do my own arranging. We can do without Charlie, too. I don’t think the folks up here are going to let him work for a while, anyway.

Connie: Ahem. Any special message for our readers?

George: Well, always remember: Don’t confuse chromatic Lydian with Lydian augmented or Lydian flat-7. The dominant chord functions as a five, but it sounds like a one, whereas in the augmented, you have the case where…

Connie: Ahhh, thank you, George, I think that’s all we have time for.

George: All you have time for, Connie. I’ve got an eternity.

Day 80 – Saturday, March 5 – This is getting serious

Goals: Shim loose pins and continue rough tuning piano

Music: None – I’m tuning a piano here

Things have once again gone from bad to worse. A number of the pins that I shimmed and tune have slipped out of tune and, of course, they are no longer tunable. The shim solution worked, only to a degree. Now I’m not sure if I can use two shims per hole, or if I want to use the bushings that I bought, or if I just want to keep using larger size pins (I still have two more sizes to go before that is no longer an option). Again, I’m not sure what the best route is, so I’m going to call one of my consultants today. Depending on his answer, I may either

-Tune to a half tone or more below concert pitch to lessen the pull of the strings on the pins

-Double up shims with larger pins

-Use bushings

-Make a desk out of the sucker

This is not looking good.

Days 78 and 79 – Saturday and Sunday, February 19 and 20 – Tuning in

Goals: Shim loose pins and continue rough tuning piano.

Music: Ornette Coleman’s “Beauty is a Rare Thing” discs 5 and 6; David Murray’s “Ming” (only for as long as I could stand).

Mrs. S. decided to go out on Saturday and she made it clear that she wanted to see some progress on the piano when she got home. So, I got busy and kept plugging away at the loose pins, badly wound strings, and other issues that are awaiting correction on my piano. The good thing is that now it is nothing more than a repetitious process of determining which strings are untunable because of loose pins, removing the pin, inserting a shim and/or a larger pin, tightening down the pin, rewinding the string and rough tuning it to make sure it will stay.

So that’s what I did, both Saturday and Sunday. I’d say about one third of all the pins require shimming, maybe even one half. I started at middle A and after two days of steady work, I’m up to the highest C on the keyboard, which leaves about seven or eight keys to go (remember: my square grand only goes up to A with its 85 keys) to have the upper half of the keyboard tuned and ready. Then I’ll be ready to do the fifteen keys leading down to the single-wound-string bass notes (33 of those) before moving to the hammers to finish up this project.

I’d be making better progress if not for two things: this re-doing the strings bit is really, really tedious. Just terribly boring, yet requiring full attention and awareness, not only to do the job right, but to keep from getting hurt as the strings are loosened and tightened over those 130 year old pin blocks. The other factor is that I reached all this avant-garde jazz crap at the same time as trying to tune the piano, which, for obvious reasons is basically impossible to do. No one can tell the difference between Bb3 above middle C and B3 with David Murray screeching some crap out of his sax. Turn off the music, work, turn on the music, work, turn off the music – that’s doesn’t get it. I worked in silence on Sunday except for the reverb from the strings and soundboard. It may be like that for a while, now.

Day 77 – Sunday, February 13 – Finally, some success

Goals: Shim loose pins and continue rough tuning piano.

Music: Ornette Colemans’s “Beauty is a Rare Thing” discs 3 and 4.

After making excuses for an entire month (shame on me!), I decided yesterday that I could not put it off any longer, and I needed to try the metal shims I bought and see if they would solve the problem of the loose tuning pins. I found the middle A strings and amazingly, they were still in tune. B-flat right above had one of the problem tuning pins, which I had already removed and left in that state, so I got my tin shears and cut me a tapered shim, quarter inch at the bottom, a little more at the top. I had a little trouble getting it seated at first, and although it was a crisp, tight fit, when I had the pin turned in and strung, it held. I tuned that pair of strings to B-flat and moved to B, C, and C#, all of these needed a shim on both pins. Long story short, it was tedious process, but the metal shims worked on every tuning pin I’ve tried them on so far (tapping forehead in lieu of wood), and my piano is, in fact, tunable. More importantly, I’ve been able to use the wires that I’ve already strung onto the piano, so I’m going to save a lot of work in not redoing all the pins and wires (a scenario I had been trying to mentally prepare for, but which I was increasingly going to face by tearing everything out of the piano and inserting an electronic keyboard instead.

Now, I have every reason (and no excuse not) to work on the thing. It may actually be able to be completed, maybe in just a couple of weeks. I’m praying for bad weather next weekend so I can stay in, drink brandy tea, and work on the sucker. I really want to get everything back inside the piano, up off the floor and finish turning the dining room into a music room. But the piano has to be first, so, no more excuses.

Advanced Jazz CD Collecting: A Quick “How To”

The basis for my jazz music collection has always been the Penguin Jazz Recordings Guide’s “Core Collection”. Remember that I started out in jazz without owning a single jazz album, except for three culled from a Wall Street Journal article about “must have” jazz recordings and some average stuff borrowed and burned from the library (I don’t do that anymore, so don’t call the FBI.) . So using the core collection of the Penguin Guide eighth edition, I began buying jazz CD’s.

As is to be expected with a list like the core collection, probably more than half the CD’s are common, relatively inexpensive, and easily found on amazon or ebay. But as you pick what I call the low hanging fruit, you are left with high hanging fruit that gets increasingly harder to find and more and more expensive. Some of the recordings are downright rare, and as I’ve written before, some can’t be had for love or money. They just aren’t out there. Be that as it may, I am dangerously close to completing the core collection with only one or two substitutes, but no integral gaps from the 188 selections.

Notice there that I say “selections” because some are multi-disc sets and some recordings are now available either as parts of boxed sets or other compilations. That complicates matters. So here’s the “how to” for completing the core collection:

1)  Get the easy ones first. Lots of artists can be had for just a couple of bucks: Bill Evans, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, etc. Most every selection on amazon will have a “People who bought this also bought…” underneath with a bunch more of the selections you will need to complete the collection. Pick up what you need.
2)  Buy used. Used CD’s are almost always half the price of new, or less. There are some CD’s I literally picked up for the cost of shipping. 
 3)  Keep track of what you have and what you don’t. You will quickly form a mental database that will help guide your search and will alert you when you come across something rare or hard to find.
4)  If you see one of the rare ones, buy it. You have to convince yourself that money is not an issue here, because there are some that I have seen and failed to purchase because I thought it too expensive, and then I never saw the thing again. It’s frustrating. More frustrating than breaking the budget.
5)   Search ebay and amazon everyday. The foreign amazon sites are also worthwhile. I found some on amazon Japan that I couldn’t find anywhere else. Use the wishlist (amazon) and watchlist (ebay) to keep your eye on prices and availability.
6)  Spend the time and money.
7)  Listen and enjoy your collection. You deserve it.

Depending on the availability of one or two CD’s and whether I opt to substitute or not, I should finish my core collection by the end of March. I plan to take a picture of me sitting in the middle of all those CD’s. It’s going to be exciting.

Still scared – still not back in the water

It’s a good thing I have my piano off in the seldom visited corner of the house. You know: out of sight, out of mind. Attentive (and even not so) readers will have noticed that I have not worked on my piano of late. I purchased everything I think I need to fix it and get it operational, but I have not jumped back in the pool since right around the holidays. The reason is simple: I’m scared. I’m deathly afraid that I will find the piano to be beyond repair, at which point, I will have to face that fact that I am hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars SOL. I know avoidance is not the best policy, but for now, it’s the policy I’ve chosen. Two weekends ago, I promised Mrs. S I would work on the thing this past weekend, but this past weekend, the temperatures hit darn close to 70 degrees, so I worked outside trimming all our crepe myrtles and all of Mrs. S roses instead, needing two and a half hours on Saturday and one and a half hours on Sunday to do it. So, here’s hoping it is cold and miserable next weekend to put me in the mood to work on the piano once again. Maybe I can at least finish it before I’ve owned the thing one year (Memorial Day-ish).

I’ve been occupying my other free time with practicing my melodic minor scales, searching high and low for a good trumpet, searching preliminarily for a violin, and seeking out and buying the last few CD’s I need to complete the entire 188 disc “core collection”. So let me write about those things instead.

For buying the trumpet, I enlisted the help of a classmate at school, and I did a ton of reading online. Since the trumpet will basically be just a decoration in our music room, the number one priority was to buy something that looked nice, but it also had to be playable, since I intend to mess around with it some. (That rules out “brand new student trumpets”, especially anything made in China.) Having only played the trumpet all of one summer when I was ten or eleven, I had to study some to not get too badly burned in the market. But since I wasn’t completely without experience. I was up to speed pretty quickly. Anyway, if you go to ebay and search trumpets, you will find about 135 pages with 50 items to a page, or roughly 7000 trumpets, mouthpieces, stands, pipes, valves, care kits, etc. It is no small task weeding out the wheat from the chaff. And after letting a really nice, rare trumpet slip away last week, I paid close attention this weekend and picked up a 1941 vintage Conn trumpet for right at $350. It is two-toned, engraved, and very classic looking. I’m excited to see it in person. Here’s a picture from the auction:

The 1941 Conn "New York" Trumpet

So after that, Mrs. S said, see if you can spend the same energy and effort to find a violin. Well, if you go to ebay and search violins, (wait for it) you will find about 885 pages with 50 items, or roughly 45,000 violins or violin items. Of those, roughly  44,273 of them are made in China. (Mrs. S said, “No ‘Made in China’, no matter how good it looks or how cheap it is.”) Despite the long odds, I still found a couple of nice ones, but the closest we could come to buying one, was finishing second in a reserve auction that the first place bidder did not win because not even he bid enough. Unlike the trumpet, it is unlikely that Mrs. S or I will play the violin, other than taking a few token strokes over it with the bow, so we’re primarily looking for something that looks nice and which we will be able to resell for what we pay for it. That means we’re going to have to spend a couple hundred on it, too.  And, we have to keep looking and wading through the plethora of Du-shi and Xiang Ho and Ming Mang Mong instruments.

Who knew having a music room to display an antique piano in could be so difficult and expensive?

I’ll write about the CD collection in a separate entry.

A(nother) Night with Joshua Bell

For the third time in eleven months, the virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell made his way to Alabama, and so, for the second time in about eight months, we made the trip to Birmingham to see him and hear him play. I think if Mrs. S could have written a script of how the night would go, it would have gone pretty much like last night did. Here’s the rundown.

The drive from Madison to Birmingham was uneventful. So much so, we had time to scout out the dinner location prior to the beginning of the cocktail party, which started one hour prior to the concert itself. Even with all that, we were still the first to arrive for drinks. So, we had some. They had some good finger foods there, too, (smoked turkey pita pockets, anyone?) and though we were reluctant to fill up on them prior to the concert and post concert dinner, we ended up eating our fair share of them (which turned out to be a good thing, for reasons which I will soon divulge).

The concert (I thought) was average. I just didn’t think the songs were that exciting. Of course, Mr. Bell’s performance was top notch, as was that of his accompanist, Sam Haywood. I suppose the only notable event at the concert was the mad rush to the stage to try to find the horsehair that fell from Josh’s bow during the final suite of songs. (Nobody could find it.) We stood in line to get an autograph before heading to the post concert dinner.

The dinner was held at an old house at Birmingham that had been converted to an arts studio, with music studios, dance room, poetry room, the works. It was a lovely old house and held the fifty or so dinner guests comfortably. We mingled with the guests while sipping California wine and toured the building on our own. We met lots of interesting, influential Birminghammers. When Mr. Bell arrived, the remainder of the party obviously revolved around him. Mrs. S. wanted to take a bunch of pictures and get her picture taken with him, so while most of the rest of the folks headed off to the buffet, we stood around drinking and watching other people chat with JB. Eventually, we got our chance to chat and take photos before he himself headed off to the buffet.

Mrs. S and Joshua Bell

All that standing around translated into us being the last to hit the buffet. By the time we were ready to sit down and eat, several people had already moved into the living room, as most of the seats in the two dining areas were taken. But there were, in fact, two seats available at one of the tables, right next to Mr. Bell. And we were welcomed to sit, so Mrs. S plopped right down next to her idol. It was a fast and fascinating dinner. Mrs. S couldn’t take but a few bites of her meal, partly because it wasn’t very good, but also because she was so excited to sit next to Mr. Bell. JB, for his part, is an amiable, charming personality, and he obviously knows a lot, has many interesting stories, and is very indulgent of his fans. I would guess we spent a good seven or eight minutes, just chatting with him. He signed a personalized autograph for Mrs. S. and answered questions about whether he would so some more jazz projects (maybe) and why he comes to Alabama so often (“Because they keep asking me”). He left after the hostess’s birthday cake came out. We drank champagne and ate cake before hitting the road. At 11:00 at night, on a frigid mid-week evening in mid-January, I was able to lock the cruise control at 75 and we made it home at exactly one minute before midnight.

Honestly, I was a little amazed at how much fun I had. We became patrons of the arts in Birmingham Alabama for one night, and it was exhilarating. Like I told the hostess, who said it must be rough to drive down from Huntsville to Birmingham and back for the event, “If I could do this every week, I would.”