* Bill Russell; Historian Helped Launch Revival of New Orleans Jazz

Bill Russell, 87, a violinist and music historian credited with launching a revival of New Orleans traditional jazz. Russell had just completed a biography of Jelly Roll Morton, which took him 30 years to research and write. The American Music Label he founded reissued the recordings of such long-retired musicians as Baby Dodds, Bunk Johnson, Dink Johnson, George Lewis, Jim Robinson and (Wooden) Joe Nicholas. Russell, the longtime curator of jazz archives at Tulane University, was a prime contributor to “Remembering Song,” a 1982 retrospective of New Orleans jazz. He was to have been honored this week by the International Assn. of Jazz Record Collectors. In New Orleans on Sunday.