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Chris May’s Best Releases Of 2020
by Chris May
Not the best year for live gigs in London, but Dele Sosimi's Afrobeat Orchestra just made it under the wire, lighting up the Jazz Cafe in late January. Rather like Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, Sosimi's band has form as an incubator of young talent. A recent star in the making was trumpeter Ife Ogunjobi, who has since been picked up by Ezra Collective and by drummer and bandleader Moses Boyd. Tonight's new name to watch was singer Sahra Gure. Topmost ...
read moreJon Hassell: Seeing Through Sound: Pentimento Volume Two
by Mark Sullivan
Visionary trumpeter-composer Jon Hassell presents another gift from his late career. The third release on his own Ndeya label, it follows the re-release of his debut album Vernal Equinox (Ndeya, 2020) and is a sequel to Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) (Ndeya, 2018). The structure is a bit different, still eight tracks, but organized as a series of Scenes. The personnel is more diverse as well. In addition to a core group of Rick Cox (electric guitar, bass clarinet, ...
read moreJon Hassell: Seeing Through Sound: Pentimento Volume Two
by Chris May
By the time even the most radical musicians reach their ninth decade, few are any longer making cutting-edge work. But trumpeter, electronicist and composer Jon Hassell, a collaborator with Terry Riley and La Monte Young in the 1960s and the creator of Fourth World music in the 1970s, remains as venturesome as ever. Much of Seeing Through Sound: Pentimento Volume Two was recorded during the sessions for Hassell's lustrous Listening To Pictures: Pentimento Volume One (Ndeya, 2018). ...
read moreVernal Equinox
by Doug Collette
In making Vernal Equinox available on vinyl for the first time in forty-two years and on CD for the first time in three decades, Jon Hassell's 1977 album has been fully remastered for its updated release on the artist's own Ndeya label. This first commercially released work by Hassell was, by many accounts, an early glimpse into a sound that would later go on to be known as 'Fourth World,' a mix of electronics, jazz, classical Indian music field recordings ...
read moreJon Hassell: Words with the Shaman
by Chris May
Jon Hassell is best known as the creator of Fourth World music, an acoustic-electronic blend of jazz, minimalism, drone, ambient, traditional African and Asian instruments and harmolodic signatures. Hassell has defined Fourth World as “serious music with transcultural appeal and a smile." He unveiled the concept on his debut album, Vernal Equinox (Lovely Records), in 1977. In March 2020, Hassell reissued Vernal Equinox on his own Ndeya Records label. Hassell's roots go back to ...
read moreJon Hassell: Vernal Equinox
by Mark Sullivan
Visionary trumpeter-composer Jon Hassell is one of the architects of what has come to be called World Music: his own preferred term is Fourth World, which he described as “a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques." Vernal Equinox was his first commercial album release, originally on Lovely Music in 1977. The second release on Hassell's own Ndeya label—following the 2018 Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)—this reissue makes the album available on vinyl ...
read moreJon Hassell / Farafina: Flash Of The Spirit
by Chris May
The trumpeter and keyboard player Jon Hassell is often labelled a practitioner of ambient music. This is a misconstruction resulting mainly from Hassell's encounters with Brian Eno, who is widely perceived as ambient's originator. Hassell's oeuvre, a technologically enabled fusion of western and non-western musics which he calls Fourth World, is a wholly different kettle of fish. Eno defines ambient as “music that does not demand the listener's attention but rewards such attention if it is given." The ...
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