George Russell was a drummer and pianist born in Cincinnati on this date in 1923. His father was a music professor at Oberlin College. Although he was a performing musician, too, AllAboutJazz.com refers to Russell as “a hugely influential, innovative figure in the evolution of modern jazz, the music's only major theorist, one of its most profound composers, and a trail blazer whose ideas have transformed and inspired some of the greatest musicians of our time.”

After time playing drums in the Boy Scout Drum and Bugle Corps Russell received a scholarship to study music at Wilberforce University where he played with the campus jazz group The Collegians. There he played with future Count Basie saxophonist Ernie Wilkins. In 1941 Russell was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent six months in the hospital where he took music theory lessons from a fellow patient. Following his hospitalization, he landed a gig playing drums for Benny Carter, but was soon replaced by Max Roach and began to concentrate less on performing and more on composing and arranging.

Russell moved to New York and began to associate with a group of musicians that met in Gil Evans’ basement apartment and discuss new musical ideas. Along with Evans, these musicians included Gerry Mulligan, Miles Davis and J.J. Johnson. Soon, however, Russell’s health became an issue again and he was hospitalized, this time for 16 months. He began work on his book “The Lydian Concept of Tonal Organization.” Soon after the book's publication in 1953 it became a significant influence on many musicians and the basis of the modal improvisation concepts being developed by Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

During his career, George Russell worked with and wrote for Dizzy Gillespie, Art Farmer, Claude Thornhill, Artie Shaw and Bill Evans. During the 1960s Russell began to lead his own six-piece groups in the New York area before leaving to work in Europe for several years. In 1969 he returned to the United States to take a position teaching at the New England Conservatory of Music. Over the years his students included Eric Dolphy, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Carla Bley. He toured with a small combo from time to time throughout the 1970s and 1980s and continued to write up until the time of his death in 2009. Russell’s 1953 book has been required reading at the Indiana University Music school since 1967.

Here is a link to a 1961 recording of The George Russell Sextet playing Ezz-thetic:

"EZZ-THETIC"