Jazz composer, arranger, and theorist George Russell died yesterday at the age of 86. Russell started out as a drummer before becoming an arranger (one of his early efforts was Ella Fitzgerald’s recording of “How High the Moon”) and bandleader (making his name in the 1950s with the classic albums “New York, New York” and “The Jazz Workshop”). But Russell’s magnum opus was the theoretical treatise “The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization,” based around the idea that, if you raise the fourth degree of the major scale, you can use variants of that scale as “parent scales” of any chord. Miles Davis built on the concept (or, as Russell referred to it, the Concept) for his great modal jazz recordings of the ’50s and ’60s; Toru Takemitsu borrowed from the Concept in fashioning his own language. The Concept has a reputation as an intricate clockwork, but, as Eric Nisenson pointed out in his book “The Making of ‘Kind of Blue,’” the Concept was, fundamentally, more philosophical than technical:

Since the Eastern belief in the unity of all things is at the heart of much non-Western religion and philosophy, it should not be surprising that this first, and only, musical theory derived from the jazz tradition is based on the concept of ultimate unity. Improvisation based on modes instead of chord changes gave jazz musicians a new freedom; now their choices could be open-ended rather than shackled by the chains of chord progressions. The theory brought jazz closer to its non-Western roots and gave jazzmen the opportunity to fly into what Sonny Rollins called music’s “open sky.”

Russell says: “I am not an intellectual. I refuse to be one, and I hate to be classified as one. All of these ideas already existed. I was just stuck with the Concept until it revealed itself completely.”

Russell was an NEA Jazz Master and the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. For many years, he taught at the New England Conservatory (after being invited to join the faculty by Gunther Schuller). Here’s Russell’s “Stratusphunk,” in a 1958 performance with Russell’s friend Bill Evans on piano, Art Farmer on trumpet, Jimmy Cleveland on trombone, Gene Quill on saxophone, and Ed Thigpen on drums.