John Russell – 19/12/54 – 18/01/21

Raised in rural Kent by his paternal grandparents, he received his first guitar as a gift from his grandfather at the age of 11. Originally drawn to the blues, he taught himself to play and formed a group while still at school. He moved to London in 1971 aged 17 and began gigging but quickly gravitated to the capital’s free improvisation scene and, from 1972 onwards, he was a regular at key improv hubs including The Little Theatre, The Musicians’ Co-Op and the London Musicians’ Collective.

From 1977, Russell gave up the electric guitar and concentrated solely on playing acoustic guitar, developing a mature, non-idiomatic style that owed much to improv progenitor Derek Bailey (from whom Russell received around a year of weekly lessons in conventional technique early in his career). Like Bailey, Russell favoured a percussive attack and remained fascinated with the deployment of wide intervals, harmonics and other timbral variations while, at the same time, finding a more meditative – even tender – voice than that of his mentor.

Russell also became an enthusiastic organiser in London’s free improv community. In 1981, he founded QUAQUA, a large bank of improvisers put together in different combinations for specific projects and, in 1991, he started the monthly MOPOMOSO gigs, which became the UK’s longest running concert series featuring mainly improvised music. As well as giving countless solo performances, he played in a number of larger groupings including a long-running trio with saxophonist John Butcher and violinist Phil Durrant, and, in 2009, formed House Full of Floors with Evan Parker and bassist John Edwards. Throughout his career, he toured extensively in the UK and overseas and appeared on over 50 albums.

In later years, Russell made a partial return to the electric guitar in live performance, including as part of Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble and in a duo with Thurston Moore. In December 2014 he played in a concert with Parker, Moore and others to celebrate his 60th birthday, while under hospital supervision for a serious heart condition. Following a quadruple heart bypass operation in March 2015, he continued to play even as his health deteriorated. Cheerful and boundlessly positive till the last, he was a much-loved figure in the world of improvised music who will be sorely missed.