The life of the spirit may be fairly
represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area.The whole triangle is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow; what today can be understood only by the apex and to the rest of the triangle is an incomprehensible gibberish, forms tomorrow the true thought and feeling of the second segment. At the apex of the top segment stands often one man, and only one. His joyful vision cloaks a vast sorrow. Even those who are nearest to him in sympathy do not understand him. Angrily they abuse him as charlatan or madman. So in his lifetime stood Beethoven, solitary and insulted. Wassily Kandinsky (1866 –1944)


Thursday, January 12, 2012

Jon Hassell - Blue Period / Light On Water



1.Blue Period 0:00 2.Light On Water 7:15 Album : Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street


Jon Hassell, "Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In the Street" (ECM). If Jon Hassell did indeed set out several decades back to create an idiosyncratic strain of music that would fit neatly into no single category, he has by now succeeded. In a career that found him studying in both Buffalo and Rochester, traveling to India to fully digest the glorious micro-tonal intricacies of that country's music, earning both respect and scorn in the jazz community, and becoming a first-call for the more esoteric and discerning class of rock musicians, (David Sylvian, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno), Hassell has played by no one's rules but his own. If that meant delving into ambient sounds, or treating his trumpet to a lavish buffet of effects devices, or attempting to phrase his solos like an Indian Kiranic singer, well, then so be it. With "Last Night the Moon Came dropping Its Clothes In the Street," Hassell and his band, Maarifa Street, delve into a protean, constantly morphing melange of sound. Far from formless and nowhere near "new age," the group weaves a dreamy tapestry of sound assimilating African, Indian and American forms, all presented with a serial composer's conception of time and space. Hassell in fact studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and the late Stockhausen's tendency to create scenarios of "controlled randomness" in his pieces hangs above Hassell and company's efforts here. This is beautiful, evocative, often transcendent music, but most importantly, it's also substantive; though he's been accused of merely doodling in the dippy ooze of new age music, Hassell is in fact a radical who can be seen to have carried on the work started by Miles Davis with the albums "In a Silent Way" and "On the Corner," with much more of an emphasis on the European influences than the African- American ones. You get as much out of "Last Night the Moon Came" as you put into the listening experience. It is, as the saying goes, a real trip. (Jeff Miers)



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