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Jon Hassell

COMPOSER/TRUMPETER Jon Hassell is the visionary creator of a style of music he describes as Fourth World, a mysterious, unique hybrid of music both ancient and digital, composed and improvised, Eastern and Western.

After composition studies and university degrees in the USA, he went to Europe to study electronic and serial music with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Several years later, he returned to New York where his first recordings were made with minimalist masters LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, through whom he met the Hindustani raga master, Pandit Pran Nath, and embarked on a lifelong quest to transmute his teacher's Kirana vocal mastery into a new trumpet sound and style.

In the last two decades, he has recorded 11 highly influential, category-defying solo albums which have, over the years, become so widely appropriated that many of their innovations have become woven anonymously into the texture of contemporary music high and low.

While the liner notes for his 1983 record Aka-Darbari-Java/Magic Realism describe a technology-tradition balance resulting in a "'coffee-colored' classical music of the future", it was innovators in the field of pop such as Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel who—after collaborations with Hassell—steered the Fourth World idea into the avant-pop sphere where it has since evolved into myriad forms of "electronica", "new age", and "world music."

Notable concert appearances have included The Next Wave at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Serious Fun at Lincoln Center, La Foret Museum in Tokyo, the Berlin Jazz Festival, the Paris Biennale, a Japan tour with Farafina, a traditional group of drummers and dancers from Burkina Faso and a spectacular appearance with eight Moroccan tribal groups at Expo 92 in Seville to celebrate Moroccan Independence Day. A European tour in November 1997 included sold-out performances at L'Opera de Nice and Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

Theatrical scores include Sulla Strada, created for the Venice Biennale, and Zangezi, directed by Peter Sellars. He has collaborated on presentations by fashion avant-gardists Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo and for choreographic works by Merce Cunningham and the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. The Kronos Quartet commissioned and recorded his 'Pano da Costa'. In 1996 the Netherlands Dance Theater commissioned Lurch—a major, evening-length piece choreographed by Australian dance maverick Gideon Obarzanek to the music of Hassell, arranged and remixed for performance by two onstage DJs. Jon both appeared in, and composed the score to the Wim Wenders' film, The Million Dollar Hotel, in collaboration with Bono, Daniel Lanois, and Brian Eno.

His last album, Fascinoma, produced by Ry Cooder, opened a surprising new chapter in Hassell's recording career.

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38
Year in Review

Chris May’s Best Releases Of 2020

Read "Chris May’s Best Releases Of 2020" reviewed by Chris May


Not the best year for live gigs in London, but Dele Sosimi's Afrobeat Orchestra just made it under the wire, lighting up the Jazz Cafe in late January. Rather like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Sosimi's band has form as an incubator of young talent. A recent star in the making was trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi, who has since been picked up by Ezra Collective and by drummer and bandleader Moses Boyd. Tonight's new name to watch was singer Sahra Gure. Topmost ...

9
Album Review

Jon Hassell: Seeing Through Sound: Pentimento Volume Two

Read "Seeing Through Sound: Pentimento Volume Two" reviewed by Mark Sullivan


Visionary trumpeter-composer Jon Hassell presents another gift from his late career. The third release on his own Ndeya label, it follows the re-release of his debut album Vernal Equinox (Ndeya, 2020) and is a sequel to Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) (Ndeya, 2018). The structure is a bit different, still eight tracks, but organized as a series of Scenes. The personnel is more diverse as well. In addition to a core group of Rick Cox (electric guitar, bass clarinet, ...

25
Album Review

Jon Hassell: Seeing Through Sound: Pentimento Volume Two

Read "Seeing Through Sound: Pentimento Volume Two" reviewed by Chris May


By the time even the most radical musicians reach their ninth decade, few are any longer making cutting-edge work. But trumpeter, electronicist and composer Jon Hassell, a collaborator with Terry Riley and La Monte Young in the 1960s and the creator of Fourth World music in the 1970s, remains as venturesome as ever. Much of Seeing Through Sound: Pentimento Volume Two was recorded during the sessions for Hassell's lustrous Listening To Pictures: Pentimento Volume One (Ndeya, 2018). ...

7
Reassessing

Vernal Equinox

Read "Vernal Equinox" reviewed by Doug Collette


In making Vernal Equinox available on vinyl for the first time in forty-two years and on CD for the first time in three decades, Jon Hassell's 1977 album has been fully remastered for its updated release on the artist's own Ndeya label. This first commercially released work by Hassell was, by many accounts, an early glimpse into a sound that would later go on to be known as 'Fourth World,' a mix of electronics, jazz, classical Indian music field recordings ...

36
Interview

Jon Hassell: Words with the Shaman

Read "Jon Hassell: Words with the Shaman" reviewed by Chris May


Jon Hassell is best known as the creator of Fourth World music, an acoustic-electronic blend of jazz, minimalism, drone, ambient, traditional African and Asian instruments and harmolodic signatures. Hassell has defined Fourth World as “serious music with transcultural appeal and a smile." He unveiled the concept on his debut album, Vernal Equinox (Lovely Records), in 1977. In March 2020, Hassell reissued Vernal Equinox on his own Ndeya Records label. Hassell's roots go back to ...

7
Album Review

Jon Hassell: Vernal Equinox

Read "Vernal Equinox" reviewed by Mark Sullivan


Visionary trumpeter-composer Jon Hassell is one of the architects of what has come to be called World Music: his own preferred term is Fourth World, which he described as “a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques." Vernal Equinox was his first commercial album release, originally on Lovely Music in 1977. The second release on Hassell's own Ndeya label—following the 2018 Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)—this reissue makes the album available on vinyl ...

7
Album Review

Jon Hassell / Farafina: Flash Of The Spirit

Read "Flash Of The Spirit" reviewed by Chris May


The trumpeter and keyboard player Jon Hassell is often labelled a practitioner of ambient music. This is a misconstruction resulting mainly from Hassell's encounters with Brian Eno, who is widely perceived as ambient's originator. Hassell's oeuvre, a technologically enabled fusion of western and non-western musics which he calls Fourth World, is a wholly different kettle of fish. Eno defines ambient as “music that does not demand the listener's attention but rewards such attention if it is given." The ...

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1

Book / Magazine

Holiday Gift Idea: New Book Features Kronos Quartet, Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakatmoto, Arvo Pärt, Jon Hassell, Michael Price And The Art Ensemble Of Chicago

Holiday Gift Idea: New Book Features Kronos Quartet, Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakatmoto, Arvo Pärt, Jon Hassell, Michael Price And The Art Ensemble Of Chicago

Source: All About Jazz

The Moderns vol.2 explores the world’s great avant-garde artists. BADD PRESS announces the launch of The Moderns vol. 2, the second installment of a series dedicated to the world’s great avant-garde artists. Featuring more than 200 reviews and interviews, the book introduces readers to established and emerging music leaders from around the world. “The first volume was so warmly received,” says author Kevin Press. “Since its publication at the beginning of this year, I’ve been sent music from all over ...

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Website

Download Three Free MP3s by Composer / Trumpeter Jon Hassell

Download Three Free MP3s by Composer / Trumpeter Jon Hassell

Source: All About Jazz

Learn more about Jon Hassell, then download three free tracks (see below), including one from his latest release Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street on ECM Records. Enjoy! About Jon Hassell Composer/trumpeter Jon Hassell is the visionary creator of a style of music he describes as Fourth World, a mysterious, unique hybrid of music both ancient and digital, composed and improvised, Eastern and Western. In the last two decades, his connoisseur recordings, built around ...

198

Interview

Trumpeter/Composer Jon Hassell Interviewed at AAJ... And Much, Much More!

Trumpeter/Composer Jon Hassell Interviewed at AAJ... And Much, Much More!

Source: All About Jazz

He may well be one of the most insidious influences in modern music. Trumpeter, composer and deep thinker Jon Hassell may not have the same name recognition as, say, Miles Davis, but his unmistakable approach to music--he calls it Fourth World music--has affected musicians around the globe, ranging from now friend/co-conspirator Brian Eno, British post-rock crooner David Sylvian and singer/songwriter Tim Elsenburg (aka Sweet Billy Pilgrim), to jazz-centric artists including trumpeters Arve Henriksen, Nils Petter Molvær and Matthias Eick, as ...

155

Birthday

Jazz Musician of the Day: Jon Hassell

Jazz Musician of the Day: Jon Hassell

Source: Michael Ricci

All About Jazz is celebrating Jon Hassell's birthday today!

JAZZ MUSICIAN OF THE DAY Jon Hassell

Composer/trumpeter Jon Hassell is the visionary creator of a style of music he describes as Fourth World, a mysterious, unique hybrid of music both ancient and digital, composed and improvised, Eastern and Western. In the last two decades... more

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Put AAJ's Musician of the ...

376

Event

Jon Hassell & Maarifa Street with Dhafer Youssef at Royce Hall (LA) on February 13th

Jon Hassell & Maarifa Street with Dhafer Youssef at Royce Hall (LA) on February 13th

Source: All About Jazz

Jon Hassell Brings his Unclassifiable Music to Royce Hall on Feb. 13 as Part of his First U.S. tour in Twenty Years. On the heels of his newest album release, Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street, Jon Hassell brings his unclassifiable musical colors and a unique electro-acoustic ensemble, with special guest Tunisian vocalist and oud player Dhafer Youssef, to Royce Hall on Feb. 13 as part of his first U.S. tour in two decades. With ...

"Almost all of the musicians I meet at the moment seem to regard Jon Hassell as one of the God-like geniuses of contemporary music." —David Toop, The Wire

"Work of quite extraordinary beauty... This pan-cultural music swirls and rises like smoke... Hassell blends his experiences in such a way that the components—African drumming, Indian microtonality, Balinese tranquility-make a new palette while forfeiting none of the individual colors." —LONDON TIMES

"Extraordinary, otherworldly music..." —ROLLING STONE

Arne Hiorth
flugelhorn
Kit Watkins
multi-instrumentalist
Fletcher McKenzie
guitar, electric

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Music

Last Night the Moon Came

From: Last Night The Moon Came...
By Jon Hassell

Maarifa Street

From: Maarifa Street: Magic Realism 2
By Jon Hassell

Power Spot

From: Power Spot
By Jon Hassell

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