After a career that encompassed over 50 years as a bandleader and compositions as diverse as jazz scores, a rock opera, and film soundtracks William Russo died on January 11, 2003 from pneumonia after leading a concert by the Chicago Jazz Ensemble. He wrote the textbooks Composing Music, A New Approach, Jazz: Composition and Orchestration, and Composing for the Jazz Orchestra. He also founded the music department at Columbia College in Chicago and formed and conducted the Chicago Jazz Ensemble.
Russo played trombone from 1950-54 in the Stan Kenton Innovations Orchestra and became its chief composer and arranger. Among his notable pieces from that period are “23 Degrees North, 82 Degrees West” and “Frank Speaking.” In 1978 he received the Grand Prix du Disc for this blues concerto Street Music, which was recorded by the San Francisco Orchestra. He studied with pianist Lennie Tristano from 1943-47. He continued recording with his own orchestra in New York and in London from 1962-65.
His nearly 100 compositions include two symphonies, 22 full-length musical theater works, three concertos, one sonata, five ballets, several full-length works for jazz orchestra, and numerous others. He studied composition with John J. Becker from 1953-55 and with Karel B. Jirak from 1955-57. Russo composed music for Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Lionel Hampton, Gerry Mulligan, and Wynton Marsalis. His compositions have been performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Boston Pops Orchestra and conducted by Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa.
In the February 2001 issue The Instrumentalist published an interview with William Russo. A follow-up session in March 2002 was incomplete because it was held at the end of a day, and in recent years Russo tired more easily as the result of cancer surgery and treatment. His comments from each session have been intermixed in the excerpts below.
In jazz the prominent soloists are in league with the critics who push an agenda of progress and innovation. Saxophone player Pat Mallinger is an extraordinary artist, but he has not been written up in the New York Times because his playing doesn’t have the novelty that critics expect. In the last 10-15 years newspaper critics have gained power because club owners need publicity to bring in customers. Rising stars are more likely to emphasize the avant-garde aspects of their playing because this attracts the critics. Both critics and musicians share the blame for this drive toward change or progress, which has prevented jazz from connecting with audiences.
When I criticize the avant-garde, I’m talking about the lack of melody. Most improvisers now play the same thing they would play with a different band, in a different place, on a different night, on a different piece. They play what they feel like playing rather than what fits the context of the music, the previous soloist, the accompanying soloist, or the audience.
In music the melody is the story, the anecdote, that connects with an audience. Melody is the movie we can understand and enjoy, the sweetness and light, the beauty of the child and the angel that draws us into a Donatello painting.
In the old days Lester Young would play songs like “Just You” and “Melancholy Baby” and he even knew the words to the melodies he played. People would play the chorus a couple of times, but never more than that for a slow piece. The audience was hearing a Broadway melody that it knew; it wasn’t being yelled at.
Today audiences often get assaulted by sound and don’t get that nice warm feeling. The larger truth is that people do not flock to see Schoenberg because people recoil from the avant-garde. Most of the people who are running jazz have become elitist and believe that if music is not exploratory, then it is not worth hearing. During a concert of Ellington’s Sacred Music I couldn’t help but feel that people were enjoying it. However, when I was young, I was like everybody else and enjoyed only the hippest thing around.
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Insofar as there is intellectual life in America, and I don’t see a lot of it, it tends to ignore the fact that jazz needs to be investigated, discussed, worked on, and furthered. Stanley Crouch once said to me, “Jazz is basically anti-intellectual, Bill. You can’t get a drummer to listen to Connie Kay of the Modern Jazz Quartet to find a different way of keeping time from how he is doing it.” This is still true, and within the jazz world the idea of studying and thinking is so downplayed by the anti-intellectualism of today that people are unwilling to seek new answers. They want it short and quick.
The consensus about the arts in American intellectual life, whether in newspapers, high schools, or colleges, is part of an unthinking acceptance of everything. We are in such an epistemological crunch these days that we avoid making any value judgments, but life is based on value judgments. Somehow Einstein was misunderstood when he talked about relativity in physics; people came to believe that everything is relative.
If musicians view everything in life as ironic, scandalized, negative, and a put-on, then the music that comes out will be the wrong kind. My view is that one of the purposes of art is to make life more understandable, to lead us into better relations with one another, to better behavior, and a sense of beauty, awe, and understanding. When I saw The Marriage of Figaro for the second time in London, I finally got a sense of what marriage is about, a beautiful picture of the possibilities for human beings.
In our secret heart we all know that Ellington was better than the rest; his pieces were more varied, subtle, and made us think about the nature of music, which should be the starting point in jazz. Ellington had a better band, but we are paralyzed by the idea that we can’t make judgments of anything because it smacks of autocracy and fascism. The truth is that a group of people brought together with one intent can come to a great number of conclusions about things, just like Jefferson and Hamilton and Washington.
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There seems to be a value to studying Latin. It helps us to think. I would encourage less competitive sports. I would do something to control popular arts in America. We can’t teach children high values in any sense of the word with television, radio, and film assaulting them. Today children watch television from 20-50 hours per week, and this hurts their concentration and their ability to think things through. Something has to be done to take these enormous enemies off our backs. I would get students listening to jazz and teach them how to play solos with only one or two notes and to write pieces for themselves. I would have them play in smaller groups and encourage them to play with intuition, feeling, and selflessness.
It would be interesting to work chronologically through jazz and play Jelly Roll and Duke Ellington, which would be difficult because the music is so transparent. We’d play “One O’Clock Jump” by Basie and others that are very easy to play, and some of the combo pieces, and pieces from two or three eras.
Jazz education should embrace the repertoire in the larger sense and get students to slow down and hold their breath, not just in terms of fewer notes but also in terms of stillness of mind, and being able to listen more carefully, with more intuition and soul in their personal lives – to take an artistic approach. Directors should do a lot more listening to older groups. Jelly Roll Morton was considered silly, atrocious, and outdated when I was young, and I did not understand his music until recently. Directors should listen to older styles, not just for its construction but for how it was played, the ways of tonguing, slurring, and accenting.
Many high school band directors have not had much experience in the jazz world. They may have played in dance bands, which sometimes have jazz elements, but this is not enough. Beyond good musicianship a jazz director should have experience playing an instrument and improvising in a bona fide jazz organization, although improvisation is a chapter in a book all by itself.
Too many jazz instructors do not know enough about the literature, which is probably because the high school jazz movement developed as part of Stan Kenton’s enormous contribution. Even though my current crusade is to rehabilitate Kenton’s music, his idea of jazz was out of proportion and excessively narrow. The kind of jazz high school bands often imitate came from Kenton at a point in his life when his perspective was insufficiently broadened by his associates. A teacher who graduates with a music education degree or a master’s in conducting or instrumental performance may not know much more about jazz than that he likes it. His heart is in the right place, but he will gravitate towards a strongly stated position, such as Stan Kenton’s.
In later years Kenton’s music was insufficiently varied and consisted mostly of pieces by the Kenton and Count Basie orchestras. It was an amalgam of late Basie and late Kenton that did not demonstrate the best qualities of either. This sound was loud, fast and powerful, intense, way behind the beat, very staccato, and too standardized in articulation and other aspects. Every long note would swell, and short notes were as short as possible and accented. The jazz concept that high schools inherited was not influenced enough by other bands, such as Basie’s earlier style or the bands of Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, or Andy Kirk.
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The big evolution came with Jelly Roll Morton. I have no idea where he got his ideas, but it is clear that he did everything he said he did, including inventing jazz. He took the principles of ragtime and changed them to jazz; it’s as simple as that. Morton had an enormous flair for composition and an ability to string together melodies in unusual forms that haven’t been heard since.
The other big evolution came when Louis Armstrong broke away from King Oliver and became more of a soloist. He was a fabulous improviser, but this had some bad consequences for jazz. Art historians often say that Michaelangelo had a bad influence on sculptors because so many tried to imitate his style but could not pull it off. I imagine this was also true with Beethoven. Armstrong changed the emphasis from contrapuntal improvisation in traditional jazz bands to playing a solo line with accompaniment.
Before Louis brought the solo to prominence, the trumpet or cornet was joined by a contrapuntal clarinet and the tailgate trombone, with each playing a solo at the same time. It was like a trio with much cooperation, as ideas were tossed back and forth. After Louis it was about dominance, with everybody trying to outplay the others. The next major step was the formation of big bands, such as Count Basie’s or Andy Kirk’s.
The first swing piece was Fletcher Henderson’s arrangement of Jelly Roll Morton’s King Porter Stomp, which later was subjected to a million different interpretations, including those by Harry James, Shorty Rogers, and Benny Goodman. Morton wrote it in the 1920s and played it on the piano but never arranged it for a band. As far as I know, Fletcher Henderson was the first to orchestrate and arrange the piece; his recording is in a swing style as opposed to the traditional jazz style. His arrangement is for seven brass and four or five saxophones as opposed to the three frontline horns, and they played the eighth notes in the swing style of Basie.
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At its best jazz could save music through its connection with the audience, which is like Mozart’s connection with the audience, only more contemporary. The question is whether jazz can be saved by restoring melody or if it will sink into the same abyss that classical music did by embracing the avant-garde and destroying its audience. I think Wynton Marsalis is opening the door to the audiences. It lies within the reach of jazz educators to grasp the point of the argument that Wynton and I have been making and spread the message.