Jon Hassell: Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume 1)
Ndeya

How inspiring it is to find trumpeter Jon Hassell so creatively vital and engaged forty years after introducing his Fourth World music to the masses. On his first new album in nine years, Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume 1) (issued on his own nascent Ndeya label), the visionary explores the principle of ‘pentimento,' a visual arts-related term that refers to the re-emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes within a work and the transformative impact they have on the finished product. In applying the concept to his music, Hassell has created material of incredible density, pieces where multiple layers of sound and texture fluidly intermix. Consequently, a powerful vertical dimension is emphasized within the album's pieces, where alterations occur between elements stacked on top of one another, such that those underneath move ‘to the top,' so to speak, and become temporary focal points in an ongoing process of re-ordering.

Such a concept is tailor-made for Hassell, who for years has been shaping his music using sampling, looping, and overdubbing. And, in fact, the idea has been part of his thinking for decades; in a 1991 interview, for example, he said, “My aim was to make a music that was vertically integrated in such a way that at any cross-sectional moment you were not able to pick a single element out as being from a particular country or genre of music performed together widely and frequently, and continue to do so.” Even more relevant to the new album are statements Hassell recently made in direct reference to it, specifically his differentiation between the customary way music is attended to, in terms of horizontal flow and narrative sequence, as opposed to ‘vertical listening,' which involves absorbing the multi-tiered mass of sound as it's happening at each moment and rapidly scanning that sonic spectrum as it presents itself.

As a figure whose past includes studies with Stockhausen, a performance credit on the original recording of Terry Riley's In C, and involvement in La Monte Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, it hardly surprises that Hassell's own music would be so polystylistic and adventurous. Throughout his career, he's continued to develop his trademark fusion of minimalism, ambient, and jazz, and enriched it by folding the indigenous musics of other cultures into its heady brew. Par for the Hassell course, this first Listening To Pictures volume oozes humidity; heat rises off its eight tracks in a way that suggests dazed explorers plunging into newly discovered jungles, encountering life-forms never before witnessed by human eyes. Naturally, many of the signature Hassell elements are here, among them hand drums, electronics, and, of course, trumpet, in tracks teeming with ideas and detail.

During the aptly titled “Dreaming,” Hassell's wave-like trumpet murmurs alongside a dense web of insistent synth tones, percussive accents, and other exotica. Pitched at a softer level, “Manga Scene” drapes his horn musings across a classic Fourth World-styled rhythm base, its electronic components flickering and stuttering when not overpowered by the convulsive surround. With punchy electronic pulses included as animating forces, “Picnic” and “Pastorale Vassant” show him staying true to his muse but also keeping his ears to the ground, allowing music outside his personal sphere to work its way into the production.

If there's one thing I (and, I suspect, other Hassell devotees) would have preferred otherwise on the album, it's more of his trumpet playing. That immediately identifiable sound is less plentiful on the recording than one might have anticipated, and when that familiar horn emerges within “Slipstream” and the title track, to cite two examples, the music is noticeably elevated by its presence. That caveat aside, the material is startlingly fresh, the work of a creator thoroughly committed and explorative; it certainly doesn't sound like Hassell coasting on his reputation.

May 2018