INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS & RELATED ARTICLES
Musician AUGUST 1990 - by Josef Woodard
WHITE MAN WITH A HORN
Third-World urban: Jon Hassell's possible musics
Jon Hassell's music pierces straight to the heart of those urbanites who sense a primal pulse but can't quite get a finger on it. His thickly basted trumpet textures dart and hover over open-ended vamps, as echoes of Third World music and '70s-era Miles Davis converge. Rhythms of vaguely funk pedigrees take off like rogue subway trains to exotic locales: Next Stop, Ghanaian Village.
City: Works Of Fiction is Hassell's debut for Brian Eno's Opal label, and the tenth record of his career. At once high-tech and earthy, ethereal and a bit edgy, this is oddly meditative music, equally appealing to hip-hop and experimental-ambient music fans. Typically, Hassell feels an allegiance to both camps.
"I've been thinking urban lately," explains the fifty-three-year-old composer, sitting in an office at Warner Bros, records. "There's a story of a guru who's up in the mountain meditating in a cave. He comes down to the marketplace, somebody bumps him and he's immediately angry. You can't stay up in the cave all the time."
Not that he ever has; Hassell's "fourth world" musical instincts have led him to India, Malaysia and Africa, among other places. But after grooving on Keith Levene's Malcolm X and Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back, he figured, "Why not look in my own backyard?
"[Rap is] very close to the African griot tradition," he notes, "the storytelling aspect of it, gossip mixed with ancestral info, the sacred and the profane in one bundle. It picks up the shards of the culture around you. If you're in the forest, it's stone and wood, and skin stretched across wood. In the Bed-Stuy forest, it's patches of James Brown and Grandmaster Flash and Chic. It's a mosaic-type construction. And I've actually been doing things like that for ten years."
You can look it up. A piece on Hassell's 1980 album Possible Musics, for instance, was constructed from a tape loop of Miles Davis. 1981's seductive Dream Theory In Malaya combined swirling, Indonesian-like patterns and enigmatic loops from the pre-sampling era. Aka-Darbari-Java (1983) utilized a Fairlight I to meld African drumming, a Les Baxter arrangement for Yma Sumac and Pygmy voices.
Hassell's resume is equally esoteric. Memphis-born, Eastman School of Music-bred, he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and made his record debut on Terry Riley's In C in 1968 - generally considered a blueprint for the minimalist movement. Hassell also performed in La Monte Young's House, a four-hour just-intonational epic - "'tuning up to time,' we used to call it." From that experience he emerged with Solid State, a sound sculpture piece presented in art museums and galleries. But the classical avant-garde didn't suit him.
"When I ran into [master singer] Pandit Pran Nath - thanks to Terry and La Monte - I began to learn about Indian music," he recalls. "And I started to question why art music was stiff and usually required white musicians with glasses playing with music stands onstage. There seemed to be a split - nighttime music and daytime music. Basically, I was trying to bring the dance-kinetic side out and give it equal time to the intellectual side."
On his 1977 album Vernal Equinox, Hassell's trumpet sound was altered, camouflaged behind various effects, a tone that has since become his signature. "One reason is that electronics are what's happening," he says simply. "For another, trumpet is a lonely instrument, so if I can use electronics to get two other guys to play with me, or allow it to be a chordal instrument, terrific." He laughs drily.
"I've always been on the alert for things which I thought countered the dichotomies of composer versus performer and sensual versus spiritual," says Hassell. "Miles Davis' On the Corner is one of those things in which I felt it all came together. It was unfair that he didn't have the same respect from the art world and intellectual community as Philip Glass, let's say. I say that to call attention to the fact that between American cultural life and European cultural life - though it's getting better - there's a very strong split between being able to call something high art and just fun. I think fun should always be a part of high art."
As a result, Hassell finds himself positioned somewhere between jazz, world music and New Music of his own devising. "I don't consider myself to be just an offshoot of one of Miles' limbs. If you think of Western music as being a vertical, harmonic music, then Indian raga is the ultimately horizontal music, where the art is in drawing the beautiful curve and making as many arabesques as you can. After I started thinking in those terms, I began paralleling myself with a harmonizer. When you add a fourth or a fifth and you're playinga raga,you automatically extend the harmonic vocabulary, going one more step up in the cycle of fifths. I'm getting strange, interesting combinations because I'm not approaching harmony from the standpoint of having a hand stretching out on a keyboard. I think of what I do as being diagonal, rather than horizontal or vertical."
But will City sell to a nation of millions? More than past works, the album does stand a fair chance of expanding Hassell's formidable cult status. And, fringe character though he might seem, Hassell is fairly savvy about the business of musical culture.
"There's a saying, 'When a pickpocket sees a saint, all he sees are his pockets'," Hassell observes. "Basically, all [record companies) are looking for is pockets. And I'm trying to make as much of a compromise as I can - I'm trying to give them pockets." Because? "I have this addiction to foolish luxuries like food and shelter."
Hassell may have found a home at Opal, the specialty label run by Eno under the Warner Bros, corporate umbrella. "To whatever extent [Eno's] name buys entrée, I think it's always well-used in terms of trying to make a wedge into the monolithic pop establishment." The pair first worked together on Hassell's Possible Musics and he senses in Eno a kindred spirit: "He was always trying to escape his white-bread upbringing."
Hassell's solo discography suggests a similarly logical evolution of variations on a theme. And, like Eno, he's also found time to collaborate with pop artists - Talking Heads, Daniel Lanois, Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian and Lloyd Cole, among others. Current plans include a solo album of unadorned trumpet. "I think it would be nice to step out from behind the Wizard of Oz curtain for once and show people what's actually going on before the electronic eye shadow is added.
"There's Quincy Jones on the wall," he says, pointing to a huge poster for Back On The Block. "I think his new record is the Sistine Chapel of rock music. He put everybody together and made associations. In fact, he made the griot-rap association in his notes. Bebop hip-hop, he calls it. That's the kind of thing one needs to do, to look beyond the superficial differences and find the common thread."
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