Jon Hassell – 22/03/1937 – 26/06/2021

After trumpeter and arch sound manipulator Jon Hassell appeared at Norway’s PUNKT Festival in 2008, it was impossible not to conclude that the master might just have been influenced by his pupils, Jan Bang and Eric Honoré, who had joined him onstage. Dubbed Norway’s electronic gurus, it would hardly be any surprise that Hassell took something from their thinking and approach — after all, his whole career had been shaped by experimental and progressive musical thinking, from the early progressive innovations of bandleader Stan Kenton to studying under Karlheinz Stockhausen, working with Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Brian Eno, David Sylvian and Hal Willner. During a period of study with Indian musician Pandit Pran Nath he learned to utilise techniques in the Kirana gharana vocal tradition on trumpet – a technique that would later influence the Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen – Hassell created a musical world beyond the musical mainstream which could rightly call his own.

Anticipating his music would be plainly labelled in order to sell it, he got in first, calling his music ‘Fourth World’ to discourage simplistic branding such as ‘world music’, ‘jazz’, ‘classical’, ‘minimal’ or ‘ambient’. His 1978 album, Vernal Equinox, was his first work to fall under the Fourth World moniker, with its mix of ethnic styles and electronics, although many attribute the term to a collaboration with Brian Eno, whom he met in New York, on Fourth World Vol. 1. Eno became Hassell’s most famous proselytiser and collaborator, working on an interface between ethnic sounds from global sources and electronics which Eno described as music from, “A globalised world, constantly integrating and hybridising, where differences were celebrated and dignified”.

Hassell never forgot his early jazz beginnings, City: Works of Fiction has a strong jazz bias with an eclectic line-up, while Fascinoma saw him fairly and squarely in jazz territory, exploring Duke Ellington’s ‘Caravan’ and the Nat King Cole hit of his youth, ‘Nature Boy’. Although he didn’t always see eye-to-eye with Brian Eno – he walked out of Eno’s and David Byrne’s session that produced the monster hit album My Life In The Bush of Ghosts – he subsequently became a kind of honourable session-man-cum-consultant on albums by Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian, Tears for Fears and Ry Cooder. Some of Hassell’s ideas presaged ‘chill-out’ music, while Dressing for Pleasure anticipated trip hop.

He has been lauded by the likes of Aphex Twin, Björk and k.d. lang, while his influence on jazz was most acutely felt in Norway’s jazz electronica scene, from Nils Petter Molvær to Arve Henriksen, from Jan Bang to Sidsel Endresen and Bugge Wesseltoft. He died on June 26 at the age of 84 after what his family called long-term health issues.