BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2009 Jon Hassell: Last Night the Moon Came (ECM/Ode)

 |   |  1 min read

Jon Hassell: Time and Place
BEST OF ELSEWHERE 2009 Jon Hassell: Last Night the Moon Came (ECM/Ode)

By sheer coincidence, this new album by ambient trumpeter Jon Hassell (full title "Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street" from a poem by Rumi) arrived just as I was posting his 1981 release Dream Theory in Malaya as an Essential Elsewhere album.

And it is pleasing to report that when it comes to his seductive, unusual, world music-influenced sound that very little has changed in the intervening decades.

He still essays a weightless, flowing and restfully cinematic style which made him seem such a comfortable fellow traveller almost three decades ago with Brian Eno (on whose Obscure label he also appeared).

Eno -- who appeared on Dream Theory -- said of Hassell in '86 that he was "an inventor of new forms of music – of new ideas of what music could be and how it might be made. His work is drawn from his whole cultural experience without fear or prejudice.

"It is an optimistic, global vision that suggests not only possible musics but possible futures.”

That also still holds true: this new album floats into the subsconscious but also imposes itself more than his Eighties releases by the slightly disturbing undercurrents of samples, stacatto guitar in the distance, violin lines, gentle knocking and so forth.

Hassell sees these 10 tracks as all part of long, symphonic piece -- but you have to accept that the symphony might be played underwater or somewhere on one of the rings of Saturn. It is other worldly in many seductive ways and you can also hear distant echoes of North African or Middle Eastern music peeking out.

But always and everywhere it is Hassell's soft and strange trumpet (nothing like Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis, Tomasz Stanko et al, more like synthesiser-created landscapes) which is so attractive.

A musician schooled on the avant-garde (Stockhausen, Terry Riley, La Monte Young), but equally at home with Indian musicans or the Kronos Quartet, Jon Hassell is one of rare and select company who really can claim to have invented his own sound.

And utterly beautiful it is. 

Share It

Your Comments

post a comment

More from this section   Jazz at Elsewhere articles index

MATT PENMAN INTERVIEWED (2002): Finding a new home bass

MATT PENMAN INTERVIEWED (2002): Finding a new home bass

Maybe it's that trait of self-effacement many New Zealanders have, or maybe Matt Penman is just naturally modest, but his achievements these past five years would have others bannering them... > Read more

MURRAY McNABB INTERVIEWED (1947-2013): The new man with the courage to make himself new

MURRAY McNABB INTERVIEWED (1947-2013): The new man with the courage to make himself new

The plan would have been timely: a concert acknowledging the half century he’d known and played in bands with drummer Frank Gibson. But then everything changed. “They gave me a year,... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

Elsewhere Art . . . Louis Armstrong

Elsewhere Art . . . Louis Armstrong

Absolutely obvious I know. But what else are you going to for the great Louis Armstrong other than cast him as some holy man radiating light out of New Orleans? This was created to... > Read more

MARK CROSS PROFILED (2013): The outsider looking outward

MARK CROSS PROFILED (2013): The outsider looking outward

Odds are Mark Cross was among the oldest in the audience at the recent concert by American nail-hard metal rockers Tool. And probably the only artist. More than a decade ago he heard Tool's... > Read more