Music theorists tend to operate like historians: they study their subjects after the fact and draw conclusions by synopsizing what happened. Their theories are entirely retrospective. George Russell, who died from complications of Alzheimer’s on Monday, July 27, at age 86, was exactly the opposite. With his 1953 book The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, Russell laid the foundation for a style of jazz that would come to prominence before the end of that decade. Modal jazz would then flourish and nearly dominate '60s jazz thanks to its influence on Miles Davis and John Coltrane. By now, there are hardly any significant jazz players who haven’t been influenced by Russell’s “LCC,” whether directly or indirectly.

Ironically, were it not for a bout with tuberculosis, Russell might have had a successful but historically insignificant career as a drummer. Raised in a musical family, he made his debut at age seven singing with Fats Waller; Russell then started playing drums as a member of the Boy Scouts and later attended Wilberforce College, performing with its highly respected jazz band. World War II intervened and he was drafted but soon contracted tuberculosis and had to be hospitalized; oddly, it was at that point that he studied music theory with another patient. After the war he was offered work as Charlie Parker’s drummer, but a recurrence of tuberculosis landed him in hospital again, this time for 16 months. It was in that period that he formed the basis of the LCC, seeking to propound a music theory that fit the practice of jazz better than classical theory.

The result, though considerably more complicated and intricate than any brief summary can convey, posited replacing diatonic chords with modal scales as a basis of musical organization, which proved a fertile ground for improvisation by allowing much more freedom in note choices. As he wrote, it “acknowledges the existence of a central tonality and an underlying tonic tone (or primary axis) for a whole area, regardless of the degree of dissonance used in the area.”

The first fruits of Russell’s theorizing were not his massive book, but rather two musical compositions of his own: "Cubano Be, Cubano Bop" for trumpeter/bebop icon Dizzy Gillespie’s big band in 1947 and "A Bird in Igor's Yard" (a tribute to both Parker and Stravinsky) for clarinetist Buddy De Franco in 1948. Russell switched to piano, the prototypical jazz composer’s instrument, and started promulgating his music and ideas in “jazz workshops.” Not a technically gifted pianist (as expected for a latecomer to the instrument), he often used other pianists for performances, notably Bill Evans, who anchored a series of 1956 recording sessions that yielded The Jazz Workshop, Russell’s first album as a leader. It also featured trumpeter Art Farmer and guitarist Barry Galbraith and the compositions “Ezz-thetic” (a favorite of Parker’s that other players would pick up) and the Evans feature “Concerto for Billy the Kid.” The following year he wrote “All About Rosie,” a suite for orchestra, on commission from Brandeis University for a festival, again featuring Evans among its several soloists.

The Evans connection led to influence on Miles Davis, who quickly put modal playing on the map with his piece “Milestones” in 1958 and then the 1959 album Kind of Blue. Miles called Russell “the motherfucker who taught me how to write.” (Evans wrote in the style too, though Miles didn’t credit him for his compositions on Kind of Blue.) And one of the members of Davis’s sextet was John Coltrane, an assiduous absorber of information for whom modal theory proved a wellspring. The influence of Davis’s and Coltrane’s use of modal playing more deeply influenced their future pianists, respectively Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner. Soon most young players were studying the style, and Russell’s The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization was frequently cited.

In the early '60s, Russell capitalized on this momentum (and showed improved piano chops) with a series of classic albums on Riverside: Stratosphunk, Ezz-thetics (famously featuring Eric Dolphy), The Stratus Seekers, and The Outer View. He then moved to Europe, living in Norway and Sweden until he returned to the U.S. in 1969 to teach the LCC at the New England Conservatory of Music, which had just started a jazz department. While in Europe he worked with young Scandinavian musicians including saxophonist Jan Garbarek, guitarist Terje Rypdal, bassist Arild Andersen, and drummer Jon Christensen, who would prove to be key artists in the rise of the ECM label in the following decades. Much of Russell’s Scandinavian work was eventually issued on the Soul Note label, which eventually amassed eight Russell releases documenting multiple versions of his Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature and more, including some New York projects.

These albums combined with his decades-long pedagogical career at NEC to solidify his position in jazz history, a position he was keenly interested in promoting, and which even further increased the influence of the LCC. But his pride in his achievement was justifiable: no book has had even remotely as big an influence on the development of jazz as did The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. It can truly be said that without George Russell, the past half-century of jazz would not have sounded the way it did. - Steve Holtje

Mr. Holtje is a Brooklyn-based poet and composer who splits his time between editing Culturecatch.com, working at the Williamsburg record store Sound Fix, and editing cognitive neuroscience books for Oxford University Press. No prizes for guessing which pays best.