Bill Russell (jazz historian)

William Wagner "Bill" Russell (born February 26, 1905 in Canton , Missouri as Russell William Wagner , † August 9, 1992 in New Orleans , Louisiana ) was an American composer, author, producer and musician of Dixieland Jazz .

Life

Russell learned the violin as a teenager and attended from 1920 the Quincy Conservatory and from 1923 the Culver Stockton College, where he studied chemistry, mathematics and music education for a degree as a teacher. After graduating in 1926, he taught for a while in the Midwest, before going to New York City in 1927, where he taught in the Long Island area, but also took violin lessons with the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, Max Pilzer, and until 1934 at the teacher Columbia University College. He intended to become a composer and therefore changed his surname from Wagner to Russell in 1929. He composed modern music ( New School ) especially for pure drum ensembles. In 1932 he traveled to Haiti to study drum rhythms there, which flowed into his ballet Ogou Badagri from 1933.

From 1934 to 1940 he toured a Chinese-inspired puppet theater (Red Gate Puppet Players), where he was responsible for the music. They performed across the country, which also gave Russell an opportunity to look everywhere for jazz records to add to his collection. With the painter Steve Smith he started the Hot Record Exchange in New York in 1935 , which lasted until 1940. In 1937 he was in New Orleans for the first time and in 1938 he met Jelly Roll Morton in Washington DC, about whom he later wrote a book with numerous documents and interviews with contemporary witnesses. In 1939 he also contributed to three chapters of the early jazz book Jazzmen (including the New Orleans chapter with Stephen W. Smith). With correspondence courses completed at the University of Chicago, he also earned his bachelor's degree from Stockton College and during a stay with puppet theater in California in 1939/40 he studied at Berkeley and at UCLA , where he was a student of Arnold Schönberg .

In 1940 he moved to Pittsburgh to live with his brother and until 1947 worked full-time as a chemist at the Pennsylvania Transformer Corporation in Pittsburgh as part of the US war effort. His brother's house was also the place where he released the recordings of his record label American Music, founded in 1944 (that's why the label name was Pittsburgh). To this end, he had already met Bunk Johnson in New Orleans in 1942 and made recordings with him (further recordings in 1943 in San Francisco), as did George Lewis and other musicians from the early days of New Orleans jazz in 1943 on a second trip to New Orleans were almost forgotten. He rented halls and clubs for the recordings, because access to studios in New Orleans was still restricted for black musicians (as was the public interplay of white and black musicians). Throughout its existence (the last recordings were made in 1953) the label was a one-man Russell business.

From 1947 to 1950 he lived again in his hometown Canton in his parents' house. From 1950 to 1956 he lived in Chicago, where he briefly took violin lessons from the concertmaster of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1950. During this time he was also the unofficial assistant of Mahalia Jackson (1953 to 1956), among other things during rehearsals and recordings. In 1956 he moved to New Orleans, where he founded the record store American Music Records. In 1958 he co-founded and first curator of the Hogan Jazz Archives at Tulane University with Dick Allen and researched the history of early jazz (from 1958 to 1965) through his interviews.

In 1962 he was briefly in Canton again to look after his elderly parents. He had given up his record shop since 1962. In 1965 he moved permanently to New Orleans, where he lived in a small room in the French Quarter and could be found in the Preservation Hall almost every night , selling tickets and records and listening to the music. He was one of the main points of contact for anyone interested in early jazz and was generous with information. He also traveled extensively in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s in search of old instruments (which he repaired) and autographs. Since 1967 he has played the violin in the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra . He continued to collect jazz memorabilia and was consulted as a jazz historian. In 1988 he sold the rights to American Music to George H. Buck of Jazzology. In 1990 his compositions were performed for drum ensembles in New York.

Shortly before his death in 1992, he finished another book on Jelly Roll Morton (Oh Mr. Jelly: A Jelly Rol Morton Scrapbook, published 1999) and worked on the re-issues of his American Music recordings. His estate, the William Russell Jazz Collection, is located in The Williams Research Center of the Historic New Orleans Collection , 410 Chartres St., New Orleans. It came to the center immediately after his death and is said to have consisted of 36,000 individual pieces weighing 86 tons.

Fonts

• Contributions to Charles Edward Smith, Frederic Ramsey Jazzmen , New York: Harcourt Brace 1939
• with Charles Edward Smith, Frederic Ramsey, Charles Payne Rogers The Jazz Record Book , New York: Smith & Durrell, 1942
• Jazz scrapbook. New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, 1998
• Mike Hazeldine, Barry Martin (Editors): New Orleans Style , New Orleans: Jazzology Press 1994
• Oh Mr. Jelly Roll: A Jelly Roll Morton Scrapbook , Copenhagen, JazzMedia Apps. 1999

literature

• Mike Hazeldine Bill Russels American Music , Jazzology Press 1993 (with audio CD), with discography of his American Music label

Web links

• Ben Wagner William Russell: Jazz lover, collector, musicologist. An annotated bibliography , pdf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ About 1000 km north of New Orleans on the Mississippi between St. Louis and Davenport (Iowa)
2. ↑ Obituary
3. ^ Review in the JazzTimes by Duck Baker, 2000
4. ^ Joan Singleton, Keep It Real: The Life Story of James "Jimmy" Palao "The King of Jazz". P. 130