Horn of plenty
Ambient jazz explorer updates his map of the Fourth World. By John Mulvey.
★★★★
Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)
NDEYA. CD/DL/LP
FORTY YEARS lost in the bush of ghosts is not, on the face of it, a logical way to become a major player. For most of that time, the American trumpeter Jon Hassell has marked out a sonic territory that he identifies as the ‘Fourth World’, a misty interzone with porous borders, where fragile approximations of jazz, minimalism and global trance are processed through an ambient haze. While open to eclectic influence, Hassell’s music is also curiously hermetic in feel, but that hasn’t stopped him collaborating with the likes of Talking Heads, David Sylvian, Peter Gabriel and, most significantly, Brian Eno. He brings exotic theory, and a languorous signature tone that imbues anything in its vicinity with a certain spiritual heft. It’s easy to classify Hassell as an adjunct to the brainy cabal who broke down barriers between prog, post-punk and an expanding soundworld of possibilities in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Still, the most striking thing about Listening To Pictures, Hassell’s first new album in nine years, is how effortlessly contemporary it sounds. That unhurried, muted trumpet is still pre-eminent, reasserting Hassell as electric Miles Davis’s most imaginative heir. It sits, though, among splattery, fractured beat scapes like Picnic, where a fusillade of glitches and rapid digital edits coalesce into a meditative whole. Picnic, the dislocated nocturne of Her First Rain, and much else here could be mistaken as the work of a contemporary producer like Flying Lotus, or Oneohtrix Point Never; no mean feat for an 81-year-old. But Listening To Pictures feels more like the culmination of a musical journey than a faddish whim. It’s one which begins in mid-’60s Cologne, where Hassell studied with Stockhausen and roomed with Can’s Irmin Schmidt, proceeds through work with Terry Riley and assiduous study of Teo Macero’s diced Miles Davis productions, and reaches a key point when Eno lends his disorienting systems to 1980’s Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics and the following year’s Dream Theory In Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two. Cutting-edge technology may now aid Hassell, but his aesthetic has remained consistent since his 1977 solo debut, Vernal Equinox (usefully reissued, along with a bunch of Hassell’s other rare sets, as downloads from his new Ndeya label). At the same time as appearing radically modern, though, this stealthily accomplished trumpeter has rarely sounded so jazzy. Opener Dreaming is a kind of phased blues shuffle, while Manga Scene finds Hassell soloing tenderly, in the vein of Chet Baker, while software appears to be serenely malfunctioning all around him. In 2007, Eno wrote of how Hassell’s experiment was to “imagine a globalised world constantly integrating and hybridising, where differences were celebrated and dignified – and to try to realise it in music.” In 2018 that project, with all its elegance,
humanity and political urgency, seems more relevant than ever.