JON HASSELL - Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street

Jon Hassell certainly has nothing left to prove to anyone, if only for having conceived fourth-world music, of which "Vernal Equinox" and "Dream Theory In Malaya" are, to put it mildly, towering representations.

That said, faced nowadays with a work that's essentially commendable even if not entirely convincing, there's nothing stopping us from calling this a "minor" period for the Memphis-born musician. Sure, hearing the sound of that trumpet (that sound full of wind and dust, crawling and intoxicated with distance) still has quite an effect, but it's in the unfolding of ideas that the man often gets lost in longueurs or in drapery lacking any clear direction.

After all, the previous "Fascinoma" and "Maarifa Street: Magic Realism 2" had already revealed a period of stagnation, though, to be fair, on this "Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In the Street", Jon shows he has, at least, reclaimed his true voice, as confirmed, after a couple of lukewarm tracks (the shadowy "Aurora" and the spectres stirring the twilight of "Time and Place"), by the restless shadows of "Abu Gil", an ostinato of strings, scattered touches of electric piano and deformed/deforming wah-wah.

Essentially crepuscular, the music finds, in the moments when the ambient element collides with liquid electric-jazz textures, a point of contact with the ethereal trajectories of the early Weather Report (take, for instance, "Blue Period"), skirting pure, inconclusive evanescence in the airy vertigo of the title track and in the brief sketch of "Scintilla".

Still alternating the right vibrations with exhalations of lyricism that's unassuming yet rather mannered ("Courtais", "Northline"), the album nonetheless finds a well-judged close in "Light On Water", with the trumpet stretching out its lament over a discreet percussive carpet, pierced here and there by bubbles of electric piano.

Pleasant but not essential.

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06/11/2009