Jon Hassell -- Classic Or Dud?

I have it -- I just don't think I ever noticed that. That's a fantastic description of the record, btw.

I'd forgotten Richard Horowitz was on Surgeon... have you heard Horowitz & Sussan Deihim's Azax Attra : Desert Equations? that is one classic record, definitely related to the fourth world series...

just found this interview online:

RH: I met Paul thanks to Brion Gysin...  I had been working on my music in between Paris and Morocco since 1969 when I received my first infusion of magnetic ecstatic blood thunder and I knew I was on to something...

http://www.richardhorowitz.com/press2.shtml

wow, she sings on Eros as well, RS, let me know if you want to trade (all these things are way out of print)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00009LI7U/qid%3D1116131185/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/103-2848508-8628646

I don't like that tree painting on the package. If it's meant to be celebratory of life energy and sexuality and so forth, for me it just comes across as grotesque (and something about the stylized figures turns me off too). A piece of the 60s better left in that era.

after the first two weeks with Maarifa I just went back through the catalog and listened to the first five albums like crazy... I hear rumors that Dream Theory is getting reissued. hope so.

weird that Eno, Budd and Hassell all have new albums out within months of each other. Budd & Guthrie's Mysterious Skin is particularly good.

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.

he was a genius, such a rich catalog.

Hadn't heard *The Living City* before. Some deep weirdness going on in there. The bassline on the opening track is like having a fly in a tooth cavity.