Named RISING STAR in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 & 2023 Downbeat Critics Poll
Coming Soon
Russ Lossing
PROXIMITY ALERT
w/ Mark Helias and Eric McPherson
coming September 2025 on SONGS label
Alternate Side Parking Music
All About Jazz 2023 Top Ten albums of the year
- Aqua Piazza Records
w/Adam Kolker, Matt Pavolka & Dayeon Seok
"Lossing has delivered one of the most creative, compelling, and comically realistic albums of the year. This ‘must hear’ should be destined for several year end best lists."
Jim Hynes- MakingaScene.org
LISTEN to "Cloned"
"A truly unique album by a jazz innovator!"
Jan Hocek - hisVOICE
Released March 21, 2025
Moon Inhabitants
w/Masa Kamaguchi & Billy Mintz
Sunnyside Records
info and purchase at: https://sunnysiderecords.com/site/release_detail?id=1223
Pianist/composer Russ Lossing has exercised a balance between structure and freedom in his music for decades. His trio with bassist Masa Kamaguchi and drummer Billy Mintz has found that balance after 25 years of performing together. Their latest release, Moon Inhabitants, is a fantastic example of their ease in expression in less than one hundred percent gravity.
Lossing’s trio has had a long career documenting their explorations with what Lossing calls “almost strict time,” an elastic feeling of playing around the beat. Their model is the unique trio of Paul Bley, Gary Peacock, and Paul Motian, an incredible assembly of musicians who balanced form and freedom. Like the Bley Trio, Lossing’s group features musicians who are equally adept at playing traditional jazz forms along with free improvisation.
Jazz Times
Top Jazz Releases, February 2025
Published February 25, 2025
Russ Lossing, Moon Inhabitants (Sunnyside)
"Russ Lossing is an unsung master, a pianist who can bridge tonal and non-tonal languages and improvisational approaches like few others. I recall nights at the Vanguard with Paul Motian when Lossing brought the music to another level, displaying a formidable command of the tradition and a bristling originality, something also immediately apparent on the free uptempo title track of Moon Inhabitants. It's a follow-up to Motian Music from 2019, with bassist Masa Kamaguchi and drummer Billy Mintz — a trio that also made two albums for hatOLOGY in 2011.
Moon Inhabitants presents a mix of Lossing originals, canonical jazz tunes and a standard, “Last Night When We Were Young,” airy and sparse, but also dynamic and alive. Sonny Rollins's “Pent Up House” is a callback in a way to Lossing's solo piano treatment from 2006 (All Things Arise, hatOLOGY) — both are similarly dense, using the strong motivic material of the song to the fullest, with the theme coming only at the end."
- David Adler, Editor, JazzTimes
"New York City based American pianist and composer Russ Lossing has a singular musical vision that makes him a musician’s musician. That means that he is not a populist, and remains little-known beyond his coterie of admirers. Maybe he’d agree with Jim Hall, that if someone had asked him to sell out, he would have – but I think that like Hall, he’s an ironist. You have to be to make a living in our cultural world, without selling out. His latest release balances structure and freedom in the manner of the finest artists." - Andy Hamilton, Jazz Journal
"... a whole world appears, with its rhythmic and melodic structures, its changes of timbres, dynamics, colors and nuances. It is as if traversed by its own music. Russ Lossing lets himself be carried away by an inexhaustible imagination and the listener cannot help but be surprised by each change of direction, by the abstraction that emerges from each Inventions."
Jérôme Gillet – Le Noïse