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George Russell, 86, an innovative and influential jazz composer who created the theoretical framework that led to such landmark recordings of the 1950s and 1960s as Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue" and John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," died July 27 in Boston. He had Alzheimer's disease. Mr. Russell developed the "Lydian chromatic concept," which offered liberating and advanced ideas of harmony and improvisation, and his greatest impact came in how other musicians used his ideas to forge a new style of jazz. .."The Lydian scale is a ladder of fifths," Mr. Russell told the Boston Globe in 1999, "and the fifth is the strongest tone in an octave."
It was a remark made by Miles Davis in 1945 when Russell asked him his musical aim that led Russell on a quest which was to become his life's work. Davis answered that his musical aim was "to learn all the changes." Knowing that Davis already knew how to arpeggiate each chord, Russell reasoned that he really meant that he wanted to find a new and broader way to relate to chords. Russell codified the modal approach to harmony...inspired by a casual remark the eighteen-year-old Miles Davis made to him in 1944: Miles said he wanted to learn all the changes and I reasoned he might try to find the closest scale for every chord...Davis popularised those liberating ideas in recordings like Kind of Blue, undermining the entire harmonic foundation of bop that had inspired him and Russell in the first place.[4]Miles reportedly summarized the LCC succinctly by saying, "F should be where middle C is on the piano" [white notes: F-F = lydian, rather than major = C-C].[4]Russell's theory proposes the concept of playing jazz based on scales or a series of scales (modes) rather than chords or harmonies. The Lydian Chromatic Concept explored the vertical relationship between chords and scales, and was the first codified original theory to come from jazz. Russell's ideas influenced the development of modal jazz, notably in the album Jazz Workshop (1957, with Bill Evans and featuring the "Concerto for Billy the Kid") as well as his writings; Evans later introduced the concepts to other members of Miles Davis's working band, which employed them in recordings beginning with the album Kind of Blue.His Lydian Concept has been described as making available resources rather than imposing constrictions on the musicians.[5] The major scale probably emerged as the predominating scale of Western music, because within its seven tones lies the most fundamental harmonic progression of the classical era....thus, the major scale resolves to its tonic major chord. The Lydian scale is the sound of its tonic major chord.[6]
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