This week we're going to take a look at the music of William Russell.

Russell's music is inherently American. He drew from musical cultures of the Americas and from whatever he was exposed. His music blends high brow with low, vernacular with classical, experimentation with tradition.

Russell had a short career as a composer, ultimately abandoning the pursuit to become a jazz historian. He recounted: "After hearing Baby Dodds, this wonderful drummer… the greatest from New Orleans, who liked music so well that, when he’d have intermission he’d sit there and play little solos on that drum set. He’d be all over the drum set: wonderful things, complicated rhythmically and tonally. As I say, a guy like that can do all of that, but I would sit there for weeks and try to figure out something that wouldn’t sound half that good. I said, ‘I’d better give up.’ And I never wrote anything after that…" (Gillespie, “American Percussion Composer”)

Despite giving up on composition and becoming relatively unknown to later generations, Russell became one of the most prolific composers at the beginning of percussion ensemble music. In addition to employing a variety of percussion, folk, and scavenged instruments, Russell embraced jazz, afro-cuban, and Haitian rhythms, as well as instances of improvisation in his music - elements essentially absent from the concert music of his contemporaries.