Jon Hassell: Fourth World and Balancing the North and South of You

"Power Spot's one of the few; Manfred doesn't usually like to take things that are done that way," Hassell explains. "And so [for Last night the moon came] he was there and we had a lot of technical issues. Basically we were going against the studio thing because La Buissonne is a beautiful studio with a beautiful room. And everybody was set up in the control room except me, so they could all relate and talk to each other in the room, because the bass was direct and the samplers were direct and the guitar was direct, etc.

"Manfred has ears and his sensibility, and the things that he latched onto were very revelatory," Hassell enthuses. "That's the first time I'd actually been in the studio with him. And he's great, he's absolutely great. In fact that first piece, "Aurora," on the record, that was actually his mix, which was very problematic, with me thinking, 'This doesn't work at all.' And he said, 'No, look at it this way.' So he took over the controls, so to speak, and you could see his acumen at blending and listening.

"Later on we went into a phase of not being able to get back together again," Hassell elaborates. "He's just incredibly busy, you know, constantly doing this thing or that. I wasn't really happy with the sessions in La Buissonne. My playing was way, way off because I'd been working on this choral piece for Norwich Cathedral, a hundred-voice choral piece. And I had learned Pro Tools in order to get that going. So I had spent two months just working on that just before the session.

"So I really was ill-prepared for it," Hassell continues, "and thinking I'd just go in and the magic would happen. But it didn't happen, it didn't really gel. So I really didn't know what to do with it and gradually, as we did more concerts and it came closer to [the release date], we had Sarah Humphries at ECM in New York start arranging the tour and we set a release date. Then we had kind of last-minute situation to make these things work. Peter has been really great in terms of the studio, so we went into his studio and started doing the enhancements and things—doing it pretty much like the process on Magic Realism 2, where it was like live mixed with studio.

"And so it came down to the wire and were thinking that we were going to go to New York—this was just before Christmas," continues Hassell. "Manfred had a few days working another project and we were thinking we were going to go and mix there. But I think it was because Manfred hadn't realized exactly how much of a hybrid situation it was going to be, and we sent him a test mix or two. And he said, 'Peter, this is great. You don't have to come here. Just go ahead and finish it.' So we did that; and he made some suggestions about sequence and ordering."

Eicher is renowned for his ability to sequence music into a meaningful narrative arc, and was largely responsible for the track order on Last night the moon came. "That's pretty much his sequence," says Hassell. "But then [there were] things that he had already kind of accepted, like for instance there was a kind of half-assed version of the title track. I actually went over to [guitarist] Rick Cox's house and played solo over it, which became the final thing because I hadn't really found it when we were in La Buissonne. I was just sort of finding the right chord to make that magical sound with the repeating string chorus thing. So I went in just the last few days before we actually had to deliver, to do that.

"There was a lot of last-minute touching up," Hassell admits. "And then I threw out the North line that we had glommed on all these things. I had had this big idea about having that—I had made these sort of mega-sessions in Pro Tools with like a hundred tracks and the idea was to like make these wild mixes, like montage. It looked like wild mixes in which there would have been even more than one motif drifting between pieces, which is kind of a grand idea. But eventually only a very small part of that actually wound up on the record.

"So the big story is that it was all a last-minute grind," concludes Hassell, "a last-minute push to put these finishing touches on it. The performance in London was so much clearer and so much groovier and had the kind of vibe that I wanted. We put that in and put a few little touches on it. Manfred has ears wide open to new things—I think that's a little identity problem that ECM has to deal with. Or maybe not; maybe not. Because if there's a New Series, and if you look at it globally, with the ECM cinema, with the Jean-Luc Godard releases, it's a much bigger entity. But seen through the jazz police lens, let's say, there's a certain box that has a certain sound. And Manfred is certainly aware of all the perceptions. So he had a lot to do with it spiritually speaking, guidance-wise, and for the first part of it, the initial few days [in Studios La Buissonne].

Punkt

When Jan Bang and Erik Honoré came up with the idea of Punkt—where live performances are alternated with immediate live remixes in another room at the festival venue, with other artists interacting with the remix—Hassell was the clear progenitor of the concept. Appearing at the festival three out of its current four years, he's also heard on Live Remixes Vol.1 (Jazzland, 2008), where he engages with Bang, Honoré and percussionist Audun Kleive on a live remix of a performance by the Norwegian group Merriwinkle—singer Sidsel Endresen, keyboardist Christian Wallumrød and sonic manipulator Helge Sten (aka Deathprod).

"Well, when Jan [Bang] originally invited me [in 2005], he basically said, 'You're the godfather of this situation,'" Hassell says, "and, in fact, that's when he played me tracks that he'd done for that piece called "Aurora," for which he shares co-writer credit [on Last night the moon came]. He said, 'I made something you would have done 10 years ago or more.'

"So I'm very much indebted for their openness and their acknowledgment, both Jan and the festival and the whole scene," Hassell continues. "Just to give you another little capsule, a little picture of the last time we were there [2008]. I think it was in the museum there when we were there to see Brian [Eno]'s 77 Million Paintings. And Nils Petter [Molvær] and Arve [Henriksen] and I were sitting around the table and we started singing—we were riffing on various things and we came up on "Flash of the Spirit" [from Flash of the Spirit (Intuition, 1989]) and they started singing the bass line. And it was kind of like, a good time was had by all—me, laughing at the fact that they knew it and that Arve had told me before that he used to go to sleep every night listening to Aka Darbari Java.

"So I appreciate it and I understand where it came from," continues Hassell, "but I can't be too concerned with it actually; I don't like to really listen to what's going on with them to tell you the truth. It's one thing what happened with Arve [in 2007, when Henriksen sat in on Hassell's closing remix of the festival], because of that disastrous fever blister that I had when I couldn't play at all. So I didn't really want that—it was going to be a kind of movie-like moment, with the passing of the torch to the younger generation, and I didn't exactly want to feel like it was all over for me."

Of course it's far from over for Hassell, but that remix remains one of the festival's most memorable and moving moments ever; an opportunity to not only see and hear the impact Hassell has had on Henriksen, but the other participants of the remix as well—Eivind Aarset, Jan Bang, and Erik Honoré.

"I was instructed to hear him [Henriksen] up close and hear him play, and he's definitely great and got something going," Hassell says. "I've never had what you'd call a perfect embouchure and playing has never been easy for me. So all the time those struggles of things not being easy, if you're really working to overcome, that becomes part of the story too and something else comes out of it. If you have perfect coloratura of the voice that's great, but I'd rather hear the untutored thing with feeling, like Jimmy Scott. Naturally you could say from the outside, 'Okay, he can't play like Charlie Parker. He's not like a fast, technical player, so naturally he would like these other things.' Well, which comes first? I've often thought that I was so lucky I didn't learn to play raga, because I would have run the risk of becoming a sideshow act where, 'Oh, here, he plays trumpet.' In fact there's a guy that came to a concert in New York that I haven't checked out but he said, 'I've been studying with Michael Harrison, who is associated with this perfectly-tempered piano thing.

"So he said that he's playing a lot on trumpet and he's working on an instrument with a fourth valve, to do the quarter tones," Hassell continues. "I'm not so interested in that and I'm much more interested in how I feel, the collage thing I wouldn't be listening to Nils Petter or Arve and checking them out and thinking, 'What are they doing,' because I don't really think I can learn anything there. I'm not seeking out a whole lot of things right now because I think I've got enough of a footing in the world to just do what I do, and have almost perhaps reached that Valhalla of life—that moment which I've wished for. If I could only be like some archetypal blues player from the Delta, who can only do one thing; that's what he does and he doesn't worry about it. I don't like to hear somebody else playing something and try to play it, to join this movement or that movement. Basically I've got enough of this culture I've made around me so that I'm taking comfort in doing what I do. It's not anything—it's not like I'm militaristic about it like, 'Don't play that for me!'"

DJ Hassell

Hassell recently had the opportunity to DJ on KCRW, the radio station of Santa Monica College, and shed light on some more of his early influences. "I was on KCRW, doing a guest DJ thing," Hassell explains, "and part of the deal was to talk about and play some of the new record, but it was really to be a guest DJ. So I brought in a few things and one of them was this beautiful thing—Chet Baker singing and playing on this tune called "Fair Weather." It's from the Herbie Hancock score to [Bernard Tavernier's] 'Round Midnight [(1986)], the movie. And I'm guessing that's not far from the end of Chet's life and the playing is labored. It's beautiful. The voice is incredible.

"The subject was things that made me cry," Hassell continues, "things that I can't hear without crying. So the vulnerability in his voice and the playing was so powerful. I mean, God, I'd so much rather hear that, even though I can't listen to it a lot because I don't want to have my buttons pushed every day, every moment. But it's so much more powerful to me to hear that—that's really the kind of moment that I like to live in. I'm just a sucker for the movie world I grew up in.

"Another thing I played was, of course, Miles' 'Black Satin,' from On the Corner (Columbia, 1972)," Hassell concludes. "I couldn't leave that out of any of my favorite things."

NEAR FAR

At Punkt 08, Hassell was commissioned for an installation that utilized the church bells of a church in downtown Kristiansand. Every hour a new stacked chord would be played, the cumulative effect of which would gradually evoke more secular emotions than normally heard coming from a cathedral. "This Eventide H8000, that I use as a harmonizer and for some other things onstage, has this patch in which you can play a couple of notes and then a few second later—or actually 15 or 20 seconds later—out comes this chord," says Hassell. "It's made for accompanying yourself, so you make this sequence of chords that you can repeat and play over. I turn the dial a little bit and use a couple of notes that aren't supposed to be used, or combine things in a certain way. And so it's this big, beautiful, rich kind of gong sound.

"I started using it in a choral piece and on "Courtrais" [from Last night the moon came], which comes from a performance we did there," Hassell continues. "These gong chords, although I still call them gongs, are happening all over the place on that one. Jan [Bang] and I were traveling, and I think it was in a car outside of Brussels someplace and he was talking about the next edition of Punkt and so I said, 'Why don't I harmonize the church bells there.' And so he said yes and we did it. The last night before we left there, before the installation went down, actually Brian [Eno] was there and took a recording. He had this little pocket digital recorder he'd just bought and recorded the whole thing—so Arne [Bang, Jan's brother] went up in the belfry and played the whole sequence.

That was the last night of the festival, I think," he continues. "I love it, I love the sounds, I love the idea. I just haven't had time, because of the managerial problems we were talking about before and my having to be my own everything. I thought that would be a great thing to try and hawk to other European festivals, where there are always churches and there are always church bells. I thought it was a beautiful thing to hear; Jan still says it's one of his favorite things from the whole Punkt 08 experience."

One of the advantages of attending Punkt is hearing things that may never be heard again—whether it's installations, combinations of musicians or specific musical projects created solely for the festival. Still, there's always the possibility that some of these things will see the light of day for broader exposure. "Well, it could very well surface someplace," says Hassell. "I have all of them here. In fact there were some that I liked—it's not just one chord, you know, it's this little sequence, sort of like the usual chiming of the hour, they have [sings] 'bong-ding-bong-bong-ding,' and then usually they play a little tune. So we had to go up and reprogram all of that and bring the H8000 up near the bells, which were beautiful, gigantic things, with overloading problems. But eventually, the experience of being outside and seeing people walking across the square and hearing these sexy chords was wonderful—I tried to make them a little sexier towards nighttime—the one that started at 8 [PM], it's kind of up in the higher range, and then I tried a lot more groovier for the 10 o'clock chime.

Choral Work

While Hassell continues to hone his Fourth World music through recordings and performances as a leader, he's also a commissioned composer who has written, amongst other things, a string quartet for the renowned Kronos Quartet that was released on White Man Sleeps (Elektra/Nonesuch, 1987), "Pano Da Costa." Another commissioned work that will hopefully find its way to mass availability is Hassell's choral work for the Norfolk & Norwich Festival. "Norwich Cathedral is a beautiful 15th century cathedral in the north of England," says Hassell. "And the Norwich group was a combination amateur and professional chorus, with 120 voices. We were supposed to do a concert and the choral piece. So I used this Native American text, a Hopi text.

"Since my goddaughter is a Native American, I brought her over and this was the first time she actually heard me play live," continues Hassell. "It was really a great experience. The choral master, John Baker actually did a souped-up or 'fill-in-the-blanks' version that was taken from the performance and other pre-material that I had done before. I have not had time to even listen to what that was and what it sounds like. But I had hopes of that going other places and, again, I just haven't had time to cultivate it.

"A lot of people to whom I gave access to the model that I made in Pro Tools said it was amazing and they loved it," Hassell concludes. "So that was before the actual voices were there. And the text, I just used this London choir, samples of voices and choral things, so it's a kind of idealized version of it but without the actual text. It's all like [sings] 'ahhhs' and that kind of thing. But certainly at some point I would like to groom that as it deserves to be heard somewhere again as a recording or as a performance.

Fourth World and Technology

In the credits to Last night the moon came, there's an acknowledgement, in the section titles "Contributions": "The sampling software ("Cognition"), developed by Arnaud Mercier, that has created little sparks of inspiration throughout the last year or two." Of "Cognition," Hassell says: "Mercier is not simply a guy who does our technical setup and does great mixes. He actually is a very well-trained acoustic engineer—beyond an engineer. And he made this software. Basically you put a sample into it and it randomly samples within that sample and seamlessly binds it together. So it's like you put the sample in one end, and out the other end comes a kind of cubistically arranged version of it. You've already scrambled the original sequence of the sample, so interesting combinations are made and a lot of things that I had originally played with as a kind of first attempt—'I wonder what this sounds like; I wonder what that sounds like?' It became quite useful, and then I'd take little sections of that and introduce them into the sound."

Despite increasingly sophisticated advances in the technology that has given Hassell the freedom to explore and expand his Fourth World music, he's the first one to say there's no telling what the future might hold. "There always the caveat that there may very well come a time in which I'll do that Jobim record," Hassell says. "One thing I'm aware of is pushing things beyond its lifespan, when it stops being interesting. When it stops being in that category, what it is that I really like, I'm quick to express my intolerance for it and move on to something else. Of course the technology allows you to integrate things and move things around, which is like all things: the easier it becomes, the more accessible it becomes and the more people are doing it and then it kind of gets deflated, so you have to find a way to keep it fresh or to simply use it without calling too much attention to it and just let it serve the music without it being spotlighted."

Self-Management

The challenges of managing one's own career are facing many musicians, for whom the overhead in a time of increasing recording and touring costs mean something has to go. "I do understand the small is beautiful concept for sure," Hassell agrees. "I know that's one of the reasons that I really haven't reached a good management situation for myself ever. It's because I find that I'm sweeping up after people and trying to do things the right way, and it winds up being as much trouble or more for me to have to deal with it on that level. And then having to put two or three other people in the loop. Management these days—I say these days—in essence seems like you're in a room and you've got a wall full of wires coming in on one side and a wall full of wires on the other side and you basically have to connect this wire to that wire because this one needs to know about that too. It's all about networking, I guess.

"It's really gotten to me this year," Hassell concludes. "I've never worked so hard in my life, and I keep dreaming of the perfect person or entity. But for the moment, sometimes you just have to take things the way they are and work with them.

Going Forward

Hassell has a busy summer lined up, between music performances and conversation pieces with Eno. "I'm doing Roskilde in Denmark, and the Stockholm Jazz Festival—that's in July; and in June, Australia. Hopefully there will be another couple of dates other than Sydney, maybe one in Auckland, New Zealand. I'm trying to mull it over now and see if I can come up with something. It's a problem because theoretically I'm going out to support the record and they may want to hear the record. And I wanted to use Eivind; I love what he does but he's also got some conflicts.

"I'm not bitching about it [being busy], except from the fatigue point of view," Hassell continues. "I'm certainly happy it's happening and I do think that, given the reception that we've gotten around the country and in Vancouver during this tour, I am more informed about how many people there are out there—just the streams and correspondences. I hardly ever look into this info on my own, but just the other day I did. I wanted to clean it out and there were these amazing things in written correspondences. One guy said he'd had this bunch of other correspondences too, like he lived on North Moore Street in New York where I lived before. But there's this one kid, and he was talking about the cover picture on Last night the moon came. 'How did you get that picture, with the left side of the coast?' He was the grandson of one of the presidents of France, and spent all of his summers at this place and he recognized it. I never even knew what it was. It's actually a seascape, a coastal seascape. And he had spent every summer there from age zero to 24."

Hassell's influence may be insidious, but it's often a surprise to him. "I'm kind of blown away by the number of people that have been following me," he says. "It makes such a difference. In fact, I had become kind of upset—what's so difficult about this? Make some records, hire a PR person and reap the benefit. Get a distributor and reap the benefits. Well, that's a big thing. There's a lot of people at the ECM office with the PR, the history and all of that. So I think the answer is certainly 'yes' to continuing. But these days I don't think you think about it in terms of the kind of exclusivity of previous days because of the whole web-o-sphere.

ECM has never been about contracts; every album is a new one," Hassell concludes. "Between you and me I haven't even signed one yet; we don't even have a contract. We just let the legend go on."

Comments