Brian Eno is MORE DARK THAN SHARK

INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES

Mojo SEPTEMBER 2021 - by David Sheppard

HORN OF PLENTY

Trumpeter, theorist and pioneering pan-global collagist, Jon Hassell left us on June 26.

It's an over-used epithet, but Jon Hassell was a true visionary, his music effectively a contemplation of possible cultural, philosophical and technological futures - an approach that foreshadowed and informed subsequent conceptions of what ambient and world music could be. According to long-time confrere Brian Eno, Hassell has "planted a strong and fertile seed whose fruits are still being gathered," and, indeed, his influence regularly manifests in contemporary electronica, sampledelica and anywhere that borderless bricolage composition is deployed to conjure sensuous, dream-like realms.

Born in Memphis in 1937, Hassell picked up his father's cornet and played in local big bands before attending the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he began exploring tape composition. Having avoided the draft by joining a Washington DC military band, in 1965 he went to Germany to study with avant-garde magus Karlheinz Stockhausen. He returned to the US having won a fellowship at the Centre for Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo, where he dabbled with Moog synthesizers and played on the debut recording of Terry Riley's proto-minimalist opus, In C. He would later perform in La Monte Young's Theatre Of Eternal Music in New York City and come under the influence of Indian classical singer Pandit Pran Nath, whose Kiranic voicings - alongside Miles Davis's amplified jazz-fusion aesthetic - would impact profoundly on Hassell's heavily ornamented, electronically harmonised trumpet style, once memorably dubbed "calligraphy in the air".

His debut album, 1978's Vernal Equinox, showcased Hassell's soi-disant 'Fourth World' approach, a melting pot of ethnic musics and advanced technology - his putative "coffee-coloured classical music of the future". A suitably-beguiled fellow cartographer of sonic terra nueva, Eno would collaborate with Hassell on 1980's sublime Fourth World Volume 1: Possible Musics and Hassell was also involved in Eno and David Byrne's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, but backed away as he considered his collaborators' take on global music too "touristic". He nonetheless contributed to Talking Heads' Remain In Light and Eno's On Land, early '80s entrees for cameos with Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian, Ry Cooder and Tears For Fears.

Hassell developed his Fourth World concept on 1982's Dream Theory In Malaya and 1986's Power Spot, while 1990's City: City: Works Of Fiction drew on hip-hop, 1994's Dressing For Pleasure featured contributions from estimable guests such as Flea and Greg Kurstin, and 2008's Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street was a deluxe ear-bath for ECM. His final recordings were 2018's Listening To Pictures and 2020's Seeing Through Sound, both influenced by the painterly technique of pentimento and equally critically lauded. In recent years Hassell was working on a book that expanded upon Fourth World principles, entitled The North And South Of You, An Erotic Worldview. After his passing, a statement by his family read, 'It was his great joy to be able to compose and produce music until the end... [he] will continue to play in the Fourth World.'

THE LEGACY

THE ALBUM Jon Hassell/Brian Eno: Fourth World Volume 1: Possible Musics

THE SOUND Hassell's heavily treated, spectral trumpet flickers across the dense, languorous percussion work of Nana Vasconcelos and Aylbe Dieaq, instantly conjuring an immersive, hallucinatory geography. Although credited as co-artist, Eno is effectively 'only" the producer here - his signature reverb washes and ambient effects nonetheless lending further exotic texture to the lush, tropical-narcotic dreamscapes.