Results for "Jon Hassell"

Jon Hassell

COMPOSER/TRUMPETER Jon Hassell is the visionary creator of a style of music he describes as Fourth World, a mysterious, unique hybrid of music both ancient and digital, composed and improvised, Eastern and Western.

After composition studies and university degrees in the USA, he went to Europe to study electronic and serial music with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Several years later, he returned to New York where his first recordings were made with minimalist masters LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, through whom he met the Hindustani raga master, Pandit Pran Nath, and embarked on a lifelong quest to transmute his teacher's Kirana vocal mastery into a new trumpet sound and style.

In the last two decades, he has recorded 11 highly influential, category-defying solo albums which have, over the years, become so widely appropriated that many of their innovations have become woven anonymously into the texture of contemporary music high and low.

While the liner notes for his 1983 record Aka-Darbari-Java/Magic Realism describe a technology-tradition balance resulting in a "'coffee-colored' classical music of the future", it was innovators in the field of pop such as Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel who—after collaborations with Hassell—steered the Fourth World idea into the avant-pop sphere where it has since evolved into myriad forms of "electronica", "new age", and "world music."

Notable concert appearances have included The Next Wave at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Serious Fun at Lincoln Center, La Foret Museum in Tokyo, the Berlin Jazz Festival, the Paris Biennale, a Japan tour with Farafina, a traditional group of drummers and dancers from Burkina Faso and a spectacular appearance with eight Moroccan tribal groups at Expo 92 in Seville to celebrate Moroccan Independence Day

Seeing Through Sound: Pentimento Volume Two

By JON HASSELL

Label: Ndeya
Released: 2020
Track listing: Fearless; Moons Of Titan; Unknown Wish: Delicado; Reykjavik; Cool Down Coda; Lunar; Timeless.

Jon 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. ...

Carlos Niño / Miguel Atwood-Ferguson: Chicago Waves

By CHRIS MAY

Chicago-based jazz drummer and electronic-beat-maker Makaya McCraven's International Anthem label has been releasing beguiling cross-genre music by a diverse roster of artists since the mid 2010s. In the process, McCraven's own double album Universal Beings (2018) gave an early US platform to musicians from the new London jazz scene including reed player Shabaka Hutchings, tenor saxophonist ...

Rava/Herbert/Guidi- Flusso Sonoro Senza Fine

By PAOLO MARRA

A Settembre del 2015 nell'ambito del Nylon Festival a Vercelli si esibiva per la prima volta il trio composto dal trombettista Enrico Rava, il pioniere della musica elettronica e compositore Matthew Herbert e il pianista Giovanni Guidi. A seguito del positivo riscontro di pubblico e critica i tre musicisti decisero di tenere nell'arco dell'anno successivo un ...

New Jazz From London: Top 20 Paradigm Shifting Albums

By CHRIS MAY

After a lifetime trying to get on an equal footing with its American parent, British jazz has finally come of age. Since around 2015, a community of young, London-based musicians has forged a style which, while anchored in the American tradition, reflects the Caribbean and African cultural heritages of many of its vanguard players. The scene ...

Musical Travelogues: May 2020

By GENO THACKARA

Gregoire Maret and Romain Collin w. Bill Frisell Americana ACT Music 2020 The sound lives up to the title; a thoughtful, airy yet soulful outing that sounds just the way a wide-open prairie landscape looks. If it seems a bit odd that Americana comes from a European duo, wonder not--Romain Collin's ...

Vernal 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 ...

Roy DeCarava: The Sound I Saw

By CHRIS MAY

The Sound I Saw Roy DeCarava 228 Pages ISBN: 9781644230107 David Zwirner 2019 Roy DeCarava was a jazz photographer, artist and Harlem local who captured everyday life in the Manhattan area with an insider's eye. Through a spare, striking use of natural light, DeCarava's exploration of the aesthetics of ...

AACM: Together We Are Stronger

By CHRIS MAY

With the passing in 2017 of the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and trumpeter Phil Cohran, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, formed in Chicago in 1965, lost the last two of the four musicians who organised its inaugural meeting. But with two succeeding generations of standard bearers stepping up to the plate, the AACM ...