Jon Hassell struggled for years before being embraced by rock

Musician and composer Jon Hassell was ‘always on the edge’, according to Brian Eno.

Jon Hassell
Musician, composer.
Born Memphis, Tennessee, March 22, 1937; died June 26, aged 84.

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It wasn’t long into the opening night of the Rite of Spring at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris, on May 29, 1913, that an audience member called out: “Un docteur!” Soon they were calling for the police too. It was reported later that punches were thrown. By some accounts a riot broke out as Igor Stravinsky’s contradictory, noisily dissonant ballet score with its godless rhythms shocked its audience and announced a century of musical revolution.

Thunderbolts to follow included Rhapsody in Blue, Carmina Burana, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, Strange Fruit, John Cage’s 4’33”, Kind of Blue, Heartbreak Hotel, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Dylan going electric.

Most of those were moments. Stockhausen was a movement. And he helped change the shape of music made by Miles Davis, Paul McCartney (Stockhausen is on the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, just to the left of WC Fields), Frank Zappa, the Who, Pink Floyd and a curious man who sold fewer records than any of them, Jon Hassell.

While studying at New York’s Eastman School of Music – whose alumni include Ron Carter, jazz’s most recorded bassist, Steve Gadd, the greatest drummer of his generation, and Chuck Mangione, the Grammy winning flugelhorn star – Hassell, unlike most students, began investigating so-called serial music forms, a European-led rebel­lion against traditional composition, even though for many this music remained coldly mathematical and gravitated around no familiar core. He moved to Cologne to study under Stockhausen and formed ideas that would indelibly inform his music.

Back in the US, where a counter-attack to serialism was under way led by minimalism pioneers Steve Reich, John Adams, Philip Glass and Terry Riley, Hassell received a fellowship at State University of New York in Buffalo. Riley also lived in Buffalo and with Hassell recorded his acclaimed early albums there as Hassell completed a PhD in musicology.

At this stage Hassell and Riley discovered the voice of Pandit Pran Nath, an acquired taste. They travelled to India to study this legendary singer of traditional raga, a music form long associated with mood and seasons. It had a profound impact on Hassell’s trumpet playing, with him “translating” Pran Nath’s vocal shapings on his debut solo album a few years later (as well as using the seasonal prompt for its title).

By the time Vernal Equinox came in 1977, Hassell was 40 with a life’s experimentation under his belt. The centrepiece of Vernal Equinox was Hassell’s restrained trumpet unwinding over a shifting substructure of gently emerging synthesiser lines with unrepeated percussive punctuation marks along with some found sounds, including ocean waves and bird calls.

Across the Atlantic another minimalist with a rock career behind him was producing synthesiser-driven instrumental music that sold modestly, only because he had once been a part of Roxy Music. Brian Eno renamed his minimalism “ambient” and it slowly found an audience.

It started with Discreet Music in 1975 and Ambient 1: Music for Airports in 1978. At that point he left to write and record in New York, where he was introduced to Vernal Equinox and its author. Soon they had collaborated on an album, Fourth World, Vol 1: Possible Musics. (Hassell had long since described his music as “fourth world”, a clear precursor to the world music phenomenon).

At the time, Eno was producing new wave act Talking Heads and incorporated Hassell into the recording of the hit album Remain in Light, a single from which was Once in a Lifetime. The album has since been deemed “culturally, historically, or artistically significant”, and the US Library of Congress has included it in the National Recording Registry.

Soon Hassell and his ghostly trumpet sounds were in demand. He played on the Peter Gabriel soundtrack for the film Birdy, appeared on albums for Ry Cooder, KD Lang, Tears for Fears and former Japan lead singer David Sylvian. He also contributed to the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ, with music composed by Gabriel, which helped put world music on the map.

Hassell’s regular Fourth World music albums fared less well. And he fell out with Eno over the lauded 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, not appearing on the album that might not have been recorded but for him. They made up. “He was a friend – and sometimes disputant! – for very many years,” Eno said this week. “He was always on the edge, for better or worse: artistically, emotionally, financially, critically.”