Jon Hassell

Summary:
Jon Hassell, a student of both Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pandit Pran Nath, created a deadly combination that would resonate for decades in world-music compositions: the ghostly sound of his trumpet lost in nightmarish electronic background. His trumpet was both a call of the wild and a wail of grief, both as ancestral as possible in a modernist setting. The quasi-ambient Vernal Equinox (1977) and the jazzier (and less successful) Earthquake Island (1978) led to his masterpiece, Dream Theory In Malaya (1981), one of the fundamental recordings of the decade, that pushed electronic music back into the primordial swamps and jungles of Africa. After the equally eerie Aka-Darbari-Java Magic Realism (1983), Hassell abandoned the supernatural tension of those works and contented himself with impressionistic works such as Power Spot (1986).

Jon Hassell invented one of the twentieth century's most original and influential musical styles. World-music was born in the 1950s, but it was only with Jon Hassell that it became a "major" genre, comparable in complexity and ambition to classical music. The trumpet had been one of the guiding instruments of improvised music for decades, but Hassell gave it a profoundly psychological and sociological voice, a voice that evokes the entire history of humanity. All in all, Hassell's music is a search for that mysterious and archaic "timbre", which alone is worth more than any symphony, a timbre capable of resonating with the human condition. Jon Hassell is one of the great masters of electronic world-music. His records, between the '70s and the' 80s, strongly influenced by Brian Eno's "environmental" research but also by a hallucinatory vision of the Third World, have coined a language that inspired an entire generation.

Born in 1937 and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the historic areas of the blues, Hassell was struck by the Latin and Caribbean sound of Stan Kenton and the exotic arrangements of Miles Davis. Graduated in composition and trumpet at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, and then in Musicology at the Catholic University of Washington, he trained between avant-garde pieces and Gregorian chants. In 1965 he went to Cologne, a pupil of Stockhausen and Berio, a schoolmate of Holger Czukay and Irmi Schmidt (future members of Can).

Returning to his homeland in 1967, he settled at the Buffalo Center, where he befriended Terry Riley (who plays on the In C , the first ever recording of a minimalist work) and composed the first pieces for tape collage (Time-Sculptured Dense-Spectrum Music , Solid State, Ocean / Desert). Meanwhile he was a member of the group of minimalist composer and guru LaMonte Young, who helped fine-tune his "Dream House" (Hassell plays on the historic 1973 recording). During a tour with Young in Rome, he met Pandit Pran Naht, from whom he took lessons in Indian singing (in 1972 in India, always in the company of Young). In their wake he began to dream of a confluence between classical and popular cultures, along the lines of Indian music. Hassell thus came to the notion of a "fourth world", a world that unites the instinctive impulses of the Third World and the rational demands of the First World (three plus one equals four). It was Pandit Pran Nath himself who taught him to use his voice as an instrument and inspired him to have an unusual style on the trumpet: trying to play ragas with the trumpet (that is, without the pauses of Western music), he understood how to use the valves of the instrument for such a continuous flow and thus came to sounds similar to blowing into a shell. Like others of the minimalist school, Hassell added electronics to his repertoire in order to further enhance the spiritual quality of his music.

From the multitude and diversity of influences, a music of the "fourth world" had sprung, a primitive-futurist ethno-electronic techno-exotic sound which, in the catalog of "possible music", stands with the "visionary orientals oriented to listening". What makes the music evocative is the timbre of his instrument: Hassell's "snake trumpet", thin and dark, damp and soft, turbid and sick, is rightfully one of the most daring virtuosities of the decade.

Vernal Equinox (Lovely, 1977) is a poignant delirium of fear and hope. Even among the electronic noises and exotic percussions (by Nana Vasconcelos), the timbre of the trumpet is the big protagonist of the record: a timbre made of wind, echoes, animalistic verses, slime, quicksand, bamboo canes, of dense and milky mist. The trumpet paints a desolate fresco of another world (echoing echoes of Africa, Asia, South America) which is closer to the primordial sound than the West. The trumpet evokes primitive civilizations with its broken and sinuous song, filtered by a synthesizer or doubled by an echoplex; an endless lament, slow and modest, which continues to murmur the same apathetic tired dirge.

Hassell was inspired by Don Cherry's humanism and Pandit's ragas, but also by minimalism and jazz-rock, of which he assimilates the techniques into a wider musical vocabulary. The result is a babelic confusion of traditional heritages (congas, drums, rattles) and electronic techniques. The transpiritual journey begins with the sound of the ocean and the screeching trumpet trumpet in Toucan Ocean and proceeds into the arcane jungle of Viva Shona (for trumpet, mbira, bells and tropical birds) where the trumpet plays the cry of the animals on a gaunt, arrhythmic, dissonant, soundless percussion carpet, which exudes the humidity of swamp and forest. The tribal rhythm of Hex completes the journey through the maze of the mysterious exotic landscape. The solemn mantra of Blues Nile , a symphony of echoes for silt, sand, clay and dust that accompanies the majestic flow of the river, goes beyond pure descriptiveness.
The Vernal Equinox suite is the first masterpiece of his chamber music for trumpet, electronics and percussion: the synthesizer does nothing but hold long indian-like chords, the percussion patters in the background and the trumpet, anemic and consumptive, throws blood and moans without strength , delirious to the last, talkative but fatalistically resigned. It is, in effect, a raga of the poor, a raga of the jungle peoples, a raga of the rice farmers, mangroves, jaguars and boas.

Earthquake Island (Tomato, 1978), with a jazz-rock combo, puts together seven other pieces of its polyglot mosaic, a magical and luxuriant fresco of an imaginary landscape, and the result is just less impressive; the fault of a nervous South American rhythm (again Vasconcelos) which prevails over the spirited acrobatics of the trumpet, occluding part of its expressiveness. Voodoo Wind is the most dazed dance, dominated by Vasconcelos' percussive tornadoes and a female song made up of only cries and rhythmic syllables, but the most seductive are Cobra Moon , in its sinister gait, between the yelps of the percussions and the bristly melody of the trumpet, and Tribal Secret, with a menacing synth tone and archaic swamp rhythms. If Sundance goes wild in a clapping frenzy, Earthquake Island drowns in a sea of anemic dissonances.

Possible Musics Fourth World (EG, 1980) the collaboration with Brian Eno that brought him to the fore, is instead a minor work, consisting of two suites, Charm and Chemistry , slowed down by Eno's "environmental" game. It was at this point that Hassell realized he was subjugated by the personality (and publicity) of his patron, at the time the New Wave in New York. When Eno and David Byrne stole the idea of My Life In The Bush of Ghosts from him, and from that theft that a musical event of the time originated, which caused a sensation in the press all over the world, Hassell decided to return to the darkness of the avant-garde.

Perhaps it was precisely the resentment for the lack of recognition of the environment towards his prescient work that motivated Hassell to formulate a broader and more ambitious anthropo-musical theory, which again detached the platoon of imitators (famous and powerful or not).

Dream Theory In Malaya (EG, 1981) and Magic Realism are in fact the first works that reflect his "cosmological" program, in which all his spiritual and philosophical influences converge, from the "future / primitive" model of the fourth world to the multi- sociological culturalism. To express the dichotomies "ancient / modern", "religious / secular", "north / south", "natural / technological", "pleasure / pain" Hassell invents the musical analogue of virtual reality, a sound technique to recreate real worlds or imaginary in your own world.

It is therefore not surprising that Dream Theory , for trumpet, electronics and percussion, presents itself as a more scientific, austere and staid work. Hassell, the visionary anthropologist, focuses on the Aboriginal civilization of Malaysia, but the electronic processing and discrete patterns of the trumpet produce lush jungle and island frescoes of the Far East that incorporate little of the local folklore, while they spring from their own arcane acoustics of the forest, drawing sounds and sensations from steamboats, monsoons, cyclones, the river.

The breathing of Hassell's trumpet has the value of a proud reminder of the wilderness, which gathers around it with a swarm of percussion and electronic effects, as in the tumultuous minimalist fanfare of Dream Theory , an In C of the jungle, where a repeating and stratifying are precisely those electronic imitations and the trumpet emits only long hoarse puffs, or in the more hermetic Gift of Fire in a similar invoice, but with the percussion in the role of iterated noises and the trumpet to frolic clumsy and petulant, or above all in the long Malay, a journey into the natural rhythms of the equatorial forest, in particular the river and the tribal one, until leaving the animal sound of the trumpet alone in the abnormal silence of a village of ghosts.
More complex and daring is the game of Datu Bintong At Jelong , where that unvoiced trumpet penetrates with its icy multi-level improvisations into the minimalist undulations of the keyboards and gamelan, duplicated and crossed by the echoplex. And the imperceptible fluctuation of bells, birds and song of These Times refers to the stasis of Zen. His hallucinated primitivism sculpts mythological scenarios in a dreamlike atmosphere.
But the operation goes further: Hassell reconstructs a modern folk of the Third World, not using the already existing folkloric material but the natural sounds from which it originated, the sounds with which those populations resonate for millennia. To them he applies the techniques of minimalism, which best enhance their timbre qualities and, ultimately, the power of psychological suggestion. The real score of his suites is the natural environment.

The basic form of his music, the improvisation of the trumpet over a substrate of cyclical noises (natural or electronic), finds full definition in Aka-Darbari-Java: Magic Realism (Eg, 1983), where he is again accompanied only by percussion. For this work, Hassell coined the term "coffee-colored classical music," perhaps intended to convey the idea of music that is serious yet easy to listen to. In reality, it is a futuristic collage that emphasizes the hallucinatory calligraphy of his hieroglyphs. But above all, it further expands his musical vocabulary, assimilating influences from different civilizations and eras, and organizing the material in an even more rigorous way, going so far as to use the computer.

Thus, in Empire I-IV, the trumpet sound dissolves into a nebula of glacially artificial vibrations, in a minimalist continuum that filters and distorts all sounds into a more homogeneous structure, a sort of multi-movement "environmental concerto" that can refine the constituent elements until they become unrecognizable (see the cosmic trills of the second movement or the obsessive dissonances of the fourth). The two Darbari Extensions are even more futuristic and mechanized, indecipherable in the wave-like motion of the synthesizer and the breath-like phrasing of the trumpet, at times approaching (in the second) the Dadaist tornadoes of Subotnick.

His most austere and rigorous composition is perhaps Pano Da Costa, written in 1985 for the Kronos Quartet, a twenty-minute sonata with an extended cello solo. The themes are two: an Arabic cantillation and a Brazilian berimbau.

The conclusion of the ethnic trilogy, Power Spot (ECM, 1986), is a collection of spiritual fragments written in collaboration with Eno, some guided by minimalist tribalism (Wing Melodies, Power Spot, Solaire), others entrusted to suggestive continuums (Passage DE) or arcane calls (Elephant And The Orchid) of his trumpet, set in intensely dreamlike landscapes. All in all, it is a somewhat disappointing work, seeming to abandon the supernatural spirit of the previous albums.

After the live meditations of Surgeon Of The Nightsky (Capitol, 1987), collected over two years (notably the spectral Ravinia and the galactic Paris 2), Hassell arrived at a more exuberant sound with Flash Of The Spirit (Capitol, 1989), a collaboration with an African troupe of percussionists and dancers, the Farafina. The fanfare of the title track and the tribal dance of Masque best express his talents as an arranger of ethnic folk, while the theme of Dreamworld reveals a less austere approach to music. His trumpet improvises, raw and breathless as ever, over the percussion festivities, but no longer has the "sickly" and desolate tone of his early work. These albums, however, mark a slow but inexorable decline.

Meanwhile (1989), he moved from New York to Los Angeles, originally to work with opera director Peter Sellars. In reality, Hassell felt he had exhausted the theme of world music. He became familiar with computers and samplers and rethought his mission in the world. The first album of this "California" phase is City: Works Of Fiction (Opal, 1990), inspired by the fusion of seemingly unrelated but actually syncretic themes: Calvino's "Invisible Cities," Jean Baudrillard's vision of America as "the primitive society of the future," Fellini's Reggiolo, Rushdie's mythical London, the dystopian Los Angeles of "Blade Runner," and the Situationist "psychogeography." All these icons integrate into a single concept, that of the "city of the future," with Los Angeles as the archetype.

The focus of his distorting lens shifts to urban folklore, namely hip-hop (Voiceprint), fusion jazz (Pagan), funk (In The City Of Red Dust), and afro-pop (Mombasa), in a lush choreography of sticks, dissonances, and beatboxing (Rain). The most fragmented piece (Ba-Ya) and the most eclectic (Warriors) are also those that take the greatest advantage of new technologies.

Hassell realizes that world music is not only what a Western traveler finds in distant lands, but also what is born and develops in one’s own neighborhood. For Hassell, hip-hop represents the birth of a new popular culture, whose roots are no less "Third World" than those of Java and Africa. Perhaps also in reaction to the commercial success of the world music he helped invent, Hassell rediscovers in the genre of marginalized Black communities the primordial voice he has been pursuing from the start: the voice of the symbiosis between an ecosystem and its inhabitants, a symbiosis that produces instruments capable of imitating natural sounds (in this case, beatboxing, which mimics the neurotic rhythms of urban life).

Reinterpreted in the key of "contemporary world music," hip-hop and its practices serve as the backbone for the sinuous framework of Dressing For Pleasure (Warner Bros, 1994), recorded with the Bluescreen ensemble. What redeems the album, however, is not the multi-ethnic hodgepodge of Club Zombie or the Arabic chant of Destination Bakiff, and even less the Miles Davis-inspired instrumental funk of G-Spot, but the final seven minutes of Blue Night, in which Hassell returns to the mysterious and unsettling climates of his "magical realism."

Hassell is undoubtedly, within world music, one of the musicians most influenced by Western avant-garde, particularly minimalism. Perhaps for this reason, he also emerges as one of the least calligraphic, and one of the most original and personal interpreters of the musical civilizations of the Third World.

His "fourth world" is the projection of the ghosts of the first world onto the unsettling scenario of the third. Technology and primitivism continuously reflect each other in the trumpeter's work, one acting as the doppelganger of the other. It is like a hall of mirrors, where Hassell's onomatopoeic trumpet and natural rhythms act as a mediumistic conduit. Thanks to technology, Hassell can reconstruct in the listener’s soul the nightmare atmospheres of the jungle.

Sulla Strada (MaSo, 1995) is the the soundtrack for a sort of a spoken opera inspired by Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" that was staged in Italy in 1982. Therefore in Hassell's discography this score comes just one year after Dream Theory In Malaya, of his career's peaks.
Accompanied by Michael Brook on guitar and Nana Vasconcelos on percussions, Hassell devised a burst of fourth-world polirhythms from a different angle: the sheer loudness and savagery of the sound sets it apart from the rest of Hassell's repertory, particularly the distorted keyboard drone and frantic pounding of Passaggio a Nordovest and the orgy-like atmosphere of Temperature Variabili. But Sulla Strada is mostly a waste of his talent: Tenera e` la Notte merely repeats the same rhythmic loop for six minutes before the keyboards introduce some change; Frontiera a Sudest indulges for 11 minutes in its busy texture of insect-like noises. The eerie, archaic, psychedelic, hallucinated soundscape of his fourth world reappears only in the 22-minute vision of Tramonto Caldo Umido, where the trumpet intones his aphonic chant in a dusty cloud of electronics and percussion. After twelve minutes is becomes a breathing that mixes with the forces of nature and murmurs an exoteric prayer. But even this tour de force is ten minutes too long.

On the acoustic album Fascinoma (Water Lily Acoustics, 1999), Hassell interprets jazz repertoire classics in his dreamlike and transcendent style, rich with references to Third World cultures. Accompanying his trumpet are a flute (Ronu Majumdar, an Indian classical musician), a piano (jazz artist Jacky Terrasson), and a guitar (the legendary bluesman and blues-rock producer Ry Cooder), a combination that could hardly be less orthodox.
The originals are a mixed bag. The cool jazz of Wide Sky is hardly Hassell's bread and butter, and, despite the careful chamber orchestration, comes off as pretentious and sterile. Secretely Happy is way too slow, minimal and subdued. The exotic noir of Mevlana Duke is neurotic enough to hint at a different side of the fourth world, but doesn't go anywhere. This album is very much sound for the sake of sound.

Hassell’s music is living music in the sense that it reproduces not only the atmosphere of a landscape, but also its sounds, its colors, its scents, in a titanic attempt to transform the record into a multi-dimensional medium. Yet his intent is more than merely “photographic.” The musician’s goal is to reconcile the technocrat with nature, the future with the past. Hassell’s pan-ethnic spiritualism has roots that are far deeper—and far more relevant—than the Indian-inspired mysticism of the 1960s.

As a trumpeter, Hassell has forged a style and tone that rank among the most spectacular achievements in a century of evolution of the instrument.

Maarifa Street - Magic Realism 2 (Bleu, 2005), Hassell's most profound work since Power Spot, adapted his fourth-world aesthetic to Arab music (or viceversa), exploiting three improvised performances that may have or may have not been united by the same philosophy: the digital studio allows the artist to smooth out differences and conflicts, to highlight the common path and the underlying soul. The process yields the evanescent drones and swirls of Maarifa Street as well as echoes of his fourth-world music upgraded to digital arrangements (Darbari Bridge). There is a stronger jazz feeling, like when a plaintive trumpet theme duets with wordlessing chanting in Open Secret (Paris), or in the double strande of trumpet soliloquy in Open Secret (Milano) (one reflecting the other i a ghostly atmosphere). Unfortunately, Hassell retains his passion for funk (notably in Peter Freeman's lively Divine S.O.S.) and dub (the launching pad for the digital-tribal propulsion of New Gods), two ingredients that never mixed quite well with his primitive futurism. The brief Warm Shift boasts a radio-friendly melody over lounge shuffle rhythm.

The jazz world suddenly discovered Hassell's trumpet thanks to Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street (ECM, 2009), featuring keyboardist Jamie Muhoberac, violinist Kheir Eddine M'Kacich, Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset, guitarist Rick Cox, Jan Bang on live sampling, bassist Peter Freeman, drummer Helge Norbakken and percussionist Steve Shehan. Hassell's best moments always balanced Brian Eno and Miles Davis, with the Brian Eno-esque side removing the drums (and therefore the funky beat) from the Miles Davis-ian side. Later in his career Hassell leaned more towards Davis than towards Eno, and in the process lost quite a bit of depth. Some of it came back in the 13-minute Abu Gil (exotic trumpet laments fluctuating over a tapestry of alien dissonance and Afro-funk rhythm) and in the eleven-minute Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street (with its waves of strings and electronics evoking a soundtrack for vast open landscapes). Despite the fragile electronic ambient watercolor that opens the album (Aurora), the combo opts for the mellow somnolent fusion of Time and Place and Light On Water, which gets even mellower in the barely whispered and drum-less Courtrais and in the feathery (and equally drum-less) Blue Period. The interplay is as superb as it is subdued in Northline, but the music remains blurred and indecisive. In a sense, Hassell had returned to his original aesthetic, the delicate fragrance of liquid tones, from a jazz perspective.

Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume one) (Ndeya, 2018), the first album in nine years, collects music composed and recorded over the years, i.e. "listening to yourself listening". The quality varies greatly. His oneiric and noir atmospheres envelop Dreaming, a classic blend of hypnotic glacial drones, mechanical pulsations and jazz rhythm, and Ndeya, the closest thing to his original tribal swampy jazz. The music is occasionally claustrophobic, like in the disjointed laptop sonata of Manga Scene or in the twitching Picnic, that sounds like a glitch-y remix of a television theme from the 1960s. Alas, the compositions don't seem to have a soul. They sound like an amateur practicing fashionable ideas and indulging in sound collage and "cut-up" technique.

Pentimento's second installment, Seeing Through Sound (Ndeya, 2020) mostly recorded during the same sessions as the previous album, featured Rick Cox (electric guitar,), John Von Seggern and Christoph Harbonnier (basses), Hugh Marsh (violin), Peter Freeman (bass, electronics), Ralph Cumbers (kongo drum programming), Eivind Aarset (electric guitar, sampling), Kheir-Eddine M'Kachiche (violin, sampler), and Michel Redolfi (electronics).

Jon Hassell died in June 2021.