From inauspicious beginnings as an adopted child in 1920's Cincinnati, George Russell overcame ill-health and transcended racism to become recognized as a unique figure in jazz: a major composer, bandleader, professor, and the music's leading theoretician. The author of The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization and composer of a significant body of small group and orchestral works, Russell influenced the development of jazz and many of its leading practitioners. George Russell: The Story of an American Composer is the first biography of one of the greatest figures in jazz. Russell's story is interwoven with some of the most colorful characters in the history of the music—musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis, and Gil Evans. Written with Russell's full cooperation and extensively researched with interviews from friends, family members, musicians, associates, and commentators on jazz, the book reveals many valuable insights and previously unknown facts about Russell's life. Not only a biography, this volume also reflects and celebrates the evolution of modern jazz while presenting a re-evaluation of the relationship between jazz and classical music.

George Russell: The Story of an American Composer (African American Cultural Theory and Heritage)

Biographies & Memoirs

Heining, Duncan

Arts & Literature

Scarecrow Press

Graham Collier's career in jazz lasted over five decades. He was a bassist, a band-leader, a composer, an educator and an author, who wrote extensively about the music. His working life was littered with 'firsts'. Amongst his many achievements, he was the first British jazz musician to study at the Berklee School of music in Boston and the first to receive an Arts Council grant. In 1985, Collier began teaching at the Royal Academy of Music, where he later established the first full-time jazz degree course in the UK in 1987. Mosaics draws extensively on Collier's personal archive, as well as on interviews with fellow musicians, ex-students and colleagues from the Royal Academy of Music. It locates Collier and his work within the social and cultural changes which occurred during his life and, particularly, in relation to developments in British and European jazz of the 1960s and 70s. Collier's work as a composer-bandleader represented an attempt to resolve the paradoxes inherent in jazz between composition and improvisation, familiarity and spontaneity and change and tradition. In this regard, Mosaics compares Collier's work with other composers such as Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Mike Westbrook, Stan Tracey, Barry Guy and Butch Morris. Throughout, Collier emerges as a contradictory figure falling between several different camps. He was never an out-and-out musical, cultural or political radical but rather an individualist continually forced to confront the contradictions in his own position - a musical outsider working within a marginalised area of cultural activity; a gay man operating in a very male area of the music business and within heterosexist culture in general; a man of working class origins stepping outside traditionally prescribed class boundaries; and a musician-composer seeking individual solutions to collective problems of aesthetic and ethical value.

Mosaics: The Life and Works of Graham Collier (Popular Music History)

Equinox Publishing (UK)

Equinox Publishing

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