Jon Hassell -- Classic Or Dud?

the new one

total winning streak, same mood as 'Maarifa Street' but even fuzzier & spaced out. and live percussion this time, not hearing loops, it's all gauze

he also put up a linked autobiography on his website which is very readable. strewn with polaroids of his muses.

That sounds promising. I've been appreciating Fascinoma a little more, recently.

So, so glad I got to see him play live.

i went down to see him in london a couple of years ago and was super disappointed. he was on fine form but the other two guys he was playing with were lameorama.

i couldn't get out quickly enough and as the lights came up i made a swift exit and stood on someone's toe. i turned round to apologise and it was brian eno. oops!

And that's why you should never go see Jon Hassel in London, you might step on Brian Eno's toes.

(Twenty-five years or so of listening to his music and I still have not learned how to spell his last name.)

living with it this week, new album is a lot more traditional & upfront. a lot more recognizable. less mysterious but that doesn't stop it from being beautiful. whereas late 70's / early 80's Hassell is too exotic and mutant to recognize as anything, you just fall into them with no compass, but this telegraphs itself a bit more directly.

I need to hear Fascinoma, that was clearly a reset for him. there's a track on here that quotes Ellington's 'Caravan', a quote that familiar should be too bald to work but here it doesn't sound like a reference, it just sounds perfect

You've never heard Fascinoma at all, or just not lately? I guess you know he coves "Caravan" on Fascinoma (one of my favorite tracks on that album). My favorite part of that album is probably still Jacky Terrasson 's piano playing, but I've come back to appreciating Hassell's playing on it more.

(I don't mean to act so shocked that you might not have heard Fascinoma, but you seem to have heard everything lse b him.)

(Can't see the end of the line when I type, incidentally. I think that makes me nervous and I start making misakes.)

(Exactly.)

It's the only one I haven't heard. When it came out, after City & Dressing For Pleasure I just wasn't as excited about a new Hassell record. Definitely going to pick it up next time I see it.

the latest one is a pretty incredible how-much-can-we-strip-away experiment - kind of like a d'n'b record without any rhythm track at some points. 2nd song is like watching blood coagulate. really something else.

this prompted me to give last night... another listen. still fantastic. and the dnb w/o any rhythm track is pretty much spot-on for the more dubby, less fusiony material. but sloooooowed down.

love this album.

the new one is indeed sick

you know which one's good? Sulla Strada, music for a 1982 Italian dance production. I got it when it finally came out in 98, but it felt peripheral at the time, a lot of the fragments are simple looped textures & resampled tracks from Fourth World Vol. 1 & 2, but coming back to it this month, that is precisely why it is so great. a lot more overt in its use of directly appropriative sampling (both of ethno-folk music & self-remixing) than on any other record of his, except Aka Darbari Java (which is the one of his I've been playing most this year)

The Washington Post's pop music critic Chris Richards put this in as his tenth fave cd of the year---he described it this way : With his 15th studio album, the esteemed jazz trumpeter evaporated Miles Davis’ cosmic slop into a resplendent sonic mist.

I'm talking about the 2009 one “Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street”

Actually I think he's just playing with the same sonic mist as In A Silent Way, but that's one of my favourite kinds of weather so I love it.

I like the new one. It is very distilled.

In the context of this intrepidly experimental environment, Hassell would come to a concept that would affect everything to come. "So I started making little things with tapes and collages," Hassell describes. "I remember one of the first things I ever did was to take a big thick chord sung by the Hi-Lo's, and kind of slice up that chord—we're talking splicing tape here—and making a cubist mash-up of the chord. Call it early sampling, when you're basically just recording a piece of something and with tape manipulation you're playing around [with it].

"So I go off to Europe, where I studied with Stockhausen for a couple of years," Hassell continues. "My wife was a pianist and she falls into that scene of playing Stockhausen at recitals and things like that. In the meantime, someone brings over The Beatles and says, 'Hey, listen to this, this is cool.' One of the scores I did was to take a Schoenberg piece and chop it up and have these little electronic devices—basically mixes that had a little keyboard on it so that the players were playing this sample of altered strings as softly as they could (you couldn't hear them on stage without amplification), so every time somebody plays the keyboard or hits one of the little nodes on the keyboard, then suddenly what they were playing would come to the fore.

"Lamonte Young and I did a performance in Rome and I heard [Indian vocal master Pandit] Pran Nath warming up. He was also doing a concert in the series there. I was warming up, I was playing these patterns; I had been sort of experimenting with a wah-wah pedal and all that, à la Miles from that period [early '70s]. And I was playing these patterns and Pran Nath heard me warming up; and so I heard him and he heard me and he took these patterns and started spinning them off. And I thought, 'Wow! That's cool.' So then I started studying. Raga was just raga to me. It was music from another place and I had no idea of how it was formed and shaped and what the ethos of it was. So then I started studying. I started studying with the trumpet, first singing and then trying to apply it to trumpet. Basically I had to pull away and kind of unlearn everything and start from there."

best career overview interview / article on Hassell I've ever read! his 60's background before getting to new york, the stuff on page 3, hadn't read any description of that in any depth at all before

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=32743&pg=1

"There was a lot of last-minute touching up," Hassell admits. "And then I threw out the North line that we had glommed on all these things. I had had this big idea about having that—I had made these sort of mega-sessions in Pro Tools with like a hundred tracks and the idea was to like make these wild mixes, like montage. It looked like wild mixes in which there would have been even more than one motif drifting between pieces, which is kind of a grand idea. But eventually only a very small part of that actually wound up on the record.

hope he gets to make this kind of record next time. interesting to hear about Eicher's involvement on the new record from the first sessions, it's so odd how he ends up collaboratively moderating the mood on almost everything on ECM. also interesting to read that Power Spot was one of the rare ECM records that the artist finished on his own clock before bringing it to the label

I wanted to like the new one, but I found the bass really really annoying for some reason. It's been too long since I've listened to have much of a sense of why at this point, if I ever did. Basically, his rhythms still sound corny to me lately.

FWIW, I was DJing at a Matmos gig in Cleveland and dropped "Datu Bintung At Jelong" (as you do), and Matmos' MC Schmidt came racing to the decks to declare that Dream Theory In Malaya is his favorite album of all time. This little anecdote represents the zenith of my DJ "career."

Listening to Dream Theory right now. "Datu Bintung At Jelong"'s AMS/Eventide pitch shifter loop is like ambient crack. "Malay" sounds like the percussionist is performing in a lake. Less background than Possible Musics Vol. 1 and more esoteric in places but a great album.

definitely better than most music

Reading an interview in Electronic Musician from a few years ago w him and he starts saying how so many of his compositions come out of other things he's done and then he says "Charm" is based off of the coda to the title track of Earthquake Island. I've had that record sitting in my iTunes library for years and just listened to it for the first time. And you don't have to wait for the coda to hear the string synth playing the part -- it's as plain as day from the opening note.

Fourth World is one of my favorite records ever, something I listen to once a week. I own the entire Hassell catalogue and the only weak ones are Sulla Strada, which is a rehash of earlier stuff and just too harsh to my ears, and Flash of the Spirit. the early ones, Vernal Equinox and Earthquake Island, are superior world-jazz records. I have some of this live Bluescreen stuff and think it's amazing. Dressing for Pleasure is more conventional and very fine. As he went on, he seemed to have referenced Miles Davis' electric stuff more, and while I prefer Miles to Jon Hassell--I prefer Miles' electric music to almost any other music I know--I think Hassell really did the instrumental thing way better than Eno, seems to have more content. Maarifa Street is a very good record from his "later" period and I prefer it to Fascinoma. There's also a cool Sub Rosa thing from '87, Myths 3. La Nouvelle Serenite, that has a great Hassell piece along with stuff by Harold Budd and Gavin Bryars. I find his Ry Cooder/Ronu Majumdar collab Hollow Bamboo to be, well, kinda hollow bamboozle. Dream Theory in Malaya has some nice stuff but some of the repetitions seem annoying to me. In the Eno doc Man Who Fell to Earth, Hassell gives the impression that Eno kinda stole his thunder, and I believe I read something to that effect in this Eno bio I read recently.

anyone heard this: http://www.discogs.com/Punkt-2-Featuring-Sidsel-Endresen-Jon-Hassell-Live-Remixes-Vol-1/release/2088246

not mentioned on hassell's web discography. saw it in the stores, hesitated, still curious

No but just realized Jan Bang is his live samplist -- I have his solo record on Samadhi Sound but haven't heard it yet.

Listening to Possible Musics now -- realize I've always had a bit of a confused relationship with it. For me, the biggest issue I have with it is that it's sequenced a bit funny -- as obviously groundbreaking as it is (and I've seen those quotes too -- when you compare it to his first two albums, I feel like Hassell maybe doesn't give Eno enough credit), "Chemistry" is a bit of a sleeper as an opener. For me, a lot of what it does rhythmically and texturally feels a little more deeply explored up thru Flash of the Spirit.

I made the dreadful music of owning that first David Sylvian record before Possible Musics.

Well, that's only a dreadful mistake of you didn't like it. I love Words w the Shaman. The biggest difference is that it feels distinctly more teleological than most of Hassell's own stuff. Which isn't a bad thing.

It's such a concerted carbon copy of PM that it's tainted PM for me.

Yes and no. I mean, yes, it's got Hassell's trumpet, atmospherics and "ethnic" percussion. But compositionally it feels pretty different.

If it hasn't been clear enough, over the last few weeks, I've been borderline obsessed with his 80s records. Even after listening to Hassell for years and reading dozens of Toop/Reynolds/Wire articles and interviews about his compositional process and the theory behind it, there are so many things about the way these records sound and were recorded that remain somewhat of a mystery to me as a musician.

Some of it is the compositional process itself. For instance, Hassell has said that one method he uses is playing older material and using where that goes as the basis of a new composition. But is it the band playing the song live in the studio? Or is it Hassell sampling the original track? Or both? As noted above, while the riff in "Charm" is lifted from the title track of Earthquake Island, it's not clear whether it's a sample (triggered by an AMS delay or whatever) or just Hassell playing a chord progression from his previous record.

But it's also the sounds themselves -- and this is where I think Eno and Lanois come in. Hassell's trumpet is obviously a huge part of it -- with the harmonizer and the way he plays the instrument. But many of the "treatments" are far more subtle, yet add a new dimension to the overall sound. I've heard Possible Musics literally hundreds of times but just recently noticed that a lot of the percussion parts are pitch-shifted to give the drums a bigger, more open, hollow and watery character. In other instances, sounds are processed to the point that they become virtually unrecognizable. According the credits, both Power Spot and The Surgeon of the Nightsky... have Michael Brook playing guitar on them -- but I don't much in the way of guitar, if any. And still other times, parts are processed to sound like completely different or "impossible" instruments -- made possible by the studio.

It makes me think that while there have always been comparisons drawn between Hassell's work and Miles Davis' in the 70s, one that seems particularly appropriate is their use of technology -- specifically, the way they used technology to mutate and blend the sound of the ensemble. And where in Miles' band, the technology of choice was wah-wah pedals (even Mtume used one on his percussion), for Hassell/Eno/Lanois it's running everything through Eventide pitch shifters and early samplers.

I know Eno avoids gear fetish discussions like the plague and understand why -- but I'd be fascinated to read a more in depth piece about the approach he took with these records.

And I still feel that way.

anyone heard this: http://www.discogs.com/Punkt-2-Featuring-Sidsel-Endresen-Jon-Hassell-Live-Remixes-Vol-1/release/2088246

not mentioned on hassell's web discography. saw it in the stores, hesitated, still curious

http://open.spotify.com/album/5Kl0psNsQSWT5d62whDRUN

I got this on cd a while ago. (Probably wouldn't have if it'd been on Spotify.) It's good though. About what you'd expect, but good.

Hello.

DISC ONE - CITY: WORKS OF FICTION

Original Fictions

1. Voiceprint (Blind From The Facts)
2. Pagan
3. Mombasa
4. Tikal
5. In The City Of Red Dust
6. Rain
7. Ba-Ya D
8. Warriors
9. Out Of Adedara


DISC TWO - THE LIVING CITY

Live at Wintergarden 17 September 1989

1. Ituri
2. Alchemistry
3. Adedara Rising
4. Mashujaa
5. Paradise Now
6. Nightsky


DISC THREE - PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

Zones Of Feeling

1. Aerial View
2. Neon Night (Rain)
3. Red Rose Empire [Bass Clef Remix]
4. Streetfaxx
5. City Spot
6. Brigantes [808 State Remix]
7. Cityism Superdub
8. Elsewhere Is A Negative Mirror [Some Truths Remix]
9. Harambe
10. Ba-Ya Dub [No UFOs Remix]
11. Freeway
12. Cuba Libre
13. Metal Fatigue [patten Remix]
14. Midnight
15. Waterfront District
16. Favela
17. Emerald City
18. Cloud-Shaped Time

Due for release in June.

Oh nice, love that record!

The live material sounds interesting.

The new cover looks great but is a real departure from the original and this, the cover to the last reissue

http://img1.bdbphotos.com/images/orig/r/z/rzg66k703xm0zr6x.jpg?djet1p5k

well dang hotlink police

RFI: can anyone suggest other recent musics with the feel of Maarifa Street and Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street. Slow, dubby, semi-improvisatory, with heavy bass and textural electronics and organics wafting about? Most times I venture into this vicinity the result misses the mark, erring towards ambiance or freneticism.

not too recent anymore, but one of the better hassellish artists: http://www.discogs.com/Paul-Sch%C3%BCtze-Apart/release/175542

recently got Hassell's Fascinoma, which I always put off because I wasn't sure if I was interesting in hearing his 'standards' record, or hearing his horn without technology or effects. I was so wrong, this is one of his weirdest records. City is by far my least favorite Hassell album but the 2nd disc looks like it could be all right

was drawn to Michel Fahres' 'The Tubes' because of Hassell's playing on the 30 min title track but the whole album is good: http://coldbluemusic.com/pages/CB0024.html

Miguel Frasconi posted this to Soundcloud streaming-only the other day, live versions circa Possible Musics --

https://soundcloud.com/frasconimusic/sets/jon-hassell-group-1982
Live performance by the Jon Hassell Performance Group, Avignon, France, June 1982. John Hassell: trumpet; Michael Brook: processing, kalimba; J. A. Dino Dean: log drum, percussion; Miguel Frasconi: udu, glass, keyboard

Harmonizer (Greg Davis and Toby Aronson) had an EP in 2011 that traversed some of Hassell's fourth world terrains:

http://www.softwarelabel.net/shop/harmonizer-world-complete/

I'll second the Paul Schutze suggestion and recommend his "New Maps Of Hell" album. Also "Bloody Thief" by Shinjuku Thief on the same label - http://www.discogs.com/Shinjuku-Thief-Bloody-Tourist/release/124161

Extreme put out a lot of Fourth World type stuff but as mentioned, it's not recent.

Rapoon sometimes remind me of Hassell but they have a fairly daunting discography.

In related news, All Saints have a Hassell remix EP coming out (featuring Patten, Mordant Music and others). I haven't had time to listen to it yet and confess to being a bit wary. Will report back

wow that harmonizer ep is shameless, pretty brave fun Greg

http://jadeane.com/blog/wed-04232014-0805

i was correct to be wary.

I'll second the Paul Schutze suggestion and recommend his "New Maps Of Hell" album.

An absolute favorite of mine, still.