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Review

Jon Hassell

Last Night the Moon Came Dropping its Clothes in the Street

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by Tim Owen

June 16, 2009

/ ALBUM

Hassell remains one of the true originals

Last Night the Moon Came Dropping its Clothes in the Street takes its full name from the writings of a 13th century Sufi poet, Jalaluddin Rumi:

“Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street.

I took it as a sign to start singing.”

Or, in Jon Hassell’s case, ?singing’ through his trumpet in the vocal style instantly identifiable as his own, as echoed in the playing of all those he has inspired, most notably Arve Henriksen.

Significantly for many this is Hassell’s first album for ECM since 1985’s Power Spot, but it follows a series of eight interim releases of which the most recent was 2005’s Maarifa Street. Last Night… was laid down live and in the studio by an augmented version of the working band of the same name.

The key supporting players here are Norwegians Jan Bang (live sampling) and Eivind Aarset (guitar), North African violinist Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche, and bass player Peter Freeman, but naturally it’s Hassell’s lush, vocal tone that defines both the mood and the direction of proceedings. As in all of his previous work - across which individual projects have digressed to explore specific avenues of the “fourth world” of which Hassell has set himself up as chief cartographer - the trumpeter’s style is readily identifiable: a spare, disarmingly unadorned ?vocal style’ being at once cerebral and sensual, which he has enhanced by electronics and studio manipulations. The contributions of other contributors - principal among them Rick Cox (guitar), Jamie Muhoberac (keyboard, drums), and Helge Norbakken (drums) - are less distinctive, though they no doubt contribute a certain facelessness to the ?montage’ methodology that Hassell has adopted as his recording practice. 

Hassell clearly believes that with montage he is onto something special, “a living, morphing process that occasionally gets set down as a record”. Hassell evidently believes that a studio blending of multiple live recordings, studio sessions and disparate samples allows him to knit together in a studio a sound - more specifically, perhaps, an ambiance - that more closely matches his conception of the music he desires to make than would standard studio practices or live recoding. One listen to the generally more satisfying and coherent Power Spot undermines that notion; by contrast, Last Night… occasionally shows its seams a little too clearly. That said it is nevertheless deeply, almost meditatively gorgeous, and never more so than on Blue Period, which fruitfully re-works Amsterdam Blue (Cortege), which was Hassell’s main contribution to the soundtrack to Wim Wenders’ Million Dollar Hotel. The less successful tracks, such as the opening Aurora and Time and Place, are almost depressingly anodyne, but there are subtle riches here for anyone willing to let Hassell’s insular sound world envelop them. 

Bassist Peter Freeman has been Hassell’s most constant working partner of late, and his playing is frequently the most obtrusive presence in the sound mix, particularly in live performance. Occasionally he pushes the ambiance into a laid-back but undeniable groove. On Abu Gil his sound is uncharacteristically tensile and wiry, undermining complacency. Aarset capitalizes on the opportunity to carve out subtle contours in the group sound, embellished by M’Kachiche with hints of Middle Eastern melody. In fact, there is a lot of filigree from all contributors on this track, but its horizons are broad enough to subsume it all without sounding cluttered. Elsewhere, on Courtrais, Freeman gives substance to a contrastingly heavy, brooding atmosphere within which Hassell’s keening vocalisations call out, a ghostly disembodied presence.

M’Kachiche’s playing also establishes the mood of the title track, which was the closing piece of Hassell’s set at the Punkt festival in 2008. A Freeman pulse emerges from a minimal repeated string figure which is initially embellished only ethereally by washes of Hassell’s trumpet and ripples of tamped piano and percussion, M’Kachiche elegantly embroidering everything with evocations of Hassell’s oriental/occidental, ancient/modern Fourth World. Hassell’s key enabler in this conception is, of course, Jan Bang, who samples and processes the various elements of the bands’ interactions, sometimes feeding them back in real time for meta-improvisation, and further mediates the results in the studio. Whether this stimulates Hassell’s work or simply envelopes it in a comforting opiate fug is open to debate.

Hassell remains one of the true originals. His impact on some of the music’s most cutting edge artists is almost as overlooked by the public as it is celebrated by critical consensus, and that’s a mystery. I am frankly ambivalent about this latest album. If I’m not in the mood, it seems complacent in ways that the really valuable recordings Hassell has under his belt, from the two volumes of Fourth World to Power Spot, most certainly are not. But then, when I’m in the mood for it, I’m totally seduced

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