Jon Hassell – Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street – ECM 2077, 1 hr. ***** [Release date: Feb. 3, 09]:
(Jon Hassell – trumpet, keyboard; Peter Freeman – bass, percussion, guitar; Jan Band – live sampling; Jamie Muhoberac – keyboard, drums; Rick Cox – guitar, loops; Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche – violin; Elvind Aarset – guitar; Helge Norbakken – drums; Peter Lockett – Drums; Dino J.A. Deane – live sampling, Steve Shehan – percussion)
Take an hour’s journey into other dimensions with Jon Hassell, and that’s not just hype. His surreal aural ambiances seem to take you around the world and forward and back in time. One moment in an Arabic market, another floating in the warm water of a tropical bay, moving thru New Age or futuristic architectures, trotting with the dinosaurs, you name it. The composer deliberately follows a cinematic construction of his score. The instrumental sounds are often very vocal – especially Hassell’s electronically-processed trumpet.
Brian Eno has spoken of how Hassell’s music is drawn from his whole cultural experience without fear or prejudice. Although Hassell makes a strong effort to not have his sounds clearly identifiable by the listener as coming from any single folk culture, I hear a strong Arabic influence in many of the ten tracks. The track Abu Gil creates a very strong lost-in-fog-in-a-Persian-market-at-midnight mood, then one begins to hear snippets of Ellington’s Caravan in it. The album title comes from a poem by Rumi, which is so fitting in that it sounds so modern – nothing like one would expect from the 13th century! Hassell intended for the ten tracks to flow into one another and describes them as “drifting clouds made out of many motifs.” If Miles Davis’ modal/ambient genre had sounded anything like Jon Hassell’s I would have remained much more of a Miles’ fan.
John Hassell’s previous album for ECM was Power Spot of a quarter-century ago, but he has been very busy in the meantime on other labels. One of his other masterpieces is Fascinoma, which is available on a Water Lilly SACD, making me very sorry that the obvious spatial aspects of this new effort are not also so available. Never mind, it is a very clean and detailed stereo recording and decodes well with ProLogic II for surround effect.
– John Henry
