Taboo
Jon Hassell, hyperreality
and the magic of tone
Since 1977, the
Los Angeles-based composer-trumpeter Jon Hassell has recorded 11 solo
albums that blur the boundaries separating serious and popular music.
Hes collaborated with an eclectic group of artists, including
Brian Eno;
Farafina, a traditional ensemble of drummers and dancers from Burkina Faso;
director Peter Sellars; fashion designers Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo;
choreographers Merce Cunningham and Alvin Ailey; and the Kronos Quartet.
Hassell is also the inventor of Fourth World, a hugely
influential composed and improvised music that hybridizes African-derived
polyrhythms, Indian microtonality and Balinese sonorities, melted through
recombinant aesthetics made possible by digital technology. Quite often,
Fourth World is none of the above. And lately, Hassell has explored the
wonders of playing music absolutely straight.
Fourth World is not just a musical style but a way of
viewing life itself, rooted in its creators past, in Memphis, Tennessee.
My father had a cornet lying around the house, so I played that, used to
lock myself in the bathroom, play Stormy Weather and stuff like that. I
heard Stan Kenton on the radio, I heard Les Baxter,
Duke Ellington and Juan
Tizols Caravan, and Ravel a permanent Technicolor oasis in my spirit.
Hassell left the South for the Eastman School, where
he studied composition and allied himself with the 12-tone types into
Webern and Schoenberg and Berg, et al. After a stint in the Army, he earned
a masters in composition and nearly completed his Ph.D. in musicology at
Catholic University of America. But by then hed discovered Berio and
Stockhausen, and I just had to find out where these blocks of notes were
going. He went to Cologne to study with Stockhausen, from whom Hassell
learned a lot about the wherefores and could-bes of electronic music. I
saw how one applied statistical means; there were exercises where youd
notate short-wave radio bits, youd see how scores were constructed.
Stockhausen started a different point of view: Instead of building sounds
up by defining all the parameters, start with the whole and then infer the
parts of that whole.
Returning
to America, Hassell met Terry Riley, who was at that time recording his classic In
C. This was
Hassells first contact with American Minimalism, whose mesmerizing
repeated figures brought him home to something hed missed: sensuality. I
remember Terry calling all of that other music over there, the post-Webern
things, neurotic. And it was so self-evident this is the sound of
Freud in Vienna, and Schiele and all that. Hassells a subsequent work
with La Monte Young found him further exploring minimalistic music that
reconciled the body, mind and spirit, a vertical way of playing and
listening to mutating structures created by overtones in flux.
There
is an instantly identifiable Hassell sound. On his best-known albums,
including Possible Musics (1980) and Dream Theory in Malaya (1981), its not at all like
trumpet; amid the pitter-pattering rhythms and generally steamy ambiance,
you think youre hearing voices, huddled together, cooing, giggling,
chanting. In fact, youre hearing Hassells voice, or, rather, his mouth
and voice box hes singing with his trumpet. Its a technique he
developed in his studies with Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath, whom he
met in the 70s through both Young and Riley, who had studied with Pran
Nath in India. At around the same time, Hassell got into Miles Davis On
the Corner,
that era and started playing with a wah-wah pedal. Thats when the
daylight world and the night world came together; the daylight world is,
youre painting white-on-white painting, as in the Minimalist-school
compositional effect, and then at night, when it comes to groove, youre
putting on Miles.
Whence comes the Fourth World. I saw how Indian
music had structure and sensuality at the same time, so rather than
literally using the tamboura, I translated the tamboura into an electronic
cluster of samples or an electronic drone, and then added whatever rhythmic
elements one can infer. I didnt want to reference; I wanted to get a new
idea about what could be. With Pran Nath, Hassell learned that theres no
limit to musical variation when one coils among the notes. There are 12
notes between B and C, and theres all that other space in between, and
youre doing a little tie, right? I heard Pran Nath start off, and 15
minutes into it I realized hed gone only two or three half-steps, because
of all the possible ways of making the curves.
In
the Indian tradition they say that all instruments come from the voice, and
my technique came from having to learn that shape-making from the voice.
Timbre and musical expression are interrelated a lot of Indian instruments
and voices derive from that, because you cant drive a truck [tuba] in a
graceful curve; it has to be something which is malleable enough to make
all these curves [sitar, voice]. I find the tiniest vibration that I can
with the mouthpiece and then try and trick myself into thinking Im still
playing only the mouthpiece. If I can do that, I can do anything.
Hassells
electronic devices have often inspired the pieces themselves. I was
learning to do the vocal-like slide technique, then this harmonizer [a
digital multiplying effect] came along and I started playing in parallel
fourths or fifths, sort of mirroring the birth of polyphony, how plainsong
began with just one line and then, given various ranges of voices, started
singing in parallels, and then somebody got the idea to play on top of
that, etc. His use of harmonizer can approach the orchestral Blue
Night on Dressing for Pleasure, for example, on which, via a switching device, one
harmonizer plays into another and into another.
Hassell
took sampling into the realms of hyperreality on the 1983 Aka-Dabari-Java
Magic Realism,
where his supercollaging found him using one second of a gamelan, one
second of a voice, one second of Yma Sumac/Les Baxter orchestration, with a
drummer playing underneath it all. He addressed the poetic possibilities
of digital transformationsa background mosaic of frozen momentsa sonic
texture like a Mona Lisa which, in close-up, reveals itself to be made up of tiny
reproductions of the Taj Mahal. Here Fourth World became what Hassell
called a coffee-colored classical music of the future.
Then
Hassell heard Hank Shocklees stupefyingly complex collages on Public
Enemys It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back and saw that collage
techniques and philosophies directly deriving from Stockhausen and the
musique concrte crowd of the 50s had entered the popular
consciousness. It was very related to Pygmy music it was based on what
was around them that they picked up in the morning, what the Pygmies heard,
Pygmies imitating birdcalls and rhythms coming out of spear blades and
things like that. And here youve got kids living in the Bronx and whose
environment is the radio. Hip-hop is like the music of the loudspeaker,
its doing the same thing Pygmies did with birdcalls.
The
advent of MIDI and sophisticated sampling technology led Hassell into new
realms with the albums City: Works of Fiction and Dressing for Pleasure (whose title derives from
the fetish world), complexly faceted and funky works on which he
extrapolated from hip-hop into how far sampling could be taken. Not
coincidentally, Shocklee had cited Brian Eno and David Byrnes My Life
in the Bush of Ghosts as an influence, a record whose gambit of planting ethnic
samples atop electric rhythms Eno and Byrne had, after consulting with
Hassell, taken for themselves. I should do a record where I sample My
Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he says. These days Eno and Hassell are good friends,
though he doesnt see much of Byrne.
Considering
the devilishly electronic nature of Hassells previous albums, I had to
wonder about his current entirely different course, soundwise. His new
album, Fascinoma, was recorded in a church in Santa Barbara, on magnetic
tape, with one stereo microphone and no digital effects. Perhaps Hassell
has experienced a bit of electronic-media overload these last few years
or suffered too much of its ensuing clever irony.
Theres
also the problem of the Hassell-derived future-primitive musical kitsch
(ethnic samples + electronics) we suffer in every elevator. Inevitably,
you question, Well, gee, would it have been better for this never to have
happened? You come to a certain point in collective thought where
progressives suddenly become the carriers of orthodoxy. Of course, the ad
world is all ready to pick up the latest contrarian view and turn it into a
commercial William Burroughs doing Nike ads, like that.
Fascinoma was produced by the
ubiquitous yet unobtrusive
Ry Cooder, whom Hassell calls a spirit
catcher, a master of authentica. The album sees Hassell aided by a
team that includes pianist Jacky Terrasson, bansuri (flute) player Ronu
Majumdar, guitarist-clarinetist Rick Cox and percussionist Jamie Muhoberac
going back to the fragrant songs he loved as a youth (such as Nature
Boy, Poinciana and Caravan), touchstones, like little windows opening
out of my 1950s world.
The album digs deep into the mysteries of pure tone
almost. While it boasts an authentic audiophiliac analog experience,
thats not quite an authentic way of describing it, as the players also
employed samples, and the performances were edited. But the technology is
minimal, and most of the cuts were played straight through, with little
rehearsal. The church setting allowed Hassell to build on the idea of not
creating something from scratch, but having to harmonize with the beauty
thats contained in a room.
There
clearly is a relationship between timbre and what kind of music you play;
theyre organically related. So, when a certain quota of beauty is already
fulfilled when you walk into the room, Nature Boy feels as right to do as
the B-minor Mass.
Fascinomas way of recording has given
Hassell ideas for future projects. Id love to do a record with Jimmy
Scott, in that intimate one-microphone way. And Id like to do a record
with Joo Gilberto, just me and him up in the church. Ive been so
enchanted by his sensuality and his rhythmic grace and everything, you
could put it up with the masterworks of the world. Gilbertos music, says
Hassell, is unassailable.
There
is beauty, like naked beauty. If you want to talk yourself out of it, okay,
go ahead and talk yourself out of it.
Digital
technology has given birth to musical methods by which one can easily mix
n match elements from as many cultures as one pleases, a situation that
has led to cries of colonialism toward artists who werent deemed to be
respecting the source material. Its always phrased this way and one
wonders how such respect could ever be sufficiently demonstrated. One is
reminded of the Brazilian Tropicalistas of the late 60s, early 70s,
proudly proclaiming their cannibalization of all and any music (European
included) they could get their hands on, or the Indian musicians who
adapted the violin for their ragas.
Who
may cannibalize without guilt? Jon Hassell? Maybe so one has only to
listen to see that he has consistently created something new out of his
lovingly borrowed elements.
The
crux of it is, Is this better than the thing youve appropriated? Does this
add anything to the world, or would it be better to hear the source that
you took from? Remember that Hassells early inspiration came from career
inauthenticists such as exotica king Les Baxter, whose purpose in life was
to provide people with pleasurable escape. Its a stretch, but you could
say that Les Baxters fake music was honest in its guileless hunger for
adventure.
Its so simple and yet its so difficult. I keep
saying, Put yourself in a dark room and keep asking the question, What is
it that I really like? There are things youve been told that you like,
things youve been commissioned to like, and things youve been told its
not right to like. I dont see the difference in kids playing out now; I
pray that they hit the spot where they start thinking, What is it that I
really like? And not what has been foisted on me.
Hassell,
like a lot of musicians in L.A., has had his stab at composing for big
Hollywood films, including the soundtrack for Wim Wenders The End of Violence. He recently scored Wenders
upcoming The Million Dollar Hotel, in which he also appears onscreen as a
down-and-out musician living in a Skid Row dive. For his acting debut,
Hassell drew on his musical side, and he enjoyed it.
In
attempting to present yourself, you have to groom yourself to perform
onstage; its the same dynamic you want to be yourself as much as
possible, be as comfortable as possible. Its a lot easier being myself
without an instrument on my mouth. So it was fun, a lotta fun. He laughs.
I play a shabby trumpet player. 
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