John Russell (1954-2021)

John Russell, who has died at the age of 66, made an enormous contribution to improvised music in the UK and beyond: an enormity that lies precisely in the supremely modest way he went about it. John believed selflessly in the collective nature of freely improvised music--its emphasis on group playing, on working things out in the moment with care and respect--a care mirrored in the organisation that surrounds a perennially neglected form. He spent nearly 50 years organising concerts (his first in 1973) and the emphasis on group interaction, on a joint search, and the rejection of a star system that characterise the music also characterise the way he went about facilitating gigs, festivals and events. Like most involved, he knew that this music was never going to make much money or a career for those in it--particularly in the UK, with its ever-eroding support for the arts--and this commitment led to a kind of optimistic advocacy--manifested from his announcements onstage--and a steadfast belief that was neither benighted nor bitter, but rather enthusiastic and practical. Over the years, he continued to organise Mopomoso (short for "Modernism-Postmodernism-So What?"), first at the Red Rose club in Finsbury Park (about whose closure I wrote something in the early days of this blog), and during the previous decade at the Vortex Jazz Club in Dalston; even the pandemic, and John's own serious illness, didn't get in the way, and the series has continued online since last March. (It can be watched on the Mopomoso youtube channel, which also includes footage of most of the performances at the in-person incarnation of the series, diligently recorded by a small but dedicated team; notably, director Helen Petts, who was responsible for much of the series' web presence and filmed every concert for the first five Vortex years). Late in 2019, I took part in the annual Christmas jamboree--dozens of performers, John compering in Christmas regalia, the combination of the whimsical, the devoted, the serious, that characterises the musical diversity of the current UK improvised scene. Amidst the multiple groups, John played a few times, I think, but, as ever, it was really his role as organiser and facilitator that stood out. He was selflessly dedicated to this music and its continuance, to the extent that his own musical contribution can get overlooked. 

That contribution was, however, a singular one. He discussed some of this in an interview I did with him back in 2009, available here--https://eartripmagazine.wordpress.com/interviews/interview-john-russell/--as well as in some more recent interviews (many of them linked on his website), and in a lecture from 2019, likewise available online. John came to the scene in the early 1970s at a time when free improvisation in the UK was moving away from the associations with free jazz that had characterised the early manifestations of European improvised music; and while his approach suggests at times suggests the very faint ghosts of rock music ("John Russell and the riff" would make for an interesting paper some day), his concern was rarely with identifiably generic material. Studying privately with Derek Bailey, Bailey is the obvious point of comparison: but the obvious differences include the fact that, until 2014, John concentrated exclusively on acoustic guitar, drawn to the physicalised sounds, the fact that one can't conceal inventiveness and detail with technological or timbral effect. The instrument would offer a seemingly boundless series of possibilities over the next five decades. Early on, he'd experiment with an electronic set-up, during a period in which other musicians such as Evan Parker, Tony Oxley, Paul Lytton and most of all Hugh Davies, were likewise expanding their set-ups at a time when electronics were cumbersome and time-consuming to transport and operate. As he put it in our interview:

For us earlier on, the search for new sounds was part of it, but the nub was to find material that could prove useful to improvising. If you like; to find an essence or core to a way of playing music. I did try various things with the electric guitar (preparations, feedback etc. and always trying to avoid the ‘I’ve got a new device mentality) but I quite consciously moved to the acoustic instrument to get closer to what being a guitarist meant.

Of note here is that this was not any old acoustic guitar, but an Archtop model designed in the 1930s to compete with the louder brass instruments in swing bands ("the modern dance orchestra")--that's to say, an acoustic instrument with some of the qualities of the electric. John provided a scan of the original manufacturer's advert on his website.

In part, John's style emerged from this very concern with the physical nature of this instrument: the instrument serves as the source both for problems and for their solution, a working that forces the mind to keep alert and that draws attention to the materiality of music-making. In that sense, the improvisation is not just between one musician and others in the group, but between the musician and the instrument itself.

Another point is that the instrument has very little sustain and the timbral range is also fairly limited so whereas someone on a different instrument might employ sustain and a shifting texture I have to work that much harder. The, if you like, ‘melodic’ or ‘lead’ part is in there, but I often disguise this by changing reference points, so it can seem like it’s just a bunch of notes to some people.

Changing reference points is a useful way of thinking--while the oft-debated 'non-idiomatic' characterisation which served as Derek Bailey's way of describing the music has, as is again often noted, certainly become an identifiable style in itself more than a half-a-century on, it's a style based on shifts and on the unexpected. Where the confusion arises is perhaps in the idea that such shifts would constitute major and obvious stylistic changes rather than the careful and patient working-through of material on a micro-level: the kinds of response, surprise and pleasure that, indeed, happens within any social, interactive frame. This requires a level of humility that John possessed in bucketloads. As he put it:

It just came about from letting the music come first. I think that if people want to turn things into movements, directions etc. that comes later and is for them. I personally don’t find that productive.

John was always a devotee of group playing, and generally associated with the school of improvised music focused in general more on interaction and on individual events (the Spontaneous Music Ensemble's 'pointillist' as opposed to AMM's 'laminar' approach, and its legacies in 'eai' (electroacoustic improvisation)). The spontaneous combinations and re-combinations of the 'Fete Qua Qua' events held since 1981--descendants or cousins of Bailey's famous Company Weeks--of which there is manifold evidence is available on the Mopomoso youtube channel--are perhaps the best recent example; there were also longer-running small groups with the likes of Evan Parker and collaborations with many, many others, a large number released on the Weektertoft label which he ran with pianist Paul G. Smyth. 

Whether on record or not--this is, after all, a music that has a complex relation to the freezing of the moment implied in recordings--I suspect that many people's memories of John's music will reside, not so much in single performances, but in the entire spread of his work: multi-faceted, kaleidoscopic. I  took this snippet of a duo with the late trumpeter Henry Lowther back at the Old Red Rose; their occasional duo embodies many of the virtues of this music. Of other collaborations that stood out, there was, of course, that with Evan Parker across many configurations, including the trio House Full of Floors with bassist John Edwards; duo work with percussionist Roger Turner, whose focus matched John's in a very different, more clattery and intense manner;  solo--the lovely recording 'Hyste', on Parker's psi label (and Helen Pett's short film 'Guitarist', focusing in minute detail on the interaction of finger and string); and a series of duos with string players: the recording with cellist Martine Altenburger on Simon Reynell's label Another Timbre (which provoked some of the best critical writing on Russell's music, including Jesse Goin's lovely and thorough review); with violinist Satoko Fukada; and with another violinist, Phil Waschmann. Those just for starters.

In the early 90s, the group News from the Shed expanded from its initial trio format (John Butcher on saxophone, Phil Durrant on violin, Russell on guitar) to a quartet with trombonist Radu Malfatti, and arguably played an important role in developing what was being known at one point as 'eai', 'reductionism', 'New London silence' and so on for which Malfatti would be a controversial lead figure. Malfatti, whose work in the UK improvisation scene in the 1970s saw noisy and ebullient playing with groups like Brotherhood of Breath, had increasingly reduced down his approach, emphasizing silence, space and placement surrounding notes almost as much--perhaps more--than virtuosity or phrasal content; an approach that led to some vigorous controversy debate (much of it conducted in online forums like Bagatellen or I Hate Music a decade or longer ago). But, as the quote above suggests, John was hardly one for prescriptive or dogmatic insistence. For him, this mode of music was a permission to, rather than a prohibition of, and the avoidance of certain harmonic, melodic and generic patterns, the insistence on an almost completely improvised approach, were ways to facilitate rather than claims to always being in the advance guard. Thus, the approach taken to be News from the Shed came about for practical reasons--as John noted, it was hard to get the acoustic guitar heard--free improvisation can often be noisy, all the more so once groups expand to more than about three participants--and the group, even before Malfatti joined, had been concerned with developing approaches that wouldn't simply drown out quieter instruments. As this suggests, John's playing was never about grandstanding or drawing attention to himself. Instead, his approach was resolutely unfussy--a careful, quiet and intense concentration that might be called 'workmanlike' were that not--unfairly--a term of abuse: if we rephrased that word to suggest the work that this music does, this mode of playing that is also, crucially, a mode of listening--listening to and with the others in the group, or the others in the room--that is one of labour and love.

In a review from 2010, Stuart Broomer praises such playing--in terms that we might equally well read as practical, musical and philosophical--for its "sense of balance"--both internally, in and between individual guitar lines, and when playing with others. Broomer notes the use of the guitar's fingerboard as a seemingly endless resource: "He finds new tones in the same place, new relationships in the same gesture. A second trip across the fingerboard is always a different excursion". These trips frequently deployed harmonics. In Broomer's words: "the harmonic is a transparent sound: silence and ambient sound pass through it. It accounts for Russell's unhurried pace and his sense of order, even when he's playing fast" there's simply so much going on". This balance--between the known and unknown, the given and the newly discovered, the other-worldly and the resolutely material--is, for me, one of the great virtues of freely improvised music, and John's playing embodied it to a T.

The performance below is John's last ever performance in public, given at Cafe Oto--just down the road from the musical home-from-home of the Vortex--in March, just before national lockdown—a solo of little more than five minutes that encapsulates the virtues of his music: methodical, calm in method, intriguing in many ways. Emotion is not always the point of this music, but Daniel Spicer is I think right to note a certain tendency in Russell's playing that he calls "meditative -- even tender". This aspect of the music is easy to emphasize given the circumstances of this gig--right on the eve of pandemic lockdown, a situation that has often seemed to worsen everyday since then--and the fact of John's illness--which combine to give an extra-musical pressure to this piece, but the playing itself rises to the occasion precisely by continuing as it always had: focused, crystalline, with the authority of a summative statement and the openness of an ongoing, life-long negotiation with the material and devotion to the demands of the moment. John Russell will be much missed.