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Surrounded by the music of the black church and the big bands which played on the Ohio Riverboats, and with a father who was a music educator at Oberlin College, he started playing drums with the Boy Scouts and Bugle Corps, receiving a scholarship to Wilberforce University where he joined the Collegians, a band noted as a breeding ground for great jazz musicians. When called up for the draft at the beginning of World War II, he was quickly hospitalized with tuberculosis, where he was taught the fundamentals of music theory by a fellow patient. In 1945, Russell was again hospitalized for 16 months. During that time he worked out the basic tenets of what was to become his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, a theory encompassing all of equal-tempered music, ultimately influential well beyond the boundaries of jazz. The first edition of his book was self-published in 1953, while he worked as a salesclerk at Macy's. Russell's ideas were a crucial influence on the modal music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis, notably on Davis' classic recording, Kind of Blue, and served as a beacon for other modernists such as Eric Dolphy and Art Farmer. While working on the theory, Russell was also applying its principles to composition. His first famous writing credit was for the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra on the two-part "Cubano Be, Cubano Bop" (1947), and part of that band's pioneering experiments infusing bebop and Cuban jazz elements. This 5 CD compilation includes all George Russell's albums as leader, made between 1956, the year of his debut, and the point in 1963 when he and his sextet relocated to Scandinavia and spent considerable time touring Europe. The set also contains a true rarity in the form of the complete recording of George Russell's Sextet briefly reutning to the US to play at the 1964 Newport Jazz Festival

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