Trumpeter, composer Jon Hassell dies at 84
Jon Hassell, a composer and trumpeter who blended modern technology with ancient instruments and traditions to create what he called Fourth World music, died Saturday. He was 84.
His death was announced in a statement from his family released by his record label, Ndeya. It did not specify where he died or the immediate cause.
Hassell’s music floated outside the genre boundaries of classical music, electronica, ambient music and jazz. He described Fourth World as “a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques” and, elsewhere, as “coffee-colored classical music of the future.”
His music could be contemplative and atmospheric, darkly suspenseful or abstractly funky. On the 20 albums Hassell made as a leader, his trumpet usually had an eerily disembodied sound that was processed through electronics and enfolded in shadowy reverberations, sometimes using harmonizers to multiply each note in parallel lines.
He played vocalistic phrases that invoked the bluesy intimacy of Miles Davis along with the Indian classical music that Hassell studied with raga singer Pandit Pran Nath. Around his trumpet, as foreground and background coalesced, there might be drone tones, global percussion, wind or string ensembles, washes of synthesizer, samples, distorted guitar, voices and more.
He delved into calm and aggression, reflection and propulsion, serenity and suspense. His polymorphous, layered, ambiguous yet sensual music helped shape decades of electronic experimentation from acts like Oneohtrix Point Never, Arca and Matmos.
In a tribute in The Guardian in 2007, musician and producer Brian Eno wrote, “He looks at the world in all its momentary and evanescent moods with respect, and this shows in his music.”
Through the years, Hassell collaborated repeatedly with Eno and American musician Ry Cooder. He also recorded with musicians from Africa, Brazil, India and Europe; composed a piece (“Pano da Costa”) for the Kronos Quartet; and played recording sessions with Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, k.d. lang, Baaba Maal, David Sylvian, Tears for Fears, Bono and others.
Jon Hassell was born on March 22, 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee. He picked up the instrument his father had played in college, a cornet, and studied music and played in big bands as a teenager. He attended the Eastman School of Music, exploring modern classical composition and earning a master’s degree. To avoid being drafted, he joined the Army band in Washington, D.C.
Fascinated by the emerging field of electronic music, he made tape collages and won a grant to study with avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen for two years in Cologne, Germany. His classmates included musicians who would go on to start the German band Can; he took LSD with them.
He received a fellowship at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at SUNY Buffalo. There, he composed music on one of the early Moog synthesizers. He also met composer Terry Riley, who first recorded his minimalist landmark “In C” in 1968 with musicians at SUNY Buffalo, including Hassell.
“It’s about making a beautiful shape in air. I call it calligraphy in sound,” he said in a 2009 interview with All About Jazz.
Hassell’s musical direction was already clear on his 1977 debut album, “Vernal Equinox.” His electronically altered trumpet is joined by African mbira (thumb piano), Indian tabla drums, maracas, tropical bird calls, electronic drones, ocean waves and crickets.
In New York City, where in the late 1970s art-rock, punk, pop and jazz shared a creative flux, Eno sought out Hassell, and they collaborated on “Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics” (1980). As the marketing category “world music” arose, its sounds and ideas strongly influenced musicians like Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel. Eno was also producing Talking Heads, and Hassell’s ghostly trumpet is prominent in “Houses in Motion” on Talking Heads’ 1980 album, “Remain in Light.”