Do The Hustle, Do The Russell
After a series of solos with familiar names like Will Smith, Weird Al, Ozzy Osbourne (and even Dizzy and Miles), and after students get started on their respective projects, I turn to George Russell. I do so with some reluctance, however, as I know that this name, more than the others will solicit the "So Who?" befuddlement the other names will not. Nevertheless, George Russell, as with so many of the names students introduce to me from their music and career, solicits the “So Who?” question that is important for a Bridge.
I use George Russell’s signature to conceptually suggest a “Russelling of Who’s” that are the multiple cites students might draw upon while exploring the names within their music and careers. These “Russelling of Who’s” do the hustle of variation that send the “insider-language” and bibliographic networks vibrating into heretofore unexpected arrangements.
My “Russelling of Who’s” serves as a counterpoint to students who sometimes get stuck in a single who, or what I like to reference through the rock band The Who. Don’t get me wrong; I love Roger Daltry’s band, and no rock band broke more rules, guitars, or drum kits than Daltry, Townshend, and Moon. And yet, it sometimes happens that students are so close to a particular band (even rule-breaking bands)—or a particular career path (even money-making ones)—that it sometimes becomes difficult for something new to emerge.
Strangely, the iconoclastic efforts of The Who can become the lock-step disco dance of "The Hustle," which might benefit from a re-dialing of Daltry’s Who’s, or even from a Russelling re-spin of Van McCoy, the author of the disco Hustle, such that the latter is put into relation with The Stylistics, a band that McCoy helped out and who are best-known for their hit: “You Make Me Feel Brand New.”
For me, George Russell serves precisely this “brand new” function with regards to my fondness for Miles Davis. Davis’s “So What?” (the opening track to Kind of Blue, an album many consider the greatest jazz recording of all time and the “first” example of Modal Jazz) lends itself to a bibliographic network that includes his pianist, Bill Evans, who shared a special relation with composer George Russell. “So What?” becomes the “Russelling of Who’s” when I discovered that George Russell was the author of the Modal Jazz thesis, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization.
Russell’s thesis is filled with music “insider-language” like “tonal gravities” and “intervallic motives” that could well be re-mixed the way Weird Al sets scalpels, forceps, and retractors in variation in his “Like a Surgeon” parody. More than this, however—and to borrow from Russell’s numerous album titles—his Stratusphunk efforts opens further connections with Stratus-seekers that expand my sense of the music that I already “know” as much as it expands further connections I might make in my Rhetoric/Composition-cum-Music/Composition career.
Consider, for example, Gilles Deleuze’s rhetorical idea that one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s great insights—following the sophist Hippias—was in adopting the ethical “So Who?” question, rather than the Platonic “So What?” question of essence (76). The “Russelling of Who’s” from my music share this language with my career in rhetorical studies. Not only does researching Russell lend further to my appreciation of Miles Davis’s Modal moves in Miles Smiles, but it also opens up a style of question-asking that extends back to Hippias, a sophist known for his interest in mnemonics. Within these associations, I note that Russell’s effort to generate the Lydian Chromatic Concept had to confront (and ultimately allow) the diabolic tritone, or diabolus in musica, which was a note that medieval composers had to avoid not only for its dissonance, but also for fear of religious prosecution. In these connections—which may further reveal me as a “music geek”—I note that in opening up a “Russelling of Who’s” that there will certainly be names (like “Ozzy” or “Silem Savid”) that will sound just as dissonant to some.
Simply piling up signatures can produce such dissonance, even when the “insider language” is as straightforward as possible. The "Russelling of Who’s" from George Russell to Ornette Coleman (known for getting beat up in the 1950’s when he played his white, plastic alto sax to otherwise open-minded jazz fans) and pairing the Chromatic Concept of the former with the Harmolodics of the latter, for instance, is an example that need not necessarily be exemplified—doing so only amplifies Free Jazz connections what may well be impossible to cover in any given Sound(Career)Track, or even in a explication of Modal-Fusion. And yet, what all this suggests is the paradox that for both instructors and students, it may be necessary to continue to do homework with headphones on! Becoming plugged into who and what our students plugged into (and further by who their who’s are into) is but an expression of how the Modal-Fusion of Music/Composition lends itself to the Heraclitean fire through the simple rustling of coals.