Triple Dip
with Russ Lossing (piano), Billy Mintz (drums)
Swiss virtuoso trombonist, Samuel Blaser plays with a sumptuous sound and confoundingly plastic phrasing. He is also an inspired composer, striving in the various ensembles he leads to balance a sense of form with the spontaneity of improvisation. By joining forces today with two prestigious representatives of the American school of jazz and improvisation, pianist Russ Lossing and drummer Billy Mintz, Blaser sets out to explore the register of the voice, common to all three instruments, in an asserted "chamber" context and from an entirely original repertoire. This intimate, resolutely lyrical music brilliantly plays on the richness and complementarity of timbres, elevating the "trialogue" to the status of a major art form.
Blaser regularly returns to the structural principle experimented with in various orchestral formulas by the great Paul Motian, namely to dispense with the double bass, making this vacant space both the driving force and the paradoxical pivot for the elaboration of an authentically collective discourse. Accompanied by New York pianist Russ Lossing and drummer Billy Mintz, SB presents a series of themes based on this dynamic of emptiness, in a melodic, highly colorful music full of contrasts that links the abstract, lyrical chamber jazz of Jimmy Giuffre, with its sense of improvisation, and a harmonic vocabulary drawn from various sources of 20th-century art music, both European and American.
Pianist Russ Lossing has been a mainstay on the New York City jazz scene since the 1980s. Praised by Down Beat for “his singular playing and composing styles,” Lossing’s music is documented on more than two dozen albums. He regularly tours throughout North America and Europe. Lossing was also a longtime colleague of Paul Motian, playing and recording with the legendary drummer for over 12 years, including celebrated week-long stands at The Village Vanguard.