Above: Sunjae Lee

Equipped with an old Tascam 242 four-track recorder and determined to make this music known to the rest of the world, he founded the Mung Music label this year, with their first releases launched in July.

A little background

Korean saxophonist Sunjae Lee is a native of Boston. After studying music, he released three albums as a leader or soloist at the end of the 2000s on the independent label Pure Potentiality: Srivbanacore, Meditations, and Equilibrium. In early 2010, he moved to Portland, Oregon, where he pursued a career in natural medicine and obtained a doctorate in naturopathy and Asian medicine. At that time, he led a jazz trio, the Kin Trio, which released the album Breathe on PJCE Records. He also learned the art of Asian calligraphy.

In 2014, he moved to Seoul, South Korea, to practice naturopathy, while continuing his musical activities with various jazz groups, including drummer Soojin Suh’s Chordless Quartet, which explores harmony and space with great freedom. 

In 2019, Lee released the album Entropy, featuring trumpeter Peter Evans, with whom he had worked during his years in Boston.

In 2020, he founded Mung Music, an independent label dedicated to showcasing experimental improvised music from South Korea using an old Tascam 424 cassette recorder.

Lee is also a painter in the Asian tradition. He’s the artist who designs the covers for the albums released on his label.

To find out more about this new label, PAN M 360 contacted Lee, who took part in the interview and answered our questions.

PAN M 360: In an interview, you said that when you were growing up in Boston, you couldn’t care less about your Korean heritage. When did the question of identity suddenly change and become important, and how did it happen?

Sunjae Lee: This happened late in the game for me, while I was in the middle of studying Chinese Medicine and Naturopathy in Portland, and delving deep into the Chinese language and history. Eventually I began learning about the various Korean systems of traditional medicine, and I think that was the final straw for me, so to speak. For decades, I was always uncomfortable about my identity and the fact that I potentially could connect with a rich heritage, ancestry, and language, but had been basically ignoring it. Learning traditional medicine, as well as suddenly becoming interested in Asian brush painting, were the two biggest triggers for me.

PAN M 360: How’s the jazz and improv scene in South Korea?

(A note to readers: jazz made its first appearances in South Korea in the late 1950s, mainly in clubs frequented by American soldiers stationed there after the Korean War. The singer Park Seong-yeon later helped popularize the genre by opening the Janus Club in Seoul in the late 1970s. Since then, a number of jazz clubs have opened there – Once In a Blue Moon, Jazz and the City, All That Jazz, Club Evans, Club Moon Glow and Soul to God. In Busan, you can find Club Monk, The Back Room, Jazz Cat)

Sunjae Lee: The conventional jazz scene is thriving. It has a bit of a conservative nature, but there are many talented musicians, and definitely places here and there to play. As for the improv music scene, as you might have guessed already, it is underground to the point of being nearly extinct, but there are little pockets and islands here and there which we are all working hard to synthesize into a community. I believe that the appearance of Choi Sun Bae is a major event, and is the first time that there is a true “elder” who is willing and able to help support the young musicians here. Of course, there is the master saxophonist Kang Tae Hwan, but he is a bit more reclusive and only performs a few times a year, and almost never with the younger generations. Through Choi Sun Bae, I learned of the existence of Alfred 23 Harth, a near legendary saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist who has been active on the worldwide experimental music scene since the 1960s, and has been living in South Korea for the past 20 years. Alfred has also begun playing with us, and has been incredibly kind and supportive, another elder figure that has suddenly appeared and gives me hope for the scene here.

PAN M 360: Why were you compelled to start a new record label in the first place?

Sunjae Lee: The main reason is to highlight the amazing musicians here in Korea who play improvised and experimental music – or even just original compositions. There is virtually no audience for it here, and only one venue that consistently allows for and supports this type of music, called Ghetto Alive. They are doing an amazing job, but there is only so much that a single venue can do to support a scene. Thus, the goal of the label is to feature these musicians and show them to the international audience, because they are incredible and deserve more recognition. 

PAN M 360: What notion lies behind the word “mung”, and what would be the label’s philosophy?

Sunjae Lee: “Mung” is a Korean term, a bit of a slang phrase that means something like “spacing out”. When someone is really tired and stares off into space, or is just not thinking about anything in particular, this is when we say that phrase. During these times, our conscious minds take a break, allowing for our subconscious minds to take over, and sometimes give way to new, brilliant thoughts. In improvised music, the subconscious mind’s fluid brilliance is also valued over the conscious mind’s concrete thought processes, and that’s why I chose the term to represent the type of music. 

Musically speaking, I hope to capture three types of subgenres that have no representation or support here. Firstly and mainly, jazz musicians who are interested in free jazz and improvised music. Second, jazz musicians who write original compositions that feature improvisation heavily, or are unconventional or on the experimental side. Finally, collaborations with traditional Korean instrumentalists who also do free improvisation – this group is growing in number, and there are now quite a few amazing improvisers who use traditional Korean instruments (Doyeon Kim, in the U.S., is the most impressive example in my mind). 

PAN M 360: Can you talk about each of the four albums that you put out in July and August, their particularities and the musicians involved?

Sunjae Lee: I will start from the second one – Eunyoung Kim’s album Earworm is the first “official” release of the label, and she is one of the artists that I was most interested in for the label. In my mind, she is a total genius of jazz piano and should already be world-famous, but here in Korea, she does not have that kind of recognition. She sat down and recorded those 11 tracks all at once in the course of a couple hours, without any rehearsal and hardly any editing afterwards, and I think it turned out amazingly well.

Next is Ma-chal by a group called Saaamkiiim – which is an improvising trio that has a motley crew of drums, electronics, and a traditional Korean bowed instrument (like an erhu). I’ve been following the group since its inception a couple years back, and appreciate their consistent and playful chemistry, and I’ve also admired the way that the leader Dey Kim has spearheaded his own improvised music series here and there, in places where there were none.

Finally, the most recent release, Embrace, was from the new project Baum Sae, which translates as “night bird”, by drummer Soojin Suh, who is one of the most active and prolific on the scene here. She has been collaborating for years with traditional Korean vocalist Borim Kim in the group Near East Quartet, led by Sungjae Son, and the two of them added a geumungo player (a traditional plucked instrument) and made some new compositions combining improvisations with traditional Korean music elements. 

PAN M 360: What did you try to achieve with your Palindrome, with regards to its theme ?

Sunjae Lee: The Palindrome album was a test album of sorts, but also very meaningful as the first effort of the label because of the sudden reappearance of Choi Sun Bae on the free jazz scene here. To give some background, he was one of Korea’s only free jazz “masters”, playing improvised shows with Kang Tae Hwan here since the 1970s, but due to the chilly reception among Korean audiences, he decided to play improvised music only in Japan, where he gained a large following. We thought that he had transitioned to mostly standard jazz and lost interest in free jazz, but thanks to the efforts of the owner of Ghetto Alive, it was discovered that this was not the case. 

He did a solo, improvised set for 90 minutes straight at Ghetto Alive, and it was one of the most compelling, impressive shows that I’ve seen in my time here in Korea. I contacted him immediately afterwards, and began playing with him with drummer Junyoung Song, who is Eunyoung Kim’s husband and my closest musical associate here. I should mention that Choi is nearly 80 years old, but has the stamina and improvisatory wit of someone our age, and title Palindrome was inspired by this feeling – him being at nearly the opposite end of the age spectrum while feeling similar to us in energy, a seeming reversal of time. 

PAN M 360: What are your plans for the label?

Sunjae Lee: I have five more recordings lined up for the rest of this year, and I hope to release them all by early 2021, and continue to generate publicity by spreading word to overseas publications and musicians. My hope is that the foreign acknowledgement will aid in the grant-application process, as the Korean government tends to support projects that spread Korean culture overseas. My dream is to be able to pay the musicians generously for their time and efforts – as I have a full time job managing a chiropractic clinic here, making money is not a personal goal of mine through this label – and encourage them to keep creating their original music, and connect them to audiences abroad that can appreciate their music much more than the local scene here. After the label gains some traction, my hope is that other great Korean musicians will take notice and in particular, I hope that musicians such as Okkyung Lee and Kang Tae Hwan might one day consider to record on the label as well. And perhaps in the far-off future, I hope the label’s presence will encourage improvising musicians from abroad to visit and make music with us as well!  

The Korean sector

For those interested in going back up the Korean trail mixing traditional and improvised music, let’s mention the ensemble Black String – guitar, percussions (including a yanggeum, a dulcimer played with small hammers similar to the Persian santur, comprising seven sets of four strings), bamboo flutes and geomungo (a six-stringed zither). Black String is, by the way, the English translation of geomungo. The quartet describes its music as “Korean contemporary music without borders”. So far they have released three albums on the ACT label: Mask Dance (2016), Karma (2018) and NES (2020), which also features the Vietnamese-born French guitarist Nguyen Lê and the Moroccan guimbri player Majid Bekkas. 

Also worth mentioning is the Near East Quartet (mentioned above) of Korean saxophonist Sungjae Son, which includes drummer Soojin Suh, who released a record on the ECM label in 2018 juxtaposing elements of contemporary jazz and traditional Korean music.

Photos: Roman Koval

PAN M 360: Inspired, among others, by your late friend the German painter and illustrator Mati Klarwein, to whom we owe several of your album covers, you apply the pictorial technique of pentimento to your recent compositions. Thus, the textures far outweigh the melodic articulation, the speed of execution or the apparent complexity. The meticulousness of your sound superimpositions generates unique textural exploration, sumptuous atmospheres, evanescent forms that incite the listener to a transversal perception of sound.  

But since the beginning of your career, hasn’t the quest for new textures been at the heart of your creative process? 

Jon Hassell: Yes, I believe so. Recently, by the way, I’ve discovered new electronic alterations, new sounds, new loops… Far beyond the melodic lines played on the trumpet, the electronically altered sounds involve harmonic progressions in my music, which adds to the fluidity and diversity of the information offered. Things are developing, new sound possibilities are more and more diversified, so it’s a question of being aware of it.

PAN M 360: John von Seggern (bass, synths, keyboards), Rick Cox (electric guitar, midi guitar, bass clarinet), Eivind Aarset (electric guitar, sampler), Hugh Marsh (violin, orchestrations) Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche (violin, sampler), Sam Minaie (bass) and Peter Freeman (bass) were your acolytes for the recordings under the Pentimento banner. How would you describe this collaboration?

JH: These amazing musicians I have worked with all have an interesting and personalized approach to their instruments, and to this mantra we share. Beyond their instrumental virtuosity, they have their own colouring approach with the music, their own effects pedals, their own knowledge of electronics. With the help of all these new electronic tools, they can colour things electronically. Thus, our music is a mixture of electronic music, ethnic music and other music that each of us has listened to along our own path.

PAN M 360: Four decades ago, at the time of your album with Brian Eno, you coined the expression “Fourth World” to define the universe of your inspirations. Indian classical music, West African music, modern jazz, western contemporary music and electronic music are still among the colours of your palette today. 

In music, is the creative dynamic irremediably global?

JH: Yes, absolutely. I’m not the kind of person who’s going to be confined indefinitely to a particular style, or a community of musicians, or anything like that.  I’ve always done it that way, by the way, whether it’s contemporary music with Stockhausen, ragas with Pandit Pran Nath, or my association with La Monte Young and Terry Riley. I have been very lucky to be able to learn from musicians and masters from all over the world, with their own traditions and ways of doing things. I love the music of the West, but also of India, West Africa, or Brazil, where the impressionism of French music has become tropical. 

PAN M 360: How do you manage to maintain your state of inspiration, even this exceptional freshness in your creative practice?

JH: You always have to ask yourself what you really like. Even if you’ve had some success, fame or notoriety in your life, it doesn’t matter. It’s always good to keep that in mind when you look at the outcome of your work – is it satisfying? Are you satisfied with what you’ve accomplished? Were you making an inspired piece of work or a product, so to speak, a musical product? You have to try to make music that you enjoy, and that reflects the way you see yourself as a sentient being, you know, to continue your development all the time.  

So I have this mantra – what do I really like? What that means, in concrete terms, is that you have to push all those things that you like a little bit further, or maybe the things that you think you have to do to maintain an audience that you’re lucky enough to have conquered. You’ve got to be honest to yourself and admit that financial success or fame could be an obstacle to moving forward, into something else. Of course, it depends on how comfortable you are in doing the same thing over and over…

PAN M 360: Did the musicians who took part in your recent recording sessions share these values? 

JH: Of course. The creative process is the result of sharing interests and sensitivities for a common goal. And of course this mantra keeps us alert and creative, to which we add new variations. Everybody had this same attitude – let’s go to the music that sounds good. Then, it was a question of letting each one exercise his profession with his tools, his sound encyclopedia. Gradually, those musicians developed with me a common sensibility. Those friends and colleagues also became my critics and guides.

PAN M 360: However, most artists gradually abandon this state once they have conquered their audience. Only a tiny minority manage to do so, and you are part of this cohort, is it a question of persistence?

JH: If you keep asking yourself this question, not only from a neutral point of view but also from a personal point of view, I think you have a good chance of being fresh, and letting only that which really touches something in you into your art. But you have to find that out. Then it’s a matter of listening to your own body and your own taste. You also need to have the courage to admit to yourself that some of the sounds you have loved in your art are no longer as fresh as they used to be. Listening to yourself, you need to identify what is bothering you and realize that it is time to find something else. And so, without having to play a role that is not yours, you will be more willing to hear the sounds that will bring things together and be your new inspiration.

PAN M 360: Haven’t you maintained this essential questioning since your beginnings, in fact?

JH: For Pentimento, as for my previous projects, I followed what I really like, this mantra continues to be repeated. If you are true to yourself, in the long run, you could make up for it by studying any amazing music that comes to you from elsewhere, from Tom Jobim to Karlheinz Stockhausen. You learn to be honest with yourself and to admit that you can’t do that for the rest of your life. It is also always sane to stay a little bit hungry.

PAN M 360: There’s no major break in your work as we’ve known it since the ’60s and ’70s, do you ever reflect on your big achievements over the years? 

JH: Not really. I don’t sit around longing for a period and wishing it back. Once again, my mantra comes into play – if you ask yourself what you really like, you look ahead, and you keep out of boredom. You don’t need nostalgia to stimulate your imagination and feel you’ve reached the essence of something you value. 

PAN M 360: Some of your predecessors had the same attitude as yours, whatever musical style they used – would you give any examples?

JH: Duke Ellington is a good example. From his early compositions to the end of his life, there was always an awareness of the possibilities offered all over the world. He understood that if you don’t get tied down to the same groove, if you don’t always walk on past achievements, you could identify new things that you would share with other musicians in search of new sounds. That’s why Ellington was one of a kind in jazz, open to French impressionism and endowed with an eternal drive. I feel the same way about Gil Evans’ harmonic vision and Miles Davis’ playing. Everything they did had a very special touch, and it also had this harmonic affinity with the music of Debussy and Ravel. So you don’t have to feel safe with your little chord progressions. Even drug addicts can get tired of using the same drug!

PAN M 360: In this period of pandemic, everything is going well on your side?

JH: Yes, I’m fine and I stay home. I’m not doing any touring until new ways of presenting things come along.  It’s a matter of waiting, watching and staying out of the flow of the virus. It’s a new time… audiences have become decentralized, it’s no longer a group of people that are enthusiastic in front of you, under the same roof. Not the time for gathering big audiences, like president Trump likes to do (laughs). So you just have to go with that, keep trying to innovate, make things happen.

Photo: Roman Koval

Selective Timeline (Conclusion)

In 2005, Hassell took part in the Punkt festival in Kristiansand, Norway – two real-time remixes of his concert by Jan Bang and Erik Honoré can be heard on the album Punkt live remixes vol. 1, released in 2008.

In 2006, he took part in Hadouk Trio’s album Utopies, on which he co-wrote two of the three pieces he played on.

In 2007-2008, he was among the musicians who interpreted Jon Balke’s magnificent Siwan, amn encounter between Middle Eastern, Andalusian, and Baroque music, which was released by ECM the following year.

The year after saw the release of Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street. Hassel was supported by an ensemble he called the Maarifa Street Band, the core of which consisted of Freeman and Cox, who were joined by various others as the songs went on, including guitarist Eivind Aarset, fiddler Jan Bang, keyboardist Jamie Muhoberac and violinist Kheir-Eddine M’kachiche. On “Abu Gil”, for example, he takes up the “Caravan” theme, while the rhythm section and the guitarist indulge in some gentle funk, onto which M’kachiche sketches Arabic patterns. Elsewhere, the melodic and rhythmic lines, and the live sampling layers Jan Bang injects into the mix, weave a shimmering, colourful web whose overall cohesion is so precise and delicate as to be transcendent. This album is a pure delight!

In 2010, Hassell took part in the production of Jan Bang’s album And Poppies from Kandahar, on which he co-wrote the two pieces he plays on: “Passport Control” and “Exile from Paradise”. 

Innovating again

In 2018, he launched Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One) on Ndeya, a label he founded with the collaboration of Matthew Jones of Warp Records. Tirelessly, he continued to explore on it. This time, it was by playing with the superimposition of images and sound fragments, by transparencies. We know that in a recording, there is relief, depth, a certain notion of three-dimensionality, but here the trumpeter pushes the exercise further. It’s as if he manages to make another level appear behind the one we hear in the foreground. To achieve this, he sometimes uses a blurring similar to that of the aerial perspective that painters used to employ. On other occasions, it’s by juxtaposing two frames, the second one being a trace rhythmically shifted in relation to the first one. This gives the impression at times that there are gaps in the music and another piece lying behind, creating striking synesthetic effects. One can imagine the precision necessary to create these illusions at the time of the mix – surgical!

In July 2020, he released the sequel, Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two). 

Rather than offering a single 75-minute disc (or a double album of two LPs, since vinyl has regained favour), Hassell preferred to split Pentimento‘s pieces into two volumes. Most of the tracks on this second volume were therefore recorded at the same time as those on the first, but when Hassell listened to them again after letting them rest for a while, he was not entirely satisfied. So he began to rework them. As a result, on this second volume, we can “see through the sound”, as the title rightly indicates, these levels in the background. The elements in the foreground seem to stand out even more clearly, and the textures are at once better defined, more varied and even more abundant.

In the first piece, “Fearless”, for example, there’s the sound of flowing water, a raspy intermittent drone that sounds like a contrabass clarinet note, a rhythmic pattern provided by a guitar and keyboards, chords that evoke Portishead, some machine sounds and above it all, Hassell’s hovering trumpet. Then in the back, at times, layers of another pattern appear and, in the distance, Hugh Marsh’s violin… Some pieces are vaporous, like “Timeless” and “Moons of Titans”, others are more rhythmic and bumpy, like “Unknown Wish” or “Reykjavik”, with their more experimental sound fragments and glitch. On the gliding “Delicado”, one might think they recognize, in the filigree, the echo of some of the trumpet player’s old pieces. On the aptly named “Lunar”, the judicious yet abundant use of echo really transports us to another planet.

The last one, “Timeless”, is an utterly hypnotizing ballad with intersecting melodic lines, enhanced by all sorts of little rhythmic noises, some of which evoke teletype machines, with the various patterns seeming to fluctuate from one level to another. As long as you listen carefully, the whole thing will leave you dumbfounded.

If we’ve heard little of him over the last decade, and his concerts have become rare, it’s because he’s been at work on re-releasing some of his albums (Vernal Equinox, Dream Theory in Malaya and City: Works of Fiction) and has devoted himself to writing a book entitled The North and South of You. In it he analyzes the current North-South dynamic, with on the one hand the northern hemisphere, rational, logical and technological, dominating, and on the other hand the southern hemisphere, which is that of intuition, of samba… and the imbalance that exists between the two. He seems to still be seeking a publisher.

Financial difficulties

It’s also that with age (he turned 83 in March), Hassell began to have health problems. Since he lives in Los Angeles with his dog Hendrix, and since in the United States, as everyone knows, health care is not exactly affordable, he has built up a pretty big bill in recent years. To wipe the slate clean, some friends have started a fundraising campaign.

If you would like to contribute to this campaign and show your gratitude for his tireless research and exploration, and the hours of delight you’ve spent listening to his music, just click on the link here.

Read our interview with Jon Hassell tomorrow.

Photo: Roman Koval

Selective Timeline (continued)

In 1983, Hassell released Aka / Darbari / Java – Magic Realism, with Daniel Lanois again producing. This time, Hassell took his exploration a little further, mixing elements of the polyphonic music of the Aka people, a pygmy population from Central Africa (which Ligeti and Steve Reich were also interested in), with motifs from Darbari’s Indian ragas, and Javanese gamelan music with Senegalese percussion. By his own admission, he seeks to create a classical music of the future that was “coffee colour”, i.e. of mixed race.

He then collaborated with David Sylvian, playing on the album Brilliant Trees (1984), of which he co-wrote two tracks (“Weathered Wall” and “Brilliant Trees”), and on Alchemy: An Index of Possibility (1985), of which he co-wrote the three-part “Words With the Shaman”.

In 1986, he published Power Spot at ECM. Produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, this album is a bit like Fourth World vol. 1: Possible Musics, with more rhythm. The two tracks that start each side of the LP, “Power Spot” and “Wing Melodies” are so catchy, they’re almost pop because. The other pieces are more ethno-ambient, but nicely arranged. Probably his most immediately accessible album. The sound quality is particularly enveloping.

Hassell composed the piece “Pano Da Costa” for Kronos Quartet, which was released in 1987 on the quartet’s album White Man Sleeps. 

He composed the music, which he performed before an audience every night in the fall of 1987, for Zangezi; a Supersaga in Twenty Planes, a play based on the texts of the Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, directed by Peter Sellars.

Because of the peculiar sound of his trumpet playing, pop artists began to ask him for help. He participated in the recording of Mainstream by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions in 1987, and The Seeds of Love by Tears for Fears in 1989. He was later pursued by Ani DiFranco, k. d. lang, Holly Cole, Baba Maal, and Ibrahim Ferrer, among others. He also collaborated with fashion designers Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo, and choreographers Merce Cunningham and Alvin Ailey. 

After assisting with the soundtrack of Alan Parker’s 1985 film Birdy, Peter Gabriel invited him again to work on the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese’s 1989 film The Last Temptation of Christ.

A new twist

In 1990, Hassell took another turn with the album City: Works of Fiction. At that time, the arrival of MIDI systems and new sampling technologies made it possible to create increasingly labyrinthine music. At the same time, hip hop was revolutionizing the rhythmic dimension of music. Hassell was particularly impressed by the intricate collages of Hank Shocklee on Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back. The first track on Hassell’s album, “Voiceprint (Blind From The Facts)”, includes a sample of “She Watch Channel Zero?!” from that record. He realized that these collages, directly in the line of Stockhausen’s work and musique concrète, had entered the collective unconscious, and decided to go all the way in that direction. 

As its name suggests, this record is resolutely urban. The wefts of his music are still Hindustani ragas, but the new urban dimension he integrates into it is expressed in a more biting, rough, fragmented, bristling and dense manner, his textures even more kaleidoscopic. Rock, jazz, and African polyrhythm were now joined by rap, but it’s as if urban chaos, with its traffic and construction-site noises, were added as well. 

The substantially expanded 2014 re-release – which includes two more CDs, the first of a concert given at the time, mixed live by Brian Eno, and the second of demos, studio scraps and remixes – allows one to appreciate the full extent of this change of direction. 

In the fall of the same year, under the direction of Hector Zazou, he took part in the recording and co-wrote a piece for Les nouvelles polyphonies corses, in which Manu Dibango and Ryuichi Sakamoto participated, among others.

Four years later, he came back with Dressing for Pleasure, this time with trip hop, acid jazz and breakbeats, on which he surrounded himself with numerous bass players from all horizons, including Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Trevor Dunn, and even Buckethead, who swapped out his guitar for the occasion, as well as Peter Freeman, who became a faithful collaborator.

In 1995, Hassell began a collaboration with Ry Cooder and participated on a number of his albums: the soundtracks to the films Primary Colors, Wim Wenders’ film The End of Violence, Chavez Ravine, My Name Is Buddy and I, Flathead.

A remarkably clean record

In 1999, he released Fascinoma. Arriving in the middle of his career, this album is to be marked with a white stone. Not only because it is remarkably pure, but also because it is the only record where the sound of his trumpet is not tampered with by the usual effects, as if he had wanted to make a clean sweep. To capture the purity of the timbre of this one, and of the other instruments, the recording – entirely analog – was even carried out using three-electrode tube microphones designed expressly for these sessions, which take place in a chapel with exceptional acoustics in Santa Barbara ,on the Californian coast.

The magic begins in the first piece, a stripped-down version of Eden Abhez’s “Nature Boy”, popularized by Nat “King” Cole in 1948, in which the bamboo flute of India’s Ronu Majumbar deliciously wraps itself around Hassell’s trumpet. This is not the only cover, however, and there are also two slowed-down versions of the famous “Caravan” by Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington, which evoke even more admirably than the original caravan of camels undulating across the dunes at dusk. Your humble correspondent returns to these regularly, as they are so bewitching. The scattered, almost floating chords of the pianist Jacky Terrasson contribute a great deal. The production was assured by Ry Cooder, whom Hassell then described as a “spirit catcher”.

In 2005, he released Maarifa Street: Magic Realism 2, which was, in a way, a sequel to his 1983 album. Maarifa means “knowledge” or “wisdom” in Arabic. This album is the first to be composed from three live recordings – one of which was at the Montreal Jazz Festival – but then reworked in the studio. Only one piece remained as it was, the very last, the encore given in Milan. Hassell’s wish in doing so was to blend the spontaneous elements and imperfections of the concert with the precision and detail that the studio allows.

The results find Hassell’s playing as silky and restrained as ever. As for his musicians, bassist Peter Freeman, keyboardist John Beasley, and guitarist Rick Cox, as well as singer and oud player Dhafer Youssef in Paris, and trumpeter Paolo Fresu in Milan, they constitute a model of precision. Together, they continued to perfect this blend of ambient and improvisation that, without the least bit of hurry, unfolds its splendours, as discreet as they are exquisite.

You can read the third part of PAN M 360’s Jon Hassell dossier here.

Photo: Roman Koval

It’s true that Hassell has a sound and has created a musical universe that is instantly recognizable, which is the mark of the greats. But who exactly is he and, above all, what has he done to stand out in this way? To answer this question, PAN M 360 has retraced his journey. 

Selective Timeline

Jon Hassell was born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 22, 1937. After completing a master’s degree at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, where he became particularly interested in the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, he continued his studies in Cologne with the latter. Among his fellow students were Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay, who later formed the group Can. 

Returning to the United States two years later, in 1967, he met Terry Riley at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the following year he was one of the musicians who took part in the first recording of his now famous In C. 

While completing a doctorate in musicology in Buffalo, Hassell played in La Monte Young’s group Theatre of Eternal Music in New York City. 

While rehearsing before a performance of Young’s Dream House in Rome in 1971, the Indian musician Pandit Pran Nath, who was also on the evening’s programme, began to make vocal variations around what he was playing, tracing all sorts of unfamiliar motifs in the air. A revelation! Hassell went to India to study with Nath. There he became interested in the world’s traditional music, and sought to reproduce on his trumpet the vocal techniques used by Pran Nath.

This is marked by the characteristic way of sliding from one note to another, called meend, which is found in Hindustani ragas. Hassell realized that by blowing his trumpet more as if it were a conch shell, and by exerting less pressure from his lips on the mouthpiece, he could use the vibrations of his lips to create a kind of supplementary voice to that produced by the air column. In this way, he not only reproduces the glissandi, but also derives a completely new and original sound from his instrument, which he immediately begins to develop. 

In another, more recent profile, Hassell explained that he has also developed a technique in which he blows his trumpet so as to obtain, for example, a C, but by playing with the pistons so as to obtain a D, thus sliding from C to D. Combined with a harmonizer, this technique will allow him to nicely expand his chromatic palette. 

Pran Nath also made him realize that there was a “microworld of connections” between different kinds of music, which he continues to explore even today.

Back in the West, Hassell began the recording sessions – which lasted from October 1976 to October 1977 – of his first record, Vernal Equinox (Spring Equinox), where he put into practice what he had learned, already toying with the sound of his trumpet. First of all, like Miles Davis, who had been using them for a few years at that point, with the wah-wah (as can be noticed on the very first piece, “Toucan Ocean”), but also with various other electronic effects.

Released in 1978 by Lovely Music, a very new and small avant-garde New York label which had just re-released Meredith Monk’s first album, as well as Robert Ashley’s Private Parts, Vernal Equinox caught the attention of Brian Eno, at that moment a much sought-after producer, who soon offered to collaborate with him. 

In 1980, the two of them released Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics under their two names, “Fourth World” being a unified future-primitive sound combining features of the world’s ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques. The record features a mix of avant-garde melodic themes, improvised jazz flights, and African and Middle Eastern rhythmic figures that would have a huge influence on so-called tribal techno. The production by Eno, who co-wrote three of the six pieces, admirably blends ethnic, electronic and ambient elements.

The beginning of the consecration

The album was immediately hailed as a success and found itself in the annual top ten of numerous critics. It is thus the occasion for a greater number of music lovers to discover this amazing trumpet sound, which sounds more like that of a shakuhachi, all the more so as it is at times treated with an inverted echo – a striking effect, especially for the time. By the way, the photo on the cover, taken by satellite, is of the region south of Khartoum in Sudan. 

Hassell went on to participate in the recording of Talking Heads’ masterpiece Remain in Light, produced by Brian Eno and largely inspired by Fela Kuti’s album Afrodisiac. 

In 1981, he released Dream Theory in Malaya (Fourth World Volume 2), where with Daniel Lanois at the controls this time, he continued his exploration with perhaps even more brilliance, even judiciously adding to the whole sounds from the jungle, in the manner of Martin Denny’s exotica.  

In 1982, he took part in the track “Dunwich Beach”, which closed Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land.

You can read the second part of PAN M 360’s Jon Hassell dossier here.

In 1964, Ennio Morricone was already on a roll as a conductor and composer. Sergio Leone asked him to create a musical score for A Fistful of Dollars, his first spaghetti Western. The two Romans had known each other since childhood. Their collaboration would prove to be fusional and last 20 years, until Once Upon a Time in America in 1984. In the meantime, Morricone composed the soundtracks for six other films that Leone directed, wrote or produced: For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Once Duck, You Sucker! (1971), My Name is Nobody (1973) and A Genius, Two Partners and a Dupe (1975).

Leone, quite lucidly, acknowledged that the immense success of his Westerns relied at least as much on Morricone’s talent as on his own. In fact, given their strength, Morricone’s compositions quickly escaped the screens to begin their own lives, moving from “film music” to “music”, no qualifier. From the late 1960s to 1975, the soundtracks of Once Upon a Time in the West and My Name is Nobody were common to countless suburban living rooms.

Leone had created a fantasized American West, with filming generally taking place in Cinecittà or in the mountains and deserts of Spain, with occasional shots of Monument Valley inserted. Morricone responded to Leone’s fantasies with freely imagined music. His scores largely escaped the traditional music of the American West, with the exception of the Mexican components, i.e. military marches and mariachis, all with trumpets well up front. The twangy guitar was anachronistic and the harmonica was alien. 

However, the abundance of finds made up for all kinds of deficiencies: ingenious percussion imitating hoof-clattering and gun or whip shots, bells of all kinds, harpsichord, mandolin, large organs and violins, choir members with angelic voices. Among Morricone’s most memorable “Leonian” pieces are four in four different registers: “L’estasi dell’oro” – “The Ecstasy of Gold” – taken from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, is emblematic of Morricone’s tragico-romantic register: brass, strings, and bells, to which is added the enchanting voice of soprano Edda Dell’Orso, one of Morricone’s favourite singers.

In the cheerful and sunny department, let’s think of “Il mio nome è Nessuno”, the eminently catchy title piece of My Name is Nobody with its synth riff and recorder chorus. In the bewitching and dreamlike category: “Giù la testa”, the main theme of Duck, You Sucker!, a well-known tune in which the violins are supported by jazzy drums, while aerial chorus singers chant, “Seán, Seán” (the first name of one of the protagonists). 

Finally, in the majestic, grandiose and solemn register: “C’era una volta il West”, title piece of Once Upon a Time in the West, corresponding to the arrival of Jill (Claudia Cardinale) at Flagstone station. Sergio Leone explained that he had been inspired by this piece, previously composed by Morricone, to build this monumental scene.

Morricone’s penchant for strange, startling sounds and haunting vocal motifs was already snugly incorporated into his composition style when the second half of the ’60s rolled around. The psychedelic sensibility was in full swing, pop music was undergoing a massive metamorphosis, and Morricone was ready to make the most of everything the moment made available. An excellent example is his score for the 1968 pop-art curiosity Danger: Diabolik. An adaptation of a racy Italian comic book series, soaked in lurid colours by director Mario Bava, it was a chance for Morricone to lighten up, let his hair down, and bring snarling fuzz guitar and thunderous rock ’n’ roll drums into the equation.

As the years progressed and tastes changed, Morricone would add horror shockers, police dramas, science fiction, and more to his catalogue of film genres, but it’s clear that he always had a special place in his heart for smart, uncompromising political cinema. Thus his contributions to Gillo Pontecorvo’s powerful and very timely The Battle of Algiers (1966), a prototype of the faux-documentary that certainly had an authentic impact; to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s deeply disturbing anti-fascist delirium Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975); and to Giuliano Montaldo’s portrait of the famous anarchists, Sacco e Vanzetti (1971), on which Morricone collaborated with American folk singer Joan Baez, an important progressive voice.

Morricone is probably the most famous composer of film music in the world of cinema, which is not surprising when you consider that he has created more than 500 soundtracks, but what is less well known are his other musical activities and his beginnings. The eldest son of a jazz trumpeter, he was introduced him to music at a very young age. Following in his father’s footsteps, he first obtained a diploma in trumpet at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome in 1946, before moving on to composition, instrumentation, and conducting.

In 1953, he took his first steps in classical and experimental music, and composed his first arrangements for a series of radio broadcasts. Without abandoning classical music, he began to make arrangements for television and to compose songs in 1958. After numerous arrangements for other musicians, he wrote his first film music for the comedy Il federale, with Ugo Tognazzi, in 1961. In the sixties, he composed and directed two albums for the Italian singer Milva, then, in 1974, he created one for Mireille Mathieu (Mireille Mathieu chante Ennio Morricone) and wrote the arrangements for several tracks on a Richard Cocciante album.

In 1965 he joined the Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, considered the first experimental group, which blended jazz, musique concrète, serial music, electronics and improvisation, employing extended techniques on traditional instruments and experiments with feedback. Formed by the composer Franco Evangelisti, the group made about ten records. For the curious, two compilations are recommended: one published by the German label Edition RZ, 1967-1975, and the other, an impressive boxed set including four CDs, a DVD and a booklet, Azioni / Reazioni 1967-1969, published by Die Schachtel.  

The group also participated in the creation of many of Morricone’s soundtracks, including Un Tranquillo Posto Di Campagna (A Quiet Place in the Country), a horror drama produced in 1968, and Gli occhi freddi della paura (Cold Eyes of Fear), a thriller from 1971, two excerpts of which can be found on Mike Patton’s excellent Crime and Dissonance compilation, on his Ipecac label. 

Parallel to his film activities, Morricone composed a number of chamber music and orchestral works, including Concerto for Orchestra in 1957, Concerto for Flute and Cello in 1983, Cantata for Europe in 1988, a trumpet concerto in 1991, Terzo concerto for guitar, marimba and strings in 1992, and Voci del Silenzio, a choral work, in 2002.

Mr. Morricone, thank you for your work, may eternity be sweet to you.