Originally published in Arthur No. 18 (Sept. 2005)

For decades, Jon Hassell has been making sensual,Technicolor music for a new world. John Payne catches up with the composer, trumpeter, gourmand, intellectual and hedonist. Photography by W. T. Nelson.

Jon Hassell is a wildly disciplined blurrer of boundaries. Does he write “serious” music? Does he play “jazz”? Is he an electronic skullscratcher? Does he make earth music for an ethnologically melting-down new world society? Does he in fact “rock”? And what does nouvelle cuisine have to do with it? Does it matter? Yes, it does. No, not at all.

Memphis-born and Stockhausen and Eastman School-trained, Hassell has collaborated with every kind of musician and artist, including Brian Eno; Farafina, a traditional ensemble of drummers and dancers from Burkina Faso; director Peter Sellars; fashion designers Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo; choreographers Merce Cunningham and Alvin Ailey, the Kronos Quartet and David Sylvian; Bjork and Ani Di Franco, even. He’s also the inventor of”Fourth World,” a hugely influential composed and improvised music that hybridizes African-derived polyrhythms, Indian microtonality and Balinese sonorities, smelted through recombinant aesthetics made possible by digital technology. On occasion, he’s moved to play his trumpet absolutely straight. Never say never, he’d say, if I didn’t just say it for him.

Fourth World is not just a musical style but a way of viewing life, or “a permanent Technicolor oasis in my spirit,” as he has called it. And that well describes the effect of his latest disc, the just-out Maarifa Street (Magical Realism 2) on his own Nyen label. A deconstruction/reconstruction of several pieces he’s either released or performed in the past, engineered and co-conceived by his producer/bandmate, bassist Peter Freeman, Maarifa is…. well, it’s music that, hearing it, one wants never to end: seven cuts of blissfully spacious yet deeply physically satisfying dubby globe-groove, familiar in tone to old fans via Hassell’s raga-inspired electronically harmonized horn lines tracing see-thru lacerie across the stars. Maarifa Street is incredibly seductive: its fragrant sound structures soothe and stimulate like a soak in ambrosial seas. It’s also the best of Hassell’s formidable achievements all rolled up in a big, round, smooth yet strangely unsettling ball.

Which is in essence what he’s done on Maarifa: the album is a digital reconceptualization-reperformance of several pieces generated in European concerts, which were themselves based on previous Hassell works from his catalogue of 13 or so albums. It reflects Hassell’s longstanding interest in making a sensual music that contained his self-generated versions of a kind of spirituality and consciousness of folklorical musical strains within the context of a darker and stranger modern digital milieu. The album’s first track, “Divine SOS,” sounds like a chapter heading in Hari Krishna training manual, but it’s actually named after the frequency-analyzing software the band used in the recording, the Divine “505” (becoming “SOS” after having been written down incorrectly in session notes). The album’s sound stage is extremely wide, the placement of sounds surprising and extraordinarily subtle evanescence made audible through sensitive balancing of a mouth on brass, old animal hides petted and prodded, the finest in massaging low and caressingly high frequencies courtesy late-issue digital instrumentation.

Structurally, these are fascinating new forms of symmetry, not just jammed out like a jazz orchestra, but containing actual interludes and episodes such as the seismic shift at the end of “Darbari Bridge,” which balloons suddenly up and out on a cloud of electronic gamelan.

“We’d been playing some version of that, ‘Darbari Extension,’ which comes from Aka/Darbari/Java, and on that record is the gamelan cloud the new piece ends with,” Hassell says. “In a way that was almost like a Darbari Suite,’ with some of the same elements, for instance the melody thing that I do comes from another track off of that record, but it’s been extended harmonically, into this whole cloud; and we took Abdou Mboup’s drum part [from a performance in Paris 20 years ago] and reconstructed it in this Divine Machine software. The thing warps into another dimension, you know.”

The album will receive further transformation as a “prequel” with Brian Eno’s reconfigured version, due for release in a few months.

For Hassell, it’s how the past can be used that spells any possibility for new things to come. “Anytime,” he says, “I love getting out of the box of, like, here’s this bass line, here’s this rhythm, here’s whatever; it’s really more like reaching back into the bag of goodies that have developed over the years. There’s always something there, and it’s seeing what somebody does with things that are already there, how to recombine. It’s interesting to think about where someone used elements that are continually refreshed by their context.”

Why not resort to food metaphors here and say that, to Hassell, the recombinance made possible by the newer digital technologies “is like `fusion cuisine’?

“Did you see that bit in The New York Times food section,” he asks, “where these super chefs make `Sci-fi Cooking,’ I think they call it? They have these incredible combinations of things, like things served on little glass tube with a burning cinnamon stick inside of it so the aroma of the thing is part of the dish. We know what prosciutto is, and we know what watermelon is, we know all these sort of elements. Well, then you combine them; in fact, one of them is even using crushed Altoids [laughs] as part of the dish. Or another guy is using Pop Rocks as a little burst.

“I want to make something that’s beautiful but sexy, you know, makes girls pay attention, and at the same time has some mysterious combination of things. Musically, a familiar sort of melody that drops back into the parallel, major triad with the harmonizer, and then this sort of resulting exotic melody—to me that’s a dish, that’s like something to eat. It has beautiful curves, but all these other things are like gurgling around it, and all these decorative Pop Rocks.”

Hassell is a fascinating hodgepodge of influences and interests, a former musical cerebralist who has rejected the straitjacket of the European classical tradition for some kind of music more deeply rooted in his own body and heart. He takes great pleasure in discussing the joys of Fellini, who once advised that it was never a good thing for an artist to be too conscious about what he was doing. He paraphrases the director: “‘For me what makes the work interesting is not where it came from or what style it is or what epoch or whatever, but whether it has vitality.’ And I think that’s important to me, for something to be vital.”

You can see, hear, read and experience much, much more about this giant in our midst on his website, jonhassell.com, which features an incredibly rich section called “Atmospherics,” an ongoing and ever-evolving collection of sound clips, visuals and whatnot accompanied by texts relating the story behind each snippet. And soon come, hopefully, will be Hassell’s completed The North and South of You, his book of musings, notes, drawings and diagrams defining the complete Fourth World paradigm and its potential uses as an inspiration bible for musicians, writers and artists alike.

Meanwhile, for Hassell it’s ancient to the future all the way.

“Faced with a choice of Brown (James) or Beethoven (Ludwig van) as my only records on a desert island, I’d say J.B. wins hands down. But the balance of structure with on-the-spot fun which is transmitted by the polyphonic after-the-hunt music of the Ba-Benzélé pygmies endures beyond both. My whole life has been toward rediscovering the North and South of You. Getting in touch with your South. And rebalancing the overbalance of the North.”