Tag Archives for Jon Hassell

THEIR MASTER’S VOICE: the impact of Pandit Pran Nath on Western minimalists, by Peter Lavezzoli (Arthur, 2006)

Originally published in Arthur No. 22 (May 2006)

Terry Riley and Pandit Pran Nath relaxing at the Houston Astrodome, 1981. Photo courtesy Marcus Boon.

MASTER OF BREATH

The life, work and astounding impact of North Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, guru to Western minimalists La Monte Young and Terry Riley.

By Peter Lavezzoli

Excerpted from  The Dawn of Indian Music in the West by Peter Lavezzoli by permission of the Continuum International Publishing Group.

On Sunday, July 13, 2003, an intimate audience congregated at the Community Music Center in Portland, Oregon, to hear a vocal recital of North Indian ragas on a full-moon night. On the riser were a pair of tablas, two tambouras, and a sarangi, situated around a cushion reserved for the vocalist. When the audience was seated, Terry Riley, father of repetitive electronic music, entered in full Indian dress, followed by his accompanists. After making their bows to the audience, the musicians were seated. Riley announced that it was the evening of Guru Purnima, a sacred holiday celebrated in India and throughout the world. Every year on the full moon of July, students and disciples pay homage to their respective gurus and celebrate the spirit of the ancient guru Vyasa, the Indian saint who edited the Vedas and authored the Puranas and Upanishads. It is a day of gratitude for the teacher’s guidance along the spiritual path. Although a disciple gives thanks to his or her guru throughout the year, Guru Purnima is a special observance of all gurus past, present and future.

This performance concluded several days in Portland, where Riley gave a series of vocal classes. Tonight, Riley would sing in honor of Pandit Pran Nath, who brought North Indian vocal music to the West. A month earlier, two of Riley’s longtime friends and fellow disciples of Pran Nath, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, gave a similar vocal recital in their New York City loft: an annual memorial concert held every June in honor of Pran Nath, who passed away seven years earlier on June 13, 1996.

Riley resurrected his guru with a performance of evening ragas, his sonorant voice resonating throughout the hall. The meticulous manner in which Riley manifests each raga stems from his training with Pran Nath; at the same time, it is pure Terry Riley. Riley’s raga is a natural extension of his definitive minimalist composition In C, his extended keyboard improvisations such as A Rainbow in Curved Air, or his string quartets such as Salome Dances for Peace. On a fundamental level, each of these works reflects the same spirit of creating magic through sound, transporting the listener out of linear time and into a realm of transcendent beauty. In tonight’s case, Riley was working with the oldest and most intimate instrument in music: the human voice.

It is no coincidence that Riley and La Monte Young committed 26 years to the study of North Indian vocal music with Pran Nath. The music that became known in the West as minimalism often shared the aims of Indian classical music: a cyclical approach to rhythm and melody; a sense that both performer and audience are involved in a transformative ritual that induces trance; an emphasis on purity of tone and precision of tuning; and an investigation into the nature of sound itself. For Young and Riley, the arrival of Pran Nath was a confirmation of principles already evident in their work, but Pran Nath also guided them to the next step.

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“THE NORTH AND SOUTH OF YOU: An Erotic Worldview” by JON HASSELL (Arthur, 2005)

Originally published in Arthur No. 18/Sept. 2005

THE NORTH AND SOUTH OF YOU
An Erotic Worldview

by Jon Hassell

“I love the East, West, North and the South of you…”
— Cole Porter, “All of You” 

A tale of two equators—one around the planet, another at the waistline—and how the present global imbalance between a “developed” (technological) North dominating an “underdeveloped” (but culturally rich) South is a projection of the imbalance between the “north of you” (head, intellect, abstraction) and the “south of you” (hips, sensuality, emotion).

Could the story be as simple as the difference in how people turn out after centuries of evolution in a cold, hostile climate versus a warm, friendly one?  And if it were, what are the chances that such a simple answer would be accepted by those whose minds have become so deeply etched with the printed circuits of language and abstraction that what is obvious on a sensual level is routinely “explained” out of existence?

Relieved of the necessity of struggle in order to stay warm, southern peoples turned toward the “art of living”: decorating experience with a surround of color and pattern and rhythm. This was in contrast to northern peoples who—in order to merely survive in the cold—had to become resourceful in the way that later became known as “technology.” A few thousand years later, this branched into communications technology—the form which had the power to change the world more than any previous development. So the northern worldview—one reflecting the cumulative psychology of struggle—was the first to be projected worldwide in the seductive new forms of mass media.

And as the science and technology paradigm became the gold standard by which the rest of the world was judged (creating the cleavage into “first” and “third worlds”), many of the life-enriching gifts of the South—the ones which are often most treasured in our personal experience—have gone deeply undervalued, appropriated, or simply, gone.

A different kind of “global warming”—an emotional one—is called for as the basis for creating an alternate scale of “market value”—one that accommodates the samba as well as the microchip, one which reflects the actual degree of pleasure and cultural enrichment brought to our lives from the South, and the south of us.

SOME UNTRIED COMBINATION OF PIGMENTS: A beginner’s guide to the music of Jon Hassell, by John Adamian

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

The timbre of Jon Hassell’s effects-drenched trumpet is unmistakable. There’s nothing else like it. Imagine being a painter who stumbled on a color — some untried combination of pigments — that no one had ever seen before, and you get an idea of the ear-opening shock of Hassell’s music. The nebulous sound of Hassell’s tricked-out trumpet has almost no attack whatsoever. The tones swell and bloom. It’s as if the swarming and droning music is the product of some extreme humidity. Hassell’s visionary approach to playing and composing has earned him admirers and collaborators in practically every genre — jazz, pop, classical, experimental and world music. Even if you’ve never heard of him, you may already have several recordings of Jon Hassell’s music.

On Remain in Light, Talking Heads’ landmark 1980 Brian Eno-produced record, Hassell provided the horn arrangement and trumpet on “Houses in Motion.” If you’re not paying attention you might not hear the restrained punctuated trumpet dabs that Hassell applies in the verses, but you can’t miss his solo — it’s part elephantine blast, part storm ululation and part muezzin’s call.

Hassell’s “Pano Da Costa” (Cloth from the Coast) is performed by the Kronos Quartet on their 1987 release White Man Sleeps. The quartet takes inspiration from the sound of Hassell’s horn, gamely mimicking the barometrically charged tone, the insectoid flutters and the dizzy phrasing. Strong percussion often propels Hassell’s music, and with shakers, rattles and aggressive bowing, Kronos conjure the right friction and mystery.

Along with numerous other Eno projects, Hassell appears on Ambient 4: On Land, and his horn supplies that ominous touch that keeps Eno’s ambient music from being solely soothing. Hassell helps to unsettle things. (If you can fathom this, Hassell also plays on records by k.d. Lang, Ani DiFranco, Manhattan Transfer, Baaba Maal and Bjork, and many others. If you’re looking to dig deeper, Hassell has scads of other projects worth checking out, if you can find them.)

Years before West Africa became the favorite stomping ground of world music collaboratists and record producers, Hassell took up the idea. This collaboration was a logical extension of Hassell’s philosophy of Fourth World music. On 1993’s Flash of the Spirit, Hassell teamed up with Farafina, an excellent percussion and balafon group from Burkina Faso. The Eno-produced record, which draws its title from scholar Robert Farris Thompson’s legendary study of Africanisms in the New World, shows how suitable the pairing of West African polyrhythm, tumbling phrasing, call-and-response and all-around kinetic music energy is with Hassell’s approach.

One of Hassell’s most haunting records is Dream Theory in Malaya, the second volume of “Fourth World” collaborations with Eno (volume one is also worth seeking out). Thick with rhythms made from the sounds of splashing water, hypnotic gongs and the earthy ping of pottery drums, the music here achieves a shamanic intensity. It’s both startling and soothing somehow.

Maarifa Street, out this year, is a fitting cap to a roundup of Hassell’s recordings. With dubbed-out effects and clubby rhythms, Hassell summons up On the Corner or Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis, folded in with bits of Arabic singing and Senegalese drumming. Like Hassell’s aesthetic, it’s smart, expansive, experimental, global, and, most of all, ecstatic.

The North and South of Him

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.”