George Russell Sextet At Beethoven Hall - Guest Artist: Don Cheery

 

Lydia And Her Friends

George Russell Sextet At Beethoven Hall 

Guest Artist Don Cheery

Produced by Joachim E. Brenda

Recording Director: H. G. Brunner-Schwer – Willi Fruth

Recording Engineer and Special Cut: Rolf Donner

Recorded Live at Beethoven Hall Stuttgart

Microphones: 6 x U67; 2 x KM54; 1 x SM2

Photos: Ove Alstrom (cover) - Manfred Schaeffer (inside)

Graphic Work: Gigi Berendt / Phil Reilly

2 Record Set

BASF STEREO MC 25125

1973

From the inside cover: George Russell's father was a music teacher at the famous Oberlin University. But George's first musical impression that remained, came from a riverboat which went downstream the Ohio past his home city Cincinnati. It was the "Fate Marable Band" who played on it.

That is the tension in Russell's musical life: The music-teacher and the riverboat. George has never learnt to know his father, but he says: "It must be heritage. From him I inherited my sense of the systematic, which led to the "Lydian Concept". From the neighborhood I grew up in I got jazz. Jimmy Mundy (in those days star-arranger for Benny Goodman and many others, author of "Airmail Special") was my neighbor.

In 1942, when Russell was 20 years of age, he "sold" his first composition to Benny Carter – and a little later just that same piece of music to the Earl Hines Big Band. It bore the symbolic title "New World".

In the middle of the 1940's Charlie Parker wanted Russell as drummer for his quintet. At the end of the the '40's Russell wrote "Cuban Be – Cuban Bop". Leonard Feather called it the "first successful large band work combining American jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms". So much about the background of George Russell. (More about him may be read in jazz books and in the liner notes of his numerous records).

George says: "I'm always trying to bind the old to the new." In "Lydia And Her Friends" just this connection is achieved. "Lydia" symbolizes the Lydian Concept of tonality, which George Russell created at the beginning of the 1950's.

John Lewis called it "the first profound theoretical contribution to come from jazz". And the "friends" are the ideas and persons who came from the old background of George Russell, to be now confronted with "Lydia".

George says: "The first part of the piece is me. But I'm influenced by everything I've heard. So I'm informing everyone: Music is big!" There is not only one style and not only one way of playing – there are many.

Now that is why Lydia all of the sudden finds herself in "Baggs Groove", is flirting with Charlie Parker's "Confirmation" and has a date with Thelonious Monk "Around Midnight". But to prevent all doubts: The last part of the piece (which belongs to one single and large complex) is called "Takin' Lydia Home". So it is George Russell who brings Lydia home, after all.

The way in which George Russell gets down to the ground with jazz-tradition in "Lydia And Her Friends" is exactly equivalent to Stravinsky's manner of resuming and reflecting the tradition of European music – from Pergolesi to Tschikowski – and of melting it into his own. Only he can create the new,  who builds up on the old.

That is exactly what "Freein'Up" is expressing. There you have a simple, almost conventional jazz motive, that swings – with Al Heath on drums – as good jazz always should swing. And yet, even to the untutored listener, all the freedom becomes evident, which Russell has brought into jazz. That is the importance of Russell's "Lydian Concept": It makes possible the freedom the jazz musician of the 1960's asks for, yet avoids arbitrariness. Russell: "The only thing which makes it free, is the logic of it. That logic expresses freedom. Unlogical freedom is chaos." Not without good reason the complete title of Russell's theoretical book is: "The Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization". This is tonal music – even if it may sound "a-tonal" to the uninitiated listener.

The reason for this "a-tonality" can be found, in the first place in, what George Russell calls, "the superimposition of different feelings". "Nobody in our complex world of computers and hydrogen bombs has only one single sort of feeling. You do have simply different feelings at the same time – or you do not fit into this world of ours."

George Russell is shocked by the incongruity between our highly developed, technicized, and specialized modern work and, on the other hand, the stone-age level of that music, the world pays homage to day by day in its hit parades. This incongruity, expressing lack of maturity, a certain un-readiness, suggests the fear that someday someone will press that button which will release the general catastrophe.

In September 1964 George Russell had come to Europe due to the initiative of the directors of the Berlin Jazz Festival. At this time, the "New York Times" wrote in its review of one of the concerts: "It was Miles Davis, who packed them in, it was the George Russell Sextex who turned them on..."

Russell's success was so great, that he decided to settle down in Europe. In Stockholm he founded a sextet consisting at first of Swedish musicians. But soon the fame of Russell's work in Stockholm ran to America. A number of American musicians came to Sweden, to be able to work along with George Russell. It has to be recalled what that meant, for jobs for jazz musicians are few, nowadays. It was not the hope to find numerous "gigs" to play, but the fascination of George Russell and his music which drew these Americans to Stockholm.

Seven or eight months later, already, George Russell had an "All American Sextet" except for the fine Swedish trumpet-player Bertie Loewgren. This sextet we present on our MPS-disc. It was recorded at a concert which took place in the Beethoven Hall in Stuttgart, on the occasion of the Radio and TV Exhibition 1965.

I shall never forget the enthusiasm the musicians played with that evening. When the concert was over and the audience had gone home after a long applause and even more encores, they kept on playing. One part of our recording was done during the concert, the other one after. We got so much of excellent material, that there soon will be another record. "George Russell At Beethoven Hall", Vol. 2.

Here are a few more words about the musicians:

Brian Trentham, born in Denver, Colorado, in 1944 has studied with Dave Baker, the former trombone-player and an important figure in the George Russell-sphere. Brian calls him his "musical father". Trentham had played already in America, together with Russell – for instance at the Newport Jazz Festival 1964. Repeatedly the Trentham Quartet was chosen as the Best College and University Jazz Group of the U. S. – as it was at the Villanova and the Penn State University Festivals.

Also to this quartet belongs the 19 year old bass player Cameron Brown – born in Detroit in 1945. He named Reggie Workman and Steve Swallow as main influences. The trip to Stockholm was easy for Brown, as he had lived in Sweden before 1963/64.

Ray Pitts, tenor sax – born in Boston in 1932 – has played a lot in Copenhagen together with Danish jazz musicians. He was especially successful in Poland at the Warsaw Jazz Festival.

Albert Heath of the Philadelphia jazz family (his brothers are Jimmy and Percy!) stayed loyal with Russell since he came over to Europe in autumn '64. From scores of jazz recordings Al is known as a sensitive, yet powerful drummer, so that he needs not to be specially introduced here.

Bertil Loewgren, born in Stockholm in 1939, has played its Arne Domneru and other Swedish jazz musicians. He says: "I'm always coming back to Brownie (Clifford Brown). I don't listen so much to trumpet-players, I want my own style". It is remarkable how perfectly Bertil, being the only European musician of this group, fits into the music and the concept of George Russell! Here, everyone can feel: This is the music of a new generation of jazzmen who span countries and continents with a new musical language which is understood by all of them.

Don Cherry –  with his old cornet or 1880 – was guest-star of the Russell concert at Beethoven Hall. Russell says: "He lights my music."

Don is a "poet of fee jazz". He has grown far beyond of what he used to play with Ornette Coleman. Even such a tough critic as Miles Davis admires his technique enabling him to disintegrate the musical thoughts and to spread them fanlike with trifling ease, permanently saying the new and personal in a powerful and, at the same time, lyrical way. Fascinating is the nonchalance with which Don takes up phrases and lets them drop again – phrases with evident continuity once they are begun. "You need not play what everyone knows already, beforehand," says Don Cherry, "look at the children. Not even they sing their songs unto the end, once they have sung them often enough before. They only hum them and think the rest. Why not should grown-ups do the same? You not just play the music. You have to live it, too, to be able to play it. and why should someone live just the same all over again? That's not for me." And that is not for George Russell, either. – Joachim E. Berendt (translated by Chris Dreyer)

Freein' Up

Lydia And Her Friends

Lydia In Bags Groove

Lydia's Confirmation

Lydia Round Midnight

Takin' Lydian Home

You Are My Sunshine

Oh Jazz, Po Jazz

Oh Jazz, Po Jazz (continued)

Volupte