What Are You Listening To?

[JonG]

Jon Hassell - Time and Place from Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street [ECM Records, 2009]

...Hassell may not be as well-known, say, as Miles Davis, but amongst a broadening group of musicians and listeners, it's become clear that his influence may well be no less pervasive—just, perhaps, more understated and subversive. While Hassell has continued to release albums periodically over the past decade—notably the sublime, uncharacteristically acoustic Fascinoma (Waterlily Acoustics, 1999) and sultry Maarifa Street: Magic Realism, Vol. 2 (Nyen, 2005)—Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street is the trumpeter's first album for ECM since 1985's Power Spot and, with the label's greater international reach and a major North American tour on the horizon, it may well be the album that introduces the innovative artist to a larger listening public and clarifies just how significant he has been and continues to be.

It's no hyperbole to suggest that without Jon Hassell there'd be no annual Punkt Festival, nor would artists like Arve Henriksen, Nils Petter Molvaer and David Sylvian (amongst others) be quite the same. Hassell's innovations in the areas of live sampling, real-time soundscaping and a musical confluence that he refers to as "The North and South of You"—meaning the cerebral/intellectual versus the physical/sensual—have inspired so many artists since his early collaborations with legendary producer/ambient music forefather Brian Eno that, while his name may not be as well-known as it should, it's an undeniable truth that the entire musical world would be a very different place without him...

- allaboutjazz.com