Still Starry-Eyed

Hannah Russell, who turns 87 next month, vividly remembers the past, but this self-described “extremely senior citizen” doesn’t dwell in it. You might find her taking an art class at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, jamming at her piano--or accessing her Web site to see how many visitors are checking out her first CD, “Space Songs: A Children’s Intergalactic Musical Adventure.”

Indeed, the computer-savvy Russell--who was born when women couldn’t vote, horse-drawn trolleys still trundled down Madison Avenue and commercial passenger flight was more than a decade away--hastened to note that songs from her CD can be previewed at the hot music Web site MP3.com.

“We’re linked,” she enthused.

“Space Songs,” a tuneful sing-along tour of the solar system, has been approved by the California State Board of Education for use in kindergarten through third grade and is being sold at the Griffith Park Observatory and other planetariums across the country. Russell wrote the dialogue, music and songs sung by a trio of young professionals, and fact-checked it with Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

She delightedly shares a JPL astronomer’s summation: “Cool.”

This self-assured, humorous, diminutive great-grandmother is working on a second CD, “Sea Songs.” Research has taken her to the Monterey Bay Aquarium; Scripps Institute and the Long Beach Aquarium are next.

“I’ve always been interested in what children learn and how they learn it,” Russell said. “Anybody who hears a song and learns a fact in the song never really forgets it.”

Space is a longtime passion.

“I took astronomy courses at Valley College [in the 1950s], and we would have field trips and go out and look at the stars with our own homemade telescopes. Space has always fascinated me, because it really is the great unknown.”

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Music has been her life. In the art-filled West Hollywood home she shares with her life companion, Saul Fox--an internist who, at 93, still lectures--Russell, accompanied by her daughter, Molly Hyman, shared a personal history that encompasses American popular music from Tin Pan Alley and beyond.

Her brother was songwriter Bud Green (“Once in Awhile,” “Sentimental Journey”), her late husband was lyricist Bob Russell (“Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” “Dance, Ballerina, Dance,” “Crazy He Calls Me”), and Hannah was the pianist in the family who played for both.

Growing up in Harlem and then the Bronx, the child of European immigrants, Russell was 4 when Green, a fledgling Tin Pan Alley songwriter, brought home a piano. Years of lessons followed and as a teenager, Russell played regularly on local radio and worked for her brothers’ music publishing company.

During the Depression--”the day the banks closed”--she married a musician with the Anson Weeks orchestra. When the couple divorced, Russell worked to support 2-year-old Molly until illness forced her to return to her family in New York. Later, she married Bob Russell, whose career would include two Oscar nominations and collaborations with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Harry Warren, Quincy Jones and other luminaries.

Russell, who’s an expert on key transposition, was her husband’s accompanist.

Preferring anecdotes to personal commentary, Russell has a storyteller’s knack for re-creating time and place, shaping her narrative with gestures of her graceful hands. One of her favorites is about Duke Ellington, who, facing lean times, picked up his first royalty check for the 1942 hit “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” her husband’s lyric version of Ellington’s instrumental “Never No Lament.”

“He had been getting royalties for ‘Never No Lament,’ which were very low, and he was in a hurry to get to the bank before it closed so he could pay the guys,” Russell said, “so he just stuck the check in his pocket and went to the bank. When he got there, he was shocked.” Instead of the couple of thousand dollars he expected, the check was for $22,500.

Bob Russell died in 1970; Hannah and her three daughters, Molly, Linda and Bonnie, protect his legacy through their Burbank-based Harrison Music Corp.

Russell, a survivor of cancer, three heart attacks and two muggings, still has a spark of the little girl who used to roller-skate to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and leave her skates with a sympathetic guard. Alive to the present, she defines life as an opportunity for growth and creativity.

“I never learned how to play bridge, lunch with the girls or shop,” she said with a laugh. “Listen, when I wake up in the morning and open my eyes, I say, ‘I won the lottery.’ ‘Cause it could all be over.”

* “Space Songs: A Children’s Intergalactic Journey,” Harrison Music Corp., (818) 238-9343; https://www.spacesongs.com/.