"No jazz musician has ever played with the same daring and nakedness and intuition," Whitney Balliett wrote in a New Yorker profile of Pee Wee Russell. "He took wild improvisational chances, and when he found himself above the abyss, he simply turned in another direction, invariably hitting firm ground." Gunther Schuller, America's preeminent jazz historian, also had high praise for Russell, saying that "he defined and exemplified what it is to be...