Articles | Featured | Future

Russ Lossing Trio: Oracle

By RAUL D'GAMA ROSE

There are rolling, wide open spaces in the music of Russ Lossing. Much of this is traversed in the seemingly sprawling beauty of Oracle, an album that meanders in the absorbing colors and textures of what that which the trio offers up for seduction. It is easy to be swept up in the diaphanous gusts of sound that sweep across the terrain, which, in turn, opens up with Lossing's gorgeously cadenced arpeggios that skitter and ramble startlingly across the interminable ...

Russ Lossing Trio: Oracle

By GLENN ASTARITA

Haunting, meditative, solemn and high-impact are descriptors that bear pianist Russ Lossing's approach and sensibilities. While Oracle denotes his trio's debut effort for hatOLOGY records, it's been a working unit for several years, largely based in New York City. The program is architected via disparate levels of pitch amid a capacious vibe, but the trio often picks up steam and executes through a vast plane of propositions, where gravitational pull and heavy-artillery counterattacks balance the flowing contours. Drummer ...

Russ Lossing Trio: Oracle

By MARK CORROTO

Pianist Russ Lossing's trio evokes a dreamlike state on Oracle, by communicating an atmosphere of unearthly elegance through trance-inducing energy. Lossing, bassist Masa Kamaguchi and drummer Billy Mintz commune at this level because they'd been a working trio for six years when this studio recording was made in 2007. Besides that, all three bring experience from the fertile jazz world: Lossing, as a member of bands led by Paul Motian, Dave Liebman, and Mat Maneri; Kamaguchi, with Frank ...

Russ Lossing / John Hebert: Line Up

By WILBUR MACKENZIE

The profound depth of the interactions between pianist Russ Lossing and bassist John Hebert on their new duo recording bears the mark of a shared history and mutual respect and enthusiasm. Hebert and Lossing have both worked with many great artists who have shaped the history of jazz, including Paul Motian, Andrew Hill, Dave Liebman and John Abercrombie, as well as many more recent innovators like Mat Maneri, Uri Caine, Fred Hersch, Greg Osby and Mark Dresser. There may be ...

Russ Lossing / John Hebert: Line Up

By BUDD KOPMAN

Pianist Russ Lossing and bassist John Hebert have known each other a long time and have played together on a number of projects, including Lossing's own Phrase 6 (Fresh Sound New Talent, 2005), and, most recently, on the phenomenal “quasi-debut" of Michael Adkins, Rotator (HatOLOGY, 2008). After talking for a long time about making a duo recording, the two players finally did it, and the exceptional Line Up, is the result. As a player, Hebert's wide-ranging musical ...

Russ Lossing / John Hebert: Line Up

By CHRIS MAY

Modern bass playing, and the special relationship in jazz between bass and piano, could be said to have begun in the early 1940s, with the partnership of pianist Duke Ellington and bassist Jimmy Blanton.

In a series of duo recordings as impactful, among musicians, as saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's couplings a few years later, Blanton took his instrument beyond its role as a more or less lumpen metronomic device and, in intimate relationship with Ellington's ...

Russ Lossing: All Things Arise

By BUDD KOPMAN

Russ Lossing is a pianist of extreme depth and intensity whose music exists between jazz improvisation and modern classicism. All Things Arise will only cement this impression. His previous records include the marvelous Metal Rat (Clean Feed, 2006) with Mat Maneri and Mark Dresser, and the intense As It Grows (HatOLOGY, 2004) with Ed Schuller and Paul Motian. This time, however, Lossing is on solo piano, which only increases the intensity since every aspect of the sounds ...

Russ Lossing / Mat Maneri / Mark Dresser: Metal Rat

By TROY COLLINS

A focused session of collective free improvisation conceived by pianist Russ Lossing, Metal Rat features the spontaneous interplay of three sympathetic musicians. Joined by violist Mat Maneri and bassist Mark Dresser, Lossing booked a recording studio for a mere four hours to instill a “real sense of urgency" to the proceedings. The ensuing session benefits from this pre-imposed constraint by lending an air of palpable tension to the work. Full of simmering intensity and dramatic flair, this is dark, intuitive ...

Russ Lossing / Mat Maneri / Mark Dresser: Metal Rat

By KARLA CORNEJO VILLAVICENCIO

Much has been said about brevity by men who were anything but. Now, art benefits from aesthetic and compositional purity--no unnecessary lines, no superfluous words, no ostentatious displays of skill--but it is usually a byproduct of a brilliant work, not the sole purpose. Pianist Russ Lossing, violist Mat Maneri and bassist Mark Dresser manage dexterously to combine deliberateness and improvisation in Metal Rat, an album of established collaboration. In the liner notes, Lossing reveals that the album was recorded in ...

Russ Lossing: Metal Rat

By BUDD KOPMAN

Metal Rat is a triumph from beginning to end. Along with pianist/leader Russ Lossing, violist Mat Maneri and bassist Mark Dresser have created a work of terrifying intensity and concentration of purpose that is engaging at many levels, simultaneously manifesting a steely ferocity that is nevertheless almost unbearably beautiful. The ten tracks have but two actual compositions ("Turn" and “Is Thick With"), which are easy to distinguish as such. The other tracks are a mix of trio ...