John Russell (musician)
John Russell (19 December 1954 – 19 January 2021) was an English acoustic guitarist known for free improvisation. He helped promote concerts and appeared on more than 50 recordings.
Born in Battersea, London, he grew up in Ruckinge, Kent. His grandfather gave him his first guitar at eleven. He taught himself, formed a band, and moved to London at seventeen to play at the Little Theatre Club. He joined the Musicians' Co-op and began organizing concerts. In 1975 he helped start the journal Musics, and he spent a year learning traditional technique from Derek Bailey before focusing on acoustic guitar in 1977.
In 1983 he appeared in Channel 4's Jazz on Four: Crossing Bridges. In 1988 he helped start Acta Records with John Butcher and Phil Durrant, releasing the trio’s debut album Conceits. In the mid-1980s he founded Mopomoso with Chris Burn, a club that hosted monthly improvisation concerts in London and later moved to the Vortex Jazz Club in 2008.
Russell led a trio with Butcher and Durrant and played in duos with artists such as Trevor Turner, Stefan Keune, Phil Minton, Evan Parker and Luc Houtkamp. In 1981 he founded Quaqua, an adaptable improvising ensemble, and in 2009 he formed House Full of Floors with Parker and John Edwards. He later returned to electric guitar and played with Parker’s Electro-Acoustic band and in a duo with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. A December 2014 concert with Parker and Moore celebrated his 60th birthday while he was hospitalised for a heart condition.
His work was featured on BBC Radio 3’s Jazz on 3 in 2010, and in 2013 Mopomoso went on a seven-date tour of England, with material later released as a Weekertoft box set. Russell and Paul G. Smyth started the Weekertoft label in 2016. After a quadruple heart bypass in March 2015, he was reported to be on the road to recovery. He died of cancer in January 2021 at the age of 66.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 10:36 (CET).