Jon Hassell

"Jon Hassell is more than a superb musician. He's an inventor of new forms of music – of new ideas of what music should be (…). [His] is an optimistic, global vision, one that hints not only at 'possible musics' but at 'possible futures'". So said Brian Eno, who, after "stealing" his idea of "Fourth-World Music" (a theft that would give rise to the acclaimed "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts", made together with David Byrne, but originally conceived as a four-handed collaboration), paid him full tribute in an interview back in 1986. Those were the years when the great American trumpeter had reached an exemplary maturity, not only artistically but also personally and "theoretically", on the back of a string of superb records, among which "Vernal Equinox", his 1977 debut on Lovely Music, remains to this day the unsurpassed peak.

But Hassell had reached that peak by no means painlessly.

We've already mentioned the "theft" affair, an episode that cut deep into the man's psyche, prompting him toward further meta-musical reflection, out of which came other essential works, including "Dream Theory In Malaya" (1981; in which the innovations of the masterpiece undergo a process of "radicalization") and "Aka-Dabari-Java: Magic Realism" (1983; slightly less inspired, but still fascinating).

Born in 1937 in Memphis, Tennessee, young Hassell grew up amid a melting pot in miniature, quickly falling in love with African-American music. Among his earliest loves were Stan Kenton and Miles Davis. Later came the shock – quite common at the time – of encountering the work of Stockhausen (especially the landmark "Gesang der Jünglinge" of 1956), whose courses he attended in Cologne in 1965, shoulder to shoulder with Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt, who would go on to found Can. Hassell himself could have joined the German band, but he turned down Schmidt's invitation, explaining that rock simply wasn't in his nature. He had other things on his mind, as became clear soon after, when, back home, he took part in the recording sessions for Terry Riley's "In C" (1967) – the "definitive" genesis of minimalism – and in some of LaMonte Young's work. In doing so, he proved to himself that he was more interested in moving beyond (though, it should be said, never entirely) certain Western musical conceptions. That his own work would need to be one of synthesis became clear to him after a trip to India, where he came into contact with the world of Indian music and the indefinable nuances of the "raga"*.

Under the guidance of Pandit Pran Nath (the great heir to the "Kirana" vocal tradition), in 1972 he began studying Indian singing, which exposed him to a "micro-world of connections". What struck him most was what has been described as "calligraphy in the air" — that almost supernatural ability Indian musicians have to build "shapes" in space out of pure sound.

The first five months of lessons were gruelling. Teacher and student were locked in constant exchange, a game of call-and-response and correction, through what has been called "aural/oral" communication. Pran Nath would perform exhausting vocal ragas, exploring the character of each single note so obsessively that listeners were driven into a genuine trance-like state.

Later, the master taught him to carry that sound over into the trumpet. Hassell ended up producing a sound remarkably close to that of blowing into a conch shell. It was something built out of desert space, out of "psychic" resonances, in which the use of ragas (regarded as akin to a pre-verbal form of knowledge) made it possible to fuse the "spiritual" and "physical" dimensions of Sound in a wholly new way, while also marking out the boundaries of a space governed by a state of grace. That grace is achieved by dissolving the divide between North and South — that is, between Western civilization, steeped in materialism and rationalism and heir to an incomplete musical tradition, and its Eastern counterpart (the South, referring to the lower half of the human body, the realm of instinct), which, unlike the West, has already managed to creatively reconcile the sensations that precede thought with the act of musical performance (something Western music ties too little, if at all, to the idea of improvisation as a release of the subconscious).

The American musician's move toward "Fourth World Music", however, also had a more "concrete" trigger, so to speak. After his marriage fell apart, Hassell met a woman of both African-American and Native American parentage — an encounter that brought him face to face with two distinct yet converging worlds within a single person. The next step was his engagement with Miles Davis's experiments, whose "On The Corner" (1972) he considers — rightly or wrongly — an album that already contained, in embryonic form, some of the defining elements of the synthesis he himself was striving for. His thinking then turned to the dichotomy between the "abstract" world of classical minimalism and the world of shadows, of elusive sensuality hiding behind the surface of things. An early experiment in this direction was the piece "Solid State" (1969), used as a "sound sculpture" in museums and galleries. It's a "block of sound" progressively eroded from within through successive "distillations". In short: on one side a "structure", on the other "ceaseless motion". Several characteristic elements of the raga are already present, such as the use of drones — hypnotic sustained tones. But what was truly pushing him toward "Vernal Equinox" were a few key refinements. First and foremost, the drones become electronic, while the percussion takes on a clearly Afro-Brazilian character (Hassell was after something more "undefinable" than the more obvious route of Indian-style drumming). What's missing is the so-called "solo line", which, naturally, was assigned to the trumpet and its electronic chiaroscuro (its timbre usually altered digitally). "Fourth World Music" was thus born.

None of this, however, would have been possible without another fundamental lesson. We're referring to the "universalism" of Don Cherry, undoubtedly one of the key waypoints on the road toward a musical system built on the accumulation of ever denser, ever more profoundly "mystical" musical material (see landmark records like "Mu", "Relativity Suite" and the more electric "Brown Rice").

Given all this, it seems only natural to view "Vernal Equinox" as a "monumental" work, precisely because of its ability to reflect, and at once absorb without distorting, such a wide range of sources and experiences. Its greatness lies exactly in the fact that it represents a "sonic revelation", whose expressive and imaginative power even its own creator may not have fully grasped at the time of its making and release.

For the universal fresco of his absolute masterpiece, Hassell brought in Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, architect of an intensely ritualistic and evocative sound. Other percussion (acoustic and otherwise) was entrusted to David Rosenboom, Miguel Frasconi, Nicolas Kilbourn and William Winant. "Special guests" – so to speak – were the "Night Creatures of Altamira", whose distant, barely distinguishable cries lend the sonic textures a deviant sense of "altered" mysticism. Alongside the "snake trumpet" (in some ways indebted to Don Cherry's "expanded" style), Hassell also handles the "scenic" dimension, so to speak, achieved through the discreet yet wonderfully evocative use of a Fender Rhodes, its sound often transcended by the ecstatic trails of the Serge Synthesizer.

The very first seconds of "Toucan Ocean" (3'56") already reveal the prodigious scale of the whole. A rhythmic wandering of congas sliding into the breaking of ocean waves on the shore. The choice is anything but random. As Hassell himself has said, his music can be seen as a continuous swaying between opposite poles, a constant moving in and out of an imaginary picture, in which – we might add – the colors are the sounds and the lines the spiritual dimensions of the mind. The trumpet's sinuous modulations conjure inner ghosts, in an empathetic soliloquy with that sickly, murky, humid timbre, which in turn opens up a meta-discourse on the immutability of music, digging into the folds of a concept very dear to LaMonte Young, but one that here becomes something else… perhaps an image, quite possibly an ocean of sensations amid the wonders of a spring equinox.

In "Viva Shona" (7'08"), by contrast, the trumpet coughs almost fearfully, unsure of itself. Its stretched-out hisses roam within a shifting arabesque, built from the intertwining and scattering of bells, mbira**, and tropical birds. True to his musical vision, Hassell sees in these rituals of the spirit a no-man's-land where the best "human" qualities of different worlds meet in a "Possible World", generator of "Possible Musics". But in this process of subtle refinement, he also ends up carving out a virgin space where the wild jungle meets the metaphorical jungle of industrialized cities — cities which, in their unchecked growth, have ended up completely burying any sense of "origins". Yet that sense, one way or another, always finds its way back, and the resulting process of "primitivization of the modern" (also explored by some of the finest new wave acts: Residents, Pere Ubu, Pop Group) leaves deep traces even in the musical depictions of a world teetering on the edge of collapse. It's a perfect cultural counterpart to what is happening within "Vernal Equinox".

Hassell's music, in fact, gives something of the sensation of a city suddenly discovering itself naked, "primitive" beneath its technological shell, as though eroded by an ancient wind blowing in from the Earth's most remote corners. These are the "unknowable aspects of the city" (to borrow the title and "artistic intent" of a landmark Joseph Jarman piece, from "Song For"), which suddenly surface, mixing with the monstrous sonic babel of traffic, the chilling indifference of passersby, or the neon lights bleeding across asphalt still glistening from recent rain. This conflict intensifies in "Hex" (6'29"), in the impossible embrace between Kilbourn's talking drum and the rattles of Vasconcelos and Rosenboom on one side, and Hassell's sly, "shamanic" trumpet on the other. It's remarkable to note how the techno-tribal impressionism later found on Talking Heads' "Remain In Light" (think of "Seen And Not Seen", for instance, with Eno in the lineup) is already fully formed and "realized" here.

In any case, what the Memphis trumpeter created is not simply another take on "world music". Rather, his music defines itself within the bounds of a daring experimentalism whose ultimate goal is the discovery of a Universal Sound, capable of conveying emotions and visions belonging to the "sacred" (precisely because rationally "unreachable") roots of the Earth. Yet in choosing technology as his binding agent, he ensures that within the refractions of those roots one also perceives "futurist" glimmers — a collision of past and future that, even in its attained state of grace, reveals the ineradicable presence of existential unease, through the electronic encoding of horror vacui (witness, in this regard, the almost indefinable backdrop against which the guiding lines of percussion and trumpet unfold).

This becomes even more evident in the two following tracks.

In “Blues Nile” (10’01”), the far-off torment of the trumpet, abandoned in emptiness, exhales distances like rivers dried up by the wind, while the sound bursts into a space/time diagram. The track's center of gravity – the static resonance of the Serge Synthesizer – hovers in an astral desert, made of arid anguish and ancestral silences. The feeling is one of a stratification that is more “psychological” than musical. Indeed, as one surrenders to the uninterrupted flow of the music, one ends up catching particularly “sinister” echoes in the synth's vibrating tremor, which digs around its own edges, penetrating toward the center of its unfolding. The multiphony of the “snake trumpet” also reveals how the notes slide into one another in an almost “impalpable” way, somewhat like in ragas, where careful listening can perceive an infinite mutation that contrasts with the apparent stillness of the musical surface. One thus notices an almost metaphysical connection between the pseudo-static real and the invisible forces that ceaselessly reshape it (not by chance did Hassell claim that “what is invisible is what surrounds us”).

Behind the placid embrace of percussion and trumpet on the title track (22’07”), an unbounded space opens up once again, in which the electronics take on a more “cosmic” character, while the trumpet's curves mimic the sinuous body of a dancer buried beneath the symphonic deluge of sunset. In the unresolved tension between sensuality and structure, between ancient and modern, the enchanted ecstasy of a “pure” sound is born, with no geography and no masters. This is music made of infinitesimal accents, probably still largely incomprehensible, since it is dictated by a need too distant in time: that of “scoring” the Soul (of the world and of humankind), but in such a way that the spaces between sound and silence are filled by a prodigious, hiss-humming twilight. In these 22 minutes of transcendental descriptivism, in which the trumpet reaches heights and timbres of terrifying lyricism, Hassell probably gives the fullest display of his towering musical achievement. And, paraphrasing some of his own statements, it truly feels like standing before a perfect beauty in a perfect place. If a sonic equivalent of Rilke's “Open” exists, then, here you will find one of its most magical and “absolute” incarnations.

In “Caracas Night September 11, 1975” (2’12”), finally, one hears a hailstorm of rattles and an insistent chirping of crickets sliding along the edge of night, while the trumpet intones to the September moon a poem now made only of inscrutable evanescences.

Notes

* Melodic foundation of Indian classical music. Each raga offers infinite possibilities for variation, and a skilled performer can extend their improvisations for over an hour. The correct performance of a raga should instill a precise mood in listeners, creating an aesthetic pleasure (rasa). Each raga must be distinct from the others; they are made up of a minimum of five and a maximum of twelve pitches, though the number can be increased through microtonal variations. The notes are arranged in ascending and descending melodic sequences, with certain notes emphasized more than others so as to establish a modal hierarchy. Some ragas employ obligatory ornamentations of one or more notes.

** A plucked idiophone instrument, made up of metal strips fixed to a wooden board and often mounted on a gourd (which acts as a “resonator”). Its melody is highly complex and is based on a series of tunings played simultaneously.

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30/10/2006