On leaving school at 16, he took farm-labouring work. John Russell improvising with Evan Parker, saxophone, and John Edwards, bass, at the Discovery festival, Walthamstow, 2017 Those discoveries triggered an early detour from progressive rock to experimental music from which he never returned. He formed his own local rock band, but also delved into modern classical music’s 12-tone techniques, and John Cage’s ideas on indeterminacy and hybrid instruments, and got wind of Bailey through an article by Fripp.

A guitar-playing classmate at his grammar school in Ashford made him a guitar fan, and one day his grandfather presented the boy with a budget steel-strung acoustic.Īt 14, Russell bought the 1968 compilation album The Rock Machine Turns You On, and the Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only in It for the Money (playing them on a DIY deck made in his school woodwork class, hitched to an old radio), and soon discovered Muddy Waters, John Mayall and King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, and 1970s progressive and blues-rock bands including Soft Machine and Blodwyn Pig. When he was 15 months old, his father took him to live with his paternal grandparents, Rodney and Jean Russell in the village of Ruckinge, on the edge of Romney Marshes – after which, he never saw his mother again and his father visited infrequently. Occasionally his playing even seemed to glimpse some long-gone bluesman coaxing soulful memories out of a battered acoustic instrument on a back porch.īorn in Battersea, south-west London, John was the son of Wenda Weston and Derek Russell. Sometimes Russell could typify the kind of implacable idiom-demolitionist that improv’s detractors loved to hate, but there was a palpable warmth and thoughtfulness to his work.

But it was as a guitarist, often playing unaccompanied and unplugged on a well-worn 1936 Radiotone archtop instrument, that Russell was most treasured by devotees of free-improv – for his cryptically captivating narratives of percussive, sharply plucked chords, glittering harmonics and nuanced timbres, flurries of scrambling runs and feverishly strummed rhythms.

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