Moon Inhabitants

SSC1752 2025-02-21

Track List

Moon Inhabitants - 5:10
Dance of the Little Swans - 7:29
Jayne - 6:15
Last Night When We Were Young - 8:38
Pent-Up House - 6:24
Being - 5:47
Tulip - 6:35
Verse - 10:16

Musicians

Russ Lossing - piano
Masa Kamaguchi - bass
Billy Mintz - drums

There is an oddly satisfying feeling while floating. The sensation of being untethered from gravity has fascinated people for ages. In a musical sense, performing without the weight of tempo or rhythmic structure has been explored by many improvisers, but finding a place not quite tethered to tempo or rhythmic structure remains a difficult challenge for most.

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.

The trio’s four recordings have shown their evolution. Two recordings for Hat Hut, Ways and Oracle, highlight their ability in free improvisation and performing original material, respectively. Their 2019 Sunnyside release, Motian Music, found them honoring one of their reflexive time heroes, Paul Motian, with interpretations of Motian’s idiosyncratic compositions that float around time and in their own space.

For Moon Inhabitants, Lossing decided to select a program of originals balanced with compositions by a variety of other composers, jazz and classical. The mixture highlights the spectrum of what the powers that the trio commands.