“When you are an 11-year-old kid and you want to be a racing driver and you see a Formula One driver, they are a superhero to you.”

American jazz pianist, composer, arranger and theorist

George Allen Russell was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger and theorist. He is best known for developing a theory of harmony rooted in jazz, rather than European music, and for setting it out in his 1953 book, Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. Russell’s work helped bring jazz thinking into broader music theory. As a pianist and composer, he was also active as an arranger, and his writings focused on how jazz could provide its own harmonic system.