Jon Hassell - Writings on the transparent membrane

Intoxicating breath

It's a bit galling to admit it, but it was probably only with “The Million Dollar Hotel”, the 1999 film by Wim Wenders, that Jon Hassell, a trumpeter born in 1937, reached a truly wide audience with his music.

Some already knew him, some (like myself) only then opened a chapter of listening and reflection, and others were, quite rightly, simply grazed by the apparition: but probably anyone who's heard the cobbled-together “Satellite of Love” sung by Milla Jovovich can recall the trumpet sound that peeks out between one verse and the next, which, with its intimate and fragile tone, lends a higher meaning to the whole performance. That was Jon Hassell, enlisted by Wenders for the film's soundtrack alongside a stellar, eclectic lineup of musicians (Bill Frisell, Bono, The Edge, Daniel Lanois), and immortalized in the film with a cameo in which he plays a Chet Baker-esque trumpeter, a somewhat kitsch figure playing alone in a room overflowing with candles. On the soundtrack CD, Hassell's world reveals itself more deeply: among the other tracks is his “Amsterdam Blues” – more an experience than a piece of music, so literally “atmospheric” that it commands attention in a way no shouted or over-compressed track ever could.

It's easy to find yourself looking around, as if trying to work out whether time has really slowed its course, or whether the air itself has grown denser, or whether our room has suddenly been filled with a kind of liquid fog. A fog we might assume to be intoxicating, which brings us to the more philosophical side of Hassell: “Intoxication is the fourth primary need, alongside sex, hunger and thirst. Intoxication is as essential as any of the other three; it's a primary need, expressed in various ways – some sanctioned by law, others not” (from “There was no avant garde”, an interview by Marcus Boon: most of the quotes I cite come from the vast collection of writings on Hassell available at www.jonhassell.com).

But, it's worth specifying, Hassell is actually quite far removed from the hedonistic or maudit spirit that might seem to come through here, whether we're talking about intoxicating breath as a musical metaphor or the actual taking of drugs. His sound – flexible enough to accommodate the most varied artistic collaborations – and his philosophy – intense, yet easily co-opted and waved around by new age epigones – both hold the depth of an entire life, the rigor of a personal mission that is difficult to sum up without oversimplifying. Digging into his biography doesn't reveal the whole of the man, but it helps.

Hassell, then, was born in Tennessee in '37, where he soon picked up the trumpet and began listening to jazz; a white man in a backward Tennessee, he loved Black music and loved the way Black musicians played his instrument (later on, Miles Davis would become his favorite). After finishing music school, he was still searching for new stimuli, and his growth as an artist was shaped by at least three more major influences: right after graduating, two years spent in Germany with Karlheinz Stockhausen, then the New York avant-garde scene of future minimalists La Monte Young and Terry Riley, and finally his encounter with the Indian raga master Pandit Pran Nath. It's this last encounter that would definitively shape the trumpeter's path. "Pandit would sing me a phrase from a raga and I would try to repeat it on trumpet, and since raga is a genre built on curvilinear movements, it basically came down to drawing shapes": the shapes and curves of raga were a revelation for Hassell, who discovered how very different musical idioms (jazz, the avant-garde, Pran Nath's music) could become simple subsets of something much larger, exactly as various raga families are themselves subsets within Indian music.

Having thus positioned himself at the very root of the musical gesture, prior to the forking-off of genres and styles, Hassell discovered that playing music essentially comes down to one single, simple gesture: the shaping of forms. It's what he himself called "calligraphy in the air," a metaphor he coined that so perfectly describes his style.

Calligraphy and microgroove

With the idea in mind of a music where improvisation would play an important role, yet one that was neither strictly jazz nor raga, in 1977 Hassell built his first solo work, Vernal Equinox. The language here is already mastered and fully conscious, practically definitive in its core premises. A long process of reflection had delivered to the microphones a mature artist (he was forty) ready to walk down a path he had carefully prepared. Some pieces of the puzzle obviously come from India: a percussive backdrop with a soloist up front, but to avoid slipping into mere imitation (even though in the 1970s this would already have counted as remarkable world music ante litteram), he doesn't turn to Indian percussion, but rather South American, and then African. And that's not all: as a decisive ingredient, part of the background is entrusted to electronics, sampled sounds and field recordings.

Above all this, his trumpet sound intones the ragas he learned from Pran Nath, a vocal, human sound, yet already heavily filtered through electroacoustic effects, pioneered by Davis a few years earlier but explored even further by Hassell, who alongside the standard echoes and reverbs discovers the harmonizer (an instant generator of parallel-interval countermelody) that would become one of his trademarks.

The balance remains apparently similar on the following record, Earthquake Island (1978), which remains interesting mostly for the sheer number of musical personalities who joined the project: Nana Vasconcelos on percussion, Badal Roy on tabla, Miroslav Vitous on bass, Dom Um Romao on bass. The star-studded cast doesn't disappoint, but it perhaps pulls the project a bit toward incongruous directions; Hassell himself isn't always convincing, letting himself get carried away by certain synth sounds hovering between ambient and fusion. In hindsight, he would admit to having made a record that was "too jazz."

In 1980 another strong personality entered the picture, and in his own way helped bring the project back into focus. That would be Brian Eno, with whom Hassell created his second masterpiece, Possible Musics: Fourth World Vol. 1, in which he further develops his music and his philosophy. At this point one of his explicit goals is to make music "that no one is able to conceive of," music that vertically integrates so many influences that it can't be explicitly tied to any one country or genre. This is Fourth World music, an imaginary realm where North and South collapse into each other, where rationality and physicality, coldness and warmth find points of fusion, or else zones of friction that grate with meaning. Hassell's Fourth World is a political, philosophical, and musical concept, all at once and without interruption.

On the record, Eno supplies crooked electronic hums, and above all controls the long-interval reverse delays, which lose the appearance of ordinary "echoes" because they come back inverted after several seconds, essentially weaving themselves into the fabric of the trumpet: Hassell knows how to recognize these shapes and knows how to respond to them in real time, drawing on Pran Nath's lesson.

Fourth World is the "essential" record according to various publications, seminal because it lights the fuse for the whole world music phenomenon, and later new age. Eno himself would become a great ambassador of the gospel, perhaps claiming a bit too much credit for its paternity, passing it on for instance to David Byrne on "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" (though Hassell had already passed through the ranks of Talking Heads). From there Peter Gabriel too would draw heavily, as would many others, more or less inspired.

For his part, Hassell continues his journey with the equally valid Fourth World Vol. 2: Dream Theory In Malaya (1981), with Eno still present but more in the background. Starting from a stunning incipit (a spreading cascade of trumpet glitches and drops that could easily pass for 2000s-style digital editing), the trumpeter shows a firmly established stylistic signature, but doesn't want to overdo it, doesn't want to claim the unlikely title of "Mr. Fourth World": he knows that when ideas become too fixed, "they no longer let the light in, and end up dying."

Aki Darbari Java: Magic Realism (1983) indeed introduces a new shade to his thinking, once again aiming at an oxymoron, a "magic realism" built on many opposing cultural components. In the cauldron simmers a techno-shamanic brew: on "Aki Darbari Java" the complexity of the electronic figures churning in the background is impressive, thoroughly modern, impossible to classify. How to define these labyrinthine sonic agglomerations, repeating with an unsettling mechanical quality, softened and made meaningful only by the emergence of the trumpet's voice? One might ask: where do they come from, what's inside them? Literally everything, as it turns out: thanks to Daniel Lanois's production, the magic potion blends field-recorded voices of pygmies, Hollywood-style orchestrations à la Les Baxter, samples of Yma Sumac's voice, alongside live-played percussion, interspersed with further layers of electronics.

The Forest and the City

Throughout the 1980s, Hassell continued working on his conception of mysticism. Always wary whenever the specter of cliché loomed, he pursued a vision of "spirituality" that didn't necessarily mean "meditation" or "isolation." "I learned that being spiritual means a lot more than surrounding yourself with incense and chanting: it has something to do with a graceful way of moving through the world." And from here, once again, common sense collapses: moving through the world in a spiritual way is the same thing whether you're wandering through a modern city or hunting in the jungle: in both cases it comes down to a skill endowed with grace. When the European label ECM reached out to him (given the obvious kindred spirit) to propose producing a new album, the result was Power Spot (1986), namely the point at which human action "achieves balance and energy at the same time."

The marriage with ECM leads to a further redefinition of his sound: compared to the "Fourth World" records, the sound of this album is that of a more polished, more accessible production, an aspect that makes Power Spot a good starting point for anyone wanting to get to know Hassell without getting burned by his more esoteric records. But perhaps the ECM sound is indeed a bit too reassuring (it's also missing the shredded, compressed sonorities of Magic Realism), and the partnership with the label lasts just a single album.

1987 gives birth to The Surgeon Of The Nightsky Restores Dead Things By The Power Of Sound: live recordings of tracks named after the (mostly European) cities they were taped in. The band is more or less the same one from Power Spot, the "The Jon Hassell Group" (among others, JA Deane, Jean Philipe Rykiel, Michael Brook, Richard Horowitz), with whom he sets off on a world tour.

The following year, Flash Of the Spirit (1988) represents an almost contradictory attempt: by bringing in the Farafina collective, which unites percussionists and dancers from Burkina Faso, Hassell's new project this time takes on a clear geographic connotation. "It's much more interesting to me to see an African band discover electronics than a Western band discover African music": it's no secret that, in sketching the contours of the Fourth World, the South represents for Hassell the most fascinating part, the one still shrouded in mystery but also the most human (hence the dream of a "coffee-colored classical music of the future").

But it would be too easy to simply surrender to exoticism, and indeed with the Nineties Hassell inaugurates, by way of contrast, an "urban" phase that grows increasingly surprising as it unfolds. City: Works Of Fiction (1990) is a masterpiece. The lineup now features electric guitar but above all a distinctly groovy electric bass, and alongside the usual percussion comes the sampler, used in its mode closest to hip-hop (beats, breaks and other genre tropes).

Hip-hop, seen as yet another Western propagation of the African spirit, becomes for Hassell another power-spot in which to magnify the points of crisis of his "futuristic primitivism". Once again the magical glue is his instrumental voice, ever the same yet ever different, a shape-shifting figure, always captivating, capable of lending coherence to the ever-changing backdrops against which it stands out. Nils Petter Molvaer, his current musical heir, is born here - and, to be unkind about it, almost entirely resolved - within this very record.

Pressing on with his technological fascination: Voiceprint (1990) features electro remixes courtesy of 808 State. But four years later comes, above all, Dressing For Pleasure (1994), almost scandalous in how wholeheartedly it embraces new sounds and new beats. The army of producers enlisted for the album (not to mention the cast of guest musicians, from Kenny Garrett to Brain of Primus to Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers) coalesces under the name Bluescreen. And "bluescreen" is no random choice: it's a stimulating metaphor for describing audio sampling. In film and TV, the technique involves filming an actor against a monochrome blue background, which can then be replaced in post-production with any other kind of backdrop. Similarly, in music, through sampling, a fragment is isolated, cut from its context and overlaid onto new backgrounds (witness, right from the album's first track, John McLaughlin's wah-wah guitar lifted directly from Miles Davis's "Live Evil").

Unfortunately, much like its video counterpart, Hassell's bluescreen also shows signs of aging, the way certain cinematic effects now make a flying superhero look a bit too crudely "cut out" against the background. Dressing For Pleasure unluckily finds itself at the roots of groovy loop-based lounge-jazz (see: acid jazz, or more recently nu-jazz) and, while it probably represents a high point of the genre, in certain moments of overenthusiastic sample-triggering it doesn't fully redeem itself.

Taking a breath

Pause. Cleanse. For Fascinoma (1999) Hassell finds a small church in Santa Barbara, California, and sets himself up with a group of trusted musicians (including Ry Cooder) in front of a single high-quality stereo microphone. No electronics, no filters or effects, just a "glorious" ambient resonance, a weight of beauty that clings to the very first note played. This leads Hassell to draw on a broader-than-usual menu, even including "covers", such as "Nature Boy" (by Eden Ahbez) or "Caravan" (by Duke Ellington).

After Fascinoma, countless collaborations follow. Impossible to list them all (from Wenders to Howie B, from Lightwave to Ani Di Franco) - perhaps a touch of disorientation, but then back on track: Maarifa Street/Magic Realism 2 (2005) is a live album, where drums, electronic percussion, digital clusters, synthesizer beds (always at risk of excess) and even, albeit sparingly, the good old harmonizer all reappear.

If the previous Fascinoma and Maarifa Street: Magic Realism 2 had highlighted a phase of stagnation, on Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street (2009) Hassell proves he has, at least, reclaimed his true voice, as confirmed - after a couple of subdued tracks (the shadowy "Aurora" and the spectres stirring in the twilight of "Time and Place") - by the restless shadows of "Abu Gil", with its string ostinato, scattered touches of electric piano and warping wah-wah.

Essentially crepuscular, the music finds, in the moments where the ambient element collides with liquid electric-jazz textures, a point of contact with the ethereal trajectories of early Weather Report (see, for example, "Blue Period"), brushing against pure evanescence in the airy vertigo of the title track and in the sketch of "Scintilla". Continuing to alternate well-judged vibrations with exhalations of understated, rather conventional lyricism ("Courtais", "Northline"), the record nonetheless finds a fitting close in "Light On Water", with the trumpet stretching out its lament over a discreet percussive bed, pierced here and there by bubbles of electric piano.

Dreaming

Nine years later, it's "Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)", the first release on his new label Ndeya, that once again sends the Maestro's metaphysical creativity soaring to stratospheric heights. Introduced by the magnificent single "Dreaming", the album owes its synesthetic title to the peculiar compositional process behind it, which Hassell sums up with one of his pithy metaphors: "I started seeing (or was that hearing?) the music we were working on in the studio in terms of a painting with layers and touch-ups and start-overs with new layers that get erased in places that let the underlying pattern come to the top and be seen (or heard)". The visual-pictorial element is therefore not the starting point (think of Morton Feldman's compositions inspired by Rothko's paintings), but the destination: Hassell doesn't comment on images, he creates them with his own hand, layering brushstroke upon brushstroke, only to then scrape them away and reassemble them, until arriving at an abstract jumble of colors - saturated here, faded there, elsewhere nearly transparent. The result is his most sophisticated and futuristic canvas yet, one that is ultimately freed from the already-loose dictates of fourth-world aesthetics: a jazz-noise-ambient never so thick with percussive halos, scarcely "ethnic" in its almost robotic nature, closer to sound design for an art gallery than to an African sunset.

It's a work that, at least in part, forsakes that timeless allure which has always set him apart (could this be the "pentimento" flaunted in the subtitle?) in order to plunge into a sonic fabric firmly anchored in the present: Hassell seems almost to want to test himself against the most advanced forms of sound processing. Not to challenge them, but to study them, as the visionary anthropologist he has always been.

The thought that such fresh music was conceived by an eighty-one-year-old is astonishing, and should at the very least give pause to the many champions of electro-fluff peddled as the New Gospel.

Seeing through sound. Two years after the excellent Listening To Pictures, which marked his return after a nine-year hiatus, Jon Hassell's sonic journey continues along the synesthetic path of his new compositional approach, enriched by a new volume in the "Pentimento" series – Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) – which confirms and expands the fertile perspective of a contemporary, revitalized vision of his alchemical fourth world.

Feeding the eight drifting movements of this new, bewitching trajectory through liquid landscapes that condense past instances and splinters of the future into an eternal present, are the same logic and the same elements that structured its remarkable predecessor. Dense, dark synthetic vapors and rhythmic textures of shifting intensity/consistency are the substrate from which oblique, decomposed and remodulated resonances continue to emerge, the essential trademark of the Hasselian universe. Crystallized into increasingly knowing and expansive sequences, once again devoid of traceable boundaries and identifiable domains, the transcendent inspiration of the Memphis trumpeter paints a multiform scenario in which vivid hues and deconstructed, overlapping marks intertwine, giving rise to an overwhelming, swirling, magnetic imaginary.

The cornerstones of the journey are the two extended sonic excursions placed at the opening and close of the record, precious bookends of a multifaceted exploration that begins with the hypnotic, creeping textures of the restless "Fearless" and ends in the nervous, jagged progress of "Timeless", highlighting a circularity whose persistent element lies in its cosmic shades. Nestled between these two poles is a sequence of visionary flashes that move between a sinuous epic from which the unmistakable, elaborate voice of the trumpet soars more markedly ("Moons Of Titan", "Lunar"), foggy spectral interludes ("Unknown Wish", "Cool Down Coda") and abstractions with Davis-like echoes studded with luminous glitches ("Delicado", "Reykjavik"). True to his constant search for an inclusive, other dimension, Hassell gives us a new piece of a possible music that never stops enchanting us with the grace with which it reveals itself to our senses.

It will remain the final legacy of the great trumpeter, who passed away on June 26, 2021 of natural causes, at the age of 84.

Jon Hassell was a rare artist, capable of revealing something new every time you returned to look at him. I have used many words but, deliberately, little musical description. The caveat was given by Hassell himself, warning of the risks of what he called wordism. "Words are written on a transparent film. The experiences they refer to take place, seamlessly, behind the surface of the film. Words are like digital samples of analog experience. If we focus on the words written on the film, the experience goes out of focus, just as when, focusing on an insect stuck to the car windshield, we can no longer see the details of the road ahead. Preverbal or primitive experience takes place entirely regardless of this film. And the more homo sapiens sinks into the realm of symbols, the more the membrane connecting things and symbols atrophies."

Let us then dissolve words into intoxicating mists like that of "Amsterdam Blues", into a music that guides and confounds us with grace, through the city-forests of our (fourth) world.

Contributions by Francesco Nunziata ("Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street"), Ossydiana Speri ("Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)"), Peppe Trotta ("Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)")

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