The jazz trumpeter Jon Hassell's embrace of electronic effects and extensive post-production has positioned him curiously. He is an acknowledged inheritor of Miles Davis and Teo Macero's experiments in electric jazz and studio-aided collage composition, and yet the ambient nature of his work often lands his discs in the new age racks. Hassell studied with Stockhausen and Pandit Pran Nath, played on the first recording of Terry Riley's In C, and collaborated with the likes of La Monte Young, Talking Heads, David Sylvian, and Ry Cooder. He's also the inventor of something he calls Fourth World, "a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques"-- a phrase that's hard to shake free, in 2009, of associations with Putumayo compilations, or Burning Man. It's difficult to think of another contemporary jazz musician whose reputation encompasses such opposing poles: conceptual rigor on the one hand; easy listening on the other.
Hassell's new album, Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, does in fact make for easy listening-- profoundly warm, immersive, relaxing listening. It's electric-blanket music, isolation-tank music, lucid-dreaming music that moves as assuredly as if by the power of your own suggestion. I've been tempted to call it "yoga for the mind," except that the phrase sounds way too glib, too slack, for music this rigorous. But it's also a puzzle, a non-Euclidean rendering sourced from small-ensemble sessions and recomposed via digital editing. It's as hard to separate out the music's discrete pieces as it is to discern between its structure and sense of drift.
Much of the album's pleasures are immediate and visceral. This is as sumptuous as "ambient" music gets. The album opens with a glowing song, "Aurora", that sounds exactly like its title suggests, with scratchy, glowing drones of uncertain provenance taking on a daybreak shine as Hassell's trumpet rises like a heat mirage in echoing, overlapping lines; there's a faint echo of dub in the bass. "Time and Place" is slow, spelunking funk, descending ropey bass lines through chambers where ambient shimmer illuminates melodic figures as lifelike as cave drawings: bluegrass violin, panting organs, and of course Hassell's reverberant horn melodies, which slide around the edges of the song's key signature, highlighting its contours in slippery relief. A dubby pulse echoes the percussive rattle of Hassell's Earthquake Island and, on a more contemporary note, the Moritz von Oswald Trio's Vertical Ascent, which might not be surprising, given that von Oswald has professed his admiration for Hassell's work. The track leads almost seamlessly into "Abu Gil", where violin and electric keys blow its modal structure wide open. One of the album's centerpieces, the 13-minute song is grounded in more loping percussion and a pinging bass line that wobbles like a taut clothesline; Hassell's trumpet is refracted through delays and a harmonizer effect, throwing shadows in fourths and fifths as it slinks, catlike, around the changes.
You might not notice any of these things on your first or even tenth listen. The measured pacing, especially on the slowly unfolding title track, lulls you into a state that can be described only as hypnotic, as reassuringly resolving string phrases lay out the soft, spongy ground over which Hassell drifts and soars. Like any bird on the wind, Hassell knows how and when to conserve his energies; he lies quiet for long stretches, letting reverb carry his melodies. Often, the line between cause and effect is blurred beyond recognition, leaving only a suggestion of breath lingering in the air. The music's gaseous feel serves to highlight more solid forms, like blocky keyboard chords, that sit like squat, rounded ruins poking through the forest canopy.
The title comes from a poem by the 13th century Persian Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi: "Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street/ I took it as a sign to start singing,/ Falling up into the bowl of sky." Some 700 years later, it proves to have been an exceptionally prescient description of Hassell's own malleable approach, melting geometrical structures with blur and bent pitches, turning breath to wind and cheating gravity with every updraft.
But if part of the music's pleasure is its liquid physicality, an equal measure derives from its conceptual base. Formally, it's hard to say exactly what to call this stuff: jazz? Electro-acoustic improv? Ambient dub? All those terms apply in some measure. Rather than a record of single performances, the album is stitched together from fragments of both studio sessions and live recordings-- although "stitched" is an inexact metaphor for joints this smeared and seamless.
As Hassell describes it in his liner notes, "The music presented here is a montage of the last years of concerts and the changing cast of the group I call Maarifa Street-- all musicians who have contributed their personalities-- the way an actor does to a film-- to this living, morphing process that occasionally gets set down as a 'record.'" The slippage in his hyphenated phrases approaches the horizontal rush of the record itself, ideas overlapping, subjects blurring, dependent clauses assuming a commanding role. His touring group Maarifa Street is here a core ensemble including Peter Freeman (bass, guitar, percussion), Jan Bang (live sampling), Rick Cox (guitar), Jamie Muhoberac (keyboard), Kheir-Eddine M'Kachiche (violin), Dino J.A. Deane (live sampling), Eivind Aarset (guitar), Helge Norbakken (drums), and Steve Shehan (percussion), with a few other players occasionally rotating in for a single track. The album's sleevenotes also credit Thomas Newman and Rick Cox for the title track's repeated string phrases, Eivind Aarset for "a beautiful loop" in "Blue Period" and ambient dub producer Pole for a sample used in an unspecified track. (Bringing things full circle, the composer Miles Evans-- son of Miles Davis' collaborator Gil Evans-- is credited "for the atmospherics" in "Abu Gil".) That might look like a lot of names in a row, but I think they bear repeating, for Hassell clearly means to impress upon us that this is a collective effort. Even Arnaud Mercier and his live-sampling software, Cognition, get a mention-- suggesting the degree to which the album's creation was not only a collaborative process, but one where the easy assumptions about chops and genius don't apply. Wrapping your mind around this music is about as easy as grabbing a fistful of river, but that's precisely what makes it so rewarding.
