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
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Year in Review
Album Review
- Seeing Through Sound: Pentimento Volume Two by Mark Sullivan
- Seeing Through Sound: Pentimento Volume Two by Chris May
Reassessing
Interview
Album Review
- Vernal Equinox by Mark Sullivan
- Flash Of The Spirit by Chris May
- Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume one) by Mark Sullivan
- Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume one) by Chris May
- Dream Theory In Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two by Chris May
December 11, 2018
Holiday Gift Idea: New Book Features Kronos Quartet, Brian Eno, Ryuichi...
May 06, 2009
Download Three Free MP3s by Composer / Trumpeter Jon Hassell
April 30, 2009
Trumpeter/Composer Jon Hassell Interviewed at AAJ... And Much, Much...
March 22, 2009
Jazz Musician of the Day: Jon Hassell
February 11, 2009
Jon Hassell & Maarifa Street with Dhafer Youssef at Royce Hall (LA) on...
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
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