| The African Game | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Live album by George Russell & The Living Time Orchestra | ||||
| Released | 1984 | |||
| Recorded | June 18, 1983 | |||
| Genre | Jazz | |||
| Length | 45:20 | |||
| Label | Blue Note | |||
| Producer | George Russell | |||
| George Russell chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   |
The African Game is a live album by George Russell released on the Blue Note label in 1984, featuring performances by Russell with his Living Time Orchestra recorded in 1983 in Boston. [2] The Allmusic review by Richard S. Ginell awarded the album 3 stars and states "The African Game is a major statement, a highly eclectic, nine-part, 45-minute suite for augmented big band that attempts to depict no less than the evolution of the species from the beginning of time to the present from an African perspective. Well, yes, this theme has been taken on by many an ambitious artist in every field, but Russell's work is remarkably successful because it tries to embrace a massive world of sound in open, colorful, young-thinking terms, with degrees of timbral unity and emotion to keep the idioms from flying out of control". [3]
George Allen Russell was an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger and theorist. He is considered one of the first jazz musicians to contribute to general music theory with a theory of harmony based on jazz rather than European music, in his book Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization (1953).
Blue Note Records is an American jazz record label that is owned by Universal Music Group and operated with Decca Records. Established in 1939 by Alfred Lion and Max Margulis, it derives its name from the blue notes of jazz and the blues. Originally dedicated to recording traditional jazz and small group swing, from 1947 the label began to switch its attention to modern jazz. Although the original company did not record many of the pioneers of bebop, significant exceptions are Thelonious Monk, Fats Navarro and Bud Powell.
Boston is the capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city proper covers 48 square miles (124 km2) with an estimated population of 685,094 in 2017, making it also the most populous city in New England. Boston is the seat of Suffolk County as well, although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999. The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest such area in the country. As a combined statistical area (CSA), this wider commuting region is home to some 8.2 million people, making it the sixth-largest in the United States.
