Stratusphunk: George Russell, His Life and Music
by Duncan Heining Jazz Internationale, £14.99

THE great Wolverhampton-born bassist Dave Holland said of Russell: “He’s done something which a lot of musicians aspire to, which is to create a world of his own within the music.” Yet this world was never an introspective one or enclosed behind musical walls.

As a young man in New York, Russell knew and worked with Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Mingus. The knowledge which formed the foundation of his genuinely influential theoretical work, the Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organisation, was based on active exposure to such jazz revolutionaries.

This concept, as Heining shows, grew into a quest to find a “unity” and “shared origin” of all music. Even as early as 1968 he was attesting that the future of music would be “pan-stylistic” and related this to “the cultural explosion occurring among the Earth’s population,” their “coming together,” and that as music became more involved with technology, it was beholden on musicians too along with all men and women, to “confront technology and help to humanise it.”

These prophetic words came from a man born in the Walnut Hills suburb of Cincinnati in 1923, the child of a black 19-year-old student and an unknown white man, whom Russell believed was a music professor.

Adopted by loving black parents, a nurse and a railroad chef, Heining’s research provides substantial detail about his childhood, the racism he suffered and his long periods in hospital after a road accident and attacks of tuberculosis. He explains how his hospital stays magnified his interest and learning in music, and strengthened his determination to become an original musician.

Like Ellington, Basie and Gil Evans, Russell’s prime instrument was his orchestra and the large number of musical ensembles on both sides of the Atlantic that he brought together over the decades — with members as far apart as Bill Evans and Eric Dolphy in the ’50s, to British stalwarts like Courtney Pine and Andy Sheppard in the ’90s.

To contemplate this is to realise how long-lasting and cross-epochal Russell’s influence and significance truly was.

Russell was frequently alienated by his “very strong rage” at US racism, and found greater appreciation and recognition in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, helping to launch celebrated lives in jazz by Norwegian virtuosi like saxophonist Jan Garbarek, bassist Arild Andersen and drummer Jon Christensen. So perhaps it is fitting that an English jazz writer should have written this fine and enlightening book.