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Composer/trumpeter Jon Hassell is the visionary creator of a style of music he describes as Fourth World, a mysterious, unique hybrid of music both ancient and digital, composed and improvised, Eastern and Western. After composition studies and university degrees in the USA, he went to Europe to study electronic and serial music with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Several years later, he returned to New York where his first recordings were made with minimalist masters La Monte Young and Terry Riley, through whom he met the Hindustani raga master, Pandit Pran Nath, and embarked on a lifelong quest to transmute his teacher's Kirana vocal mastery into a new trumpet sound and style. In the last two decades, he has recorded albums which have, over the years, become so widely appropriated that many of their innovations have become woven anonymously into the texture of contemporary music high and low.
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phaks
May 12, 2016For me Jon Hassell is one of the greatest musicians I ever had the pleasure to listen to. When I heard the 1980 Forth World LP (with Brian Eno) I was hypnotized by this strange 'flanged' trumpet sound in combination with highly percussive worldbeat ensembles. Since then I've listened to most of JH's records. In the 80s the music is more slow jungle, like walking through muddy water, in the 90s it gets more poppy, sometimes slightly overproduced. The City Works Reissue 2015 is fantastic, makes me write this.