01. Flash Of The Spirit [Laughter] 5:48
02. Night Moves [Fear] 2:24
03. Air Afrique [Wind] 3:59
04. Out Pours (Kongo) Blue [Prayer] 7:14
05. Kaboo [Play] 2:54
06. (Like) Warriors Everywhere [Courage] 4:44
07. Dreamworld [Dance] 4:54
08. Tales Of The Near Future [Clairvoyance] 4:18
09. A Vampire Dances [Symmetry] 4:00
10. Masque [Strength] 11:42

The first ever reissue and remastering of Jon Hassell & Farafina’s prescient, “Fourth World” masterwork. Propulsive Burkinese rhythms meet revelatory, ambient soundscapes. Co-produced with the legendary studio team of Brian Eno & Daniel Lanois.

“[Hassell’s] command of microtonal shadings enabled him to blend into the West Africans’ distinctive sonic colorations, which would not have been possible for a player whose intonation conformed strictly to Western music’s equal temperament.” – Robert Palmer, New York Times 

Composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell has been an elusive, iconic musical figure for more than half a century. He’s best known as the pioneer and propagandist of “Fourth World” music, mixing technology with the tradition and spirituality of non-western cultures to create what he termed the “coffee-colored classical music of the future.” In 1987 he joined with Farafina, the acclaimed percussion, voice, and dance troupe from Burkina Faso, to record Flash of the Spirit. While the album is a natural extension of those “Fourth World” ideas, and a new strand of Possible Musics, it also a distinctive outlier in the careers of both artists; an unrepeated merging of sounds whose influence still reverberates today.

Hassell arrived as the outsider, having to slide in and around Farafina, an established group that started in 1978 where the leader, as he told Music Technology, was “somewhat inflexible in terms of new things. They were suspicious at first…about what could happen and why this whole thing was going on.”

But once settled in the studio, the musicians sparked off each other. The eight members of the band – who had also collaborated with the Rolling Stones and Ryuichi Sakamoto – brought their long apprenticed, virtuosic drumming and melodic textures (balafon, flute, voices) to the sessions. They built up layers and patterns of rhythm, while producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois (fresh off the phenomenal success of U2’s Joshua Tree) created a sonic atmosphere in which they could creatively intertwine with Hassell’s digitally processed trumpet and keyboards. Just the physical feel of the drums in the room was enough to inspire Hassell.

“There’s something about the volume of air that drums pump, there is a wonder quality about it that’s impossible to find any place else,” he recalled. “Even if you sampled all that and tried to duplicate it, I don’t think it would have the same feel.”

The experiment took root. Despite their initial skepticism, the musicians from Farafina ended up relishing their interaction with the studio team and the trumpeter/conceptualist Hassell. Souleymane “Mani” Sanou, Farafina’s band leader from the early 90’s on, remarked: “traditional instruments, they can meet with electronic and modern music; so collaborations are so important to us…yes, with Jon Hassell, the experience was amazing.”

The music that emerged was rich and groundbreaking, a move to transcend the boundaries between jazz, avant-garde classical, ambient and the deep rhythmic tradition embodied by Farafina. But of course, Hassell had been slowly blurring and ignoring such boundaries for years.

He’d served an apprenticeship with Stockhausen, worked with minimalists Terry Riley and LaMonte Young, studied Indian music under Pandit Pran Nath, and collaborated with artists like Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and David Sylvian, as well as forging a path into ambient music, through an especially fruitful partnership with Brian Eno on the albums Fourth World, Vol.1: Possible Musics and Dream Theory in Malaya.

Hassell’s ideas of melody and rhythm had moved beyond the confines of Western music, out into borderless, imagined spaces, and in Farafina he found the ideal companions in exploration. It’s an album of subtle, telling details, where the layers and textures build and change to highlight each other. On “Out Pours,” for instance, the groove simmers softly, led by shifting patterns on the balafon, while Hassell’s heavily treated trumpet creates breathy swirls of sound that play and dance around them. Percussion leads on “A Vampire Dances,” pushing and probing and seeming to force electronic shrieks as a response from Hassell’s trumpet, while the keyboard creates a bed of sound that refuses to hold still. “(Like) Warriors Everywhere” takes that idea even further. Over Farafina’s surging rhythms, Hassell’s electric piano and trumpet dig deep into abstract, melodic ideas hinted at by the Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis band.

What’s apparent is how carefully the musicians listen to each other and the ways in which they respond; the spaces become as important as the notes. Every piece of music is alive. It breathes, it changes and grows. Farafina create the rhythms and counter-rhythms that spring and move, making room for Hassell’s explorations. They affect him, and in turn what he plays alters what they do. It’s symbiotic; each inspires the other. The trumpet techniques that Hassell developed to play the microtones of Indian music – electronic and acoustic – let him easily slide through the music.  He becomes part of the whole, his trumpet another voice in the band, rather than an imposed, outside Western instrument – achieving one of the aims of the “Fourth World” credo, to create a new, natural trans-cultural harmony.

And nowhere is that harmony more apparent than on the epic final track, “Masque,” where percussion and treated trumpet draw the listener along on a journey through shifting landscapes that transform into unexpected colors with every turn. It becomes a series of discoveries that startle and delight and sometimes confound.

On its release 32 years ago, Flash of the Spirit was a revelation, a record that had no clear parallel for its

encompassing sound. Even today, now that the musical world has caught up with much of Jon Hassell’s vision, it still feels especially vibrant. The album remains a testament to both the influence Hassell has quietly exerted on contemporary music, and the forward-looking traditionalism of Farafina, one of West Africa’s great rhythmic ensembles.

As walls and barriers are erected around the globe, it is hard not to think of the music found on Flash of the Spirit as ever more relevant.  An echo from the past. Still transmitting future possibilities.

01. Chor Moiré
02. Courage
03. Dream Theory
04. Datu Bintung At Jelong
05. Malay
06. These Times…
07. Gift Of Fire
08. Ordinary Mind (bonus track)

 

When speaking of his musical journey — a journey that that spans more than five decades — Jon Hassell recently noted: “without overstating it too much I don’t know who else has had the kind of experience that I’ve had in various kinds of music.” It is very hard to argue with his self- estimation. Hassell’s soundworlds have been varied and bold and their influence on contemporary musics, discernable and ongoing.

A childhood in Memphis; a classical conservatory education studying the trumpet; composition and electronic music study with Stockhausen in Cologne; a passage through the New York minimalist sphere with Terry Riley, Lamonte Young and Phillip Glass; a singular and radicalized approach to the trumpet developed after a mentorship with the Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath; collaborative excursions with Eno, The Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian, Bjork and Ry Cooder; a continuous questioning of the dichotomies between North and South, sacred and sensual, primitive and futurist.

These cross-pollinating influences and pan-cultural musical educations led Hassell to seek sonic solutions outside of the didactics of western music. The result of this search was the gradual development of musical concepts and gestures that he grouped under the umbrella theory: “Fourth World.” In a 1997 interview he describes the genesis of these ideas:

“I wanted the mental and geographical landscapes to be more indeterminate- not Indonesia, not Africa, not this or that…something that could have existed if things were in an imaginary culture, growing up in an imaginary place with this imaginary music…I called it ‘coffee-colored classical music of the future’…What would music be like if ‘classic’ had not been defined as what happened in Central Europe two hundred years ago. What if the world knew Javanese music and Pygmy music and Aborigine music? What would ‘classical music’ sound like then?”

In the late 1970’s in New York, Hassell began to produce a series of astonishing albums where his trumpet explored both non-western modalities and dramatic sound processing (deftly rendered by nascent digital effects like the AMS harmonizer). Brian Eno, who was living New York at the time was thrilled by Hassell’s debut album Vernal Equinox and sought out its creator. Eventually they began an in-depth (and at times contentious) collaboration that resulted in the classic album Fourth World Vol.1: Possible Musics (also reissued by Glitterbeat Records).

While the partnership with Eno surely introduced Hassell’s music to a wider audience, it also left raw feelings and unresolved issues. As Eno charged headlong into “Fourth World”-ish collaborations with a new partner, David Byrne from The Talking Heads (My Life in The Bush of Ghosts / Remain in Light), Hassell began to feel that at best they were heavily borrowing concepts and sounds he had introduced them to, and at worst, that a full-scale appropriation was taking place.

As Hassell undertook the process of recording and finalizing Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two — the follow-up to Possible Musics — Brian Eno was again present, as both mixer and musician, but this time the album was clearly ascribed to Hassell. The back cover credits leave no room for interpretation or confusion: “All compositions by Jon Hassell. Produced by Jon Hassell.”

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An excerpt from the essay Dream Theory in Malaya by Kilton Stewart
In the West the thinking we do while asleep usually remains on a muddled, childish, or psychotic level because we do not respond to dreams as socially important and include dreaming in the educative process. This social neglect of the side of man’s reflective thinking, when the creative process is most free, seems poor education.

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Jon Hassell’s liner notes for Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two

Someplace I ran across an essay called Dream Theory in Malaya by an adventurer-ethnologist named Kilton Stewart describing a “dream tribe”—the Senoi—in Malaya (before it become “Malaysia”). Soon I’m having an affair with the cinematic sound of the word “Malaya” and all that it evokes: exotically-tuned melodies, gongs, birdcalls in the jungle. (Later I’ll have a little romance with an exotically-tuned woman from Kuala Lumpur that fills in the rest of the fantasy.) I’m in a different loft in the same building on Park Avenue South, practicing an invented exotic scale on top of a tambura-like drone consisting of a set of sine tones that I’ve tuned as a guide to keep me on the Indonesian-type tuning that nobody ever tried to play on a trumpet before.

A book called Primitive Peoples had a record inside with little snippets of music recorded around the world by a BBC team accompanying the Queen on her tour of the Commonwealth and one of them is this beautiful watersplash rhythm with giggling children and birds from a tribe—the Semelai—which, on my map, doesn’t look too far away from the Senoi so l built a rather elaborate musical form by cutting and pasting a few selected bars of this, and that became the basis for “Malay”, the centerpiece of the record.

I had heard from Brian about a couple of enterprising and talented brothers, Bob and Daniel Lanois who had set up a nice studio in a house on Grant Ave., in Hamilton, not far from Toronto, who were offering exceptional rates and I decided to make this record there, commuting from Michael Brook’s house in Toronto with my dog, Beeper. Michael was helping to coordinate the recording and I’d do sketches in his basement studio then drive to Hamilton where Brian was hanging out at chez Lanois and start to put things down on multitrack.

The opening track —“Chor Moiré” — is a fanfare of trumpets, looped and live, which suggest a kind of musical “moiré” patterning. Walter DeMaria (who was not only a groundbreaking artist but also the first drummer with the Velvet Underground ) came up to Canada for the studio fun and I swear he’s there doing “distant drums” someplace within Brian’s quasi-Polynesian drumming marking the ceremonial gait of the mass trumpets of “Courage” (named not only for the obvious but also a reference to the name of the lowest string on the tambura) which then reprise in the next track, transformed into the magical, dub-like atmosphere of “Dream Theory.”

Brian is probably under-credited on this record—maybe a reactionary move on my part to reaffirm an independent identity after the experience of finding Possible Musics—my music—in the “Eno” bin in record stores. Anyway, I gave him the trumpet solo on “These Times…” which he worked into the texture of his record, On Land. An effervescent Chinese girl and a hot, undercover summer in New York lead to the multileveled title, “Gift of Fire”: I’m thinking of her, I’m thinking of the fire pit in the cover painting, I’m thinking of that moment in the history of Homo Sapiens.

 

01. Chemistry 6:50
02. Delta Rain Dream 3:26
03. Griot (Over “Contagious Magic”) 4:00
04. Ba-Benzélé 6:15
05. Rising Thermal 14° 16′ N; 32° 28′ E 3:05
06. Charm (Over “Burundi Cloud”) 21:29

 

“Jon Hassell invented the term “Fourth World” both to describe his music and as a general term applicable to other global-minded work. This evokes the optimistic notion of a trans-cultural harmony beyond the divisions and competitiveness we are now part of, and preparing us how to deal with it joyfully rather than defensively. I am reminded of Thomas Mann’s statement: ‘Art is to the community as the dream is to the individual.’ Hopefully Jon Hassell’s dream will prove to be prophetic.” — Brian Eno

Originally released in 1980, Jon Hassell and Brian Eno’s collaborative album “Fourth World Music Vol.I: Possible Musics” is a sound document whose ongoing influence seems beyond dispute. Not only is the album a defining moment in the development of what Eno coined as “Ambient Music” but it also facilitated the introduction of Hassell’s “Future Primitive” trumpet stylings and visionary “Fourth World” musical theories to the broader public. These vectors continue to enrich contemporary audio culture. Eno’s Ambient strategies are now fixed in the DNA of electronic music and the cross-cultural legacy of Hassell’s “Fourth World” concept is apparent not only in the marketplace genre “World Music” but also more persuasively in the accelerating number of digitally driven, borderless musical fusions we now experience.

Brian Eno has been an essential fixture of both experimental and popular music since the 1970’s: An art school education; early success as an androgynous synthesizer interventionist with Roxy Music; a run of influential vocal-oriented solo records; the embrace of the term “ambient music” and the application of it to increasingly discreet and oblique electronic instrumental albums; seminal collaborations with David Bowie, The Talking Heads, Robert Fripp and Krautrock pioneers Cluster; and by the mid-80’s chart-topping marquee productions for the Irish rock band U2.

Jon Hassell’s musical journey, while more obscured from the cultural mainstream, is every bit as storied and individual as Eno’s. A childhood in Memphis; a classical conservatory education studying the trumpet; composition and electronic music study with Stockhausen in Cologne; a passage through the New York minimalist sphere with Terry Riley, Lamonte Young and Phillip Glass; a singular and radicalized approach to the trumpet developed after a mentorship with the Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath; collaborative excursions with The Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, David Sylvian, Bjork and Ry Cooder; an ongoing questioning of the dichotomies between North and South, sacred and sensual, primitive and futurist.

In an exclusive interview for the reissue liner notes, Hassell sized up his lifetime of musical experiences: “Without overstating it too much I don’t know who else has had the kind of experience that I’ve had in various kinds of music.”

These cross-pollinating influences and pan-cultural musical educations led Hassell to seek sonic solutions outside of the didactics of western music. The result of this search was the gradual development of musical concepts and gestures that he grouped under the umbrella theory: “Fourth World.” In a 1997 interview he describes the genesis of these ideas:

“I wanted the mental and geographical landscapes to be more indeterminate- not Indonesia, not Africa, not this or that…something that COULD HAVE existed if things were in an imaginary culture, growing up in an imaginary place with this imaginary music…I called it ‘coffee-colored classical music of the future’…What would music be like if ‘classic’ had not been defined as what happened in Central Europe two hundred years ago. What if the world knew Javanese music and Pygmy music and Aborigine music? What would ‘classical music’ sound like then?”

By the time that Eno and Hassell met, Hassell’s experiments with a “Fourth World” musical vocabulary were well underway and in fact it was because of these experiments, particularly Hassell’s debut album “Vernal Equinox” that Brian Eno purposefully sought him out. Eno remembers:

“This record (Vernal Equinox) fascinated me. It was a dreamy, strange, meditative music that was inflected by Indian, African and South American music, but also seemed located in the lineage of tonal minimalism. It was a music I felt I’d been waiting for.”

Hassell picks up the story of their actual first meeting: “Brian came to a concert that I was doing at The Kitchen, an avant-garde performance space in New York at that time (1980), and I called it “Fourth World” something or the other…he came up after the concert and introduced himself and said, “you know we should do something together.” So that’s how we met and we had a period of socializing and my introducing him to the things I was into, the musical things that I was into like the Ocora label and a lot of great ethnic music and recordings…”

Within a couple of months of Hassell’s performance at The Kitchen the duo entered Celestial Sound in New York City and began work on what would become “Fourth World Music Vol.I: Possible Musics.” Hassell invited previous collaborators like the Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos and the Senegalese drummer Ayibe Dieng to join the sessions. Most of the tracks carry a Hassell/Eno writing credit, though the 20-minute “Charm (Over ‘Burundi Cloud’)” was a carry over from Hassell’s concert repertoire. Hassell has made it clear in several interviews over the years that the album’s shared billing was at least partly inaccurate and that Eno’s contribution was mainly as a producer. In August of 2014 he offered these thoughts:

“He (Eno) had assumed that it was going to be a producer credit, you know on the cover, and I was thinking “gee I would really like to make some money off of this” and he was very, very popular at the time and his name meant a lot, so I said I’ll be first, it’ll be “Jon Hassell” slash “Brian Eno.” And that would help the sales… his contributions were in bringing the art school mind to the studio as in like “what would happen if we did this” right? For instance turning the tape over and getting the backwards echo…”

While Brian Eno has never commented publicly on the issue, a 2007 article he wrote for The Guardian, entitled “The debt I owe to Jon Hassell” makes it clear that he considered Hassell an influential mentor.
More spiky, angular and steeped in rhythm and exoticism than most of Eno’s records and more drone based, reflective and sonorous than most of Hassell’s outings, “Possible Musics”– whatever the actual division of labor in sound and concept – is a seminal highlight in both of their discographies. A meeting of two of the late 20th centuries most restless and prescient musicians, the album sounds as beguiling, indeterminate and other worldly today as it did 34 years ago when it was originally released.

The impact of “Possible Musics” on the contemporary music conversation was almost immediate. Just ten days after it was mastered Brian Eno and David Byrne convened in Los Angeles to continue experiments inspired in part by Hassell’s musical theories. The resultant album would be called “My Life in the Bush Of Ghosts.” All parties involved agree that “Ghosts” was originally conceived as a trio project that included Hassell but the idea fell apart over disagreements about logistics and musical direction. Hassell still remains bitter about what he considers the projects un-credited appropriation of his musical signatures. From there it was a short jump forward to the chart-topping, afro-futurism of The Talking Heads “Remain In Light,” an album that Eno co-produced and Hassell guested on.

“Fourth World” strategies have echoed, and can still be heard echoing in the music of Peter Gabriel (WOMAD & Real World), Nils Petter Molvaer, Bjork, David Sylvian, David Byrne (Luaka Bop), Ryuichi Sakamoto, Damon Albarn (“Mali Music”& Africa Express), DJ Spooky, Jah Wobble, Matmos, 23 Skidoo, Goat, Bill Laswell, Mark Ernestus, Adrian Sherwood (African Headcharge) and of course the ongoing projects of Eno and Hassell themselves.

Brian Eno offers this: “I owe a lot to Jon. Actually, a lot of people owe a lot to Jon. He has planted a strong and fertile seed whose fruits are still being gathered.”

Jon Hassell & Brian Eno: Fourth World Music Vol. I: Possible Musics: Glitterbeat is proud and honored to re-release and re-introduce this compelling, groundbreaking album.