Dossiers Jazz

Since moving to South Korea a few years ago, saxophonist Sunjae Lee has discovered an exciting and unexpected music scene, where musicians from different generations mix traditional jazz, free improvisation, and traditional Korean instrumentation.

In painting, pentimento can be described as the ghostly reappearance of previous forms or features that have been altered or erased, and then repainted on the canvas. This is what Jon Hassell applies to music, at least in his recent two-volume Pentimento series on the Ndeya label, Listening to Pictures (2018) and Seeing Through Sound (July 2020). A master of superimposition, the trumpeter, composer and electronic creator invites us more than ever to practice “vertical listening”, to use his own expression. Contacted at his home in Los Angeles, the octogenarian provides clues to explain the astonishing freshness of his art, constantly regenerated since his early youth.

Trumpet player Jon Hassell has had a marked influence on the music of the last half-century. 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.

Trumpet player Jon Hassell has had a marked influence on the music of the last half-century. 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.

Trumpet player Jon Hassell has had a marked influence on the music of the last half-century. And not only on other trumpeters, like Arve Henriksen, Nils Petter Molvaer, Mathias Eick, Erik Truffaz, and Paolo Fresu. In the world of electronic music, for example, from Aphex Twin to Oneohtrix Point Never, many musicians are indebted to him for the paths he opened up. So much so that he can be considered one of the innovators and tireless explorers, along with Miles, Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Anthony Braxton and John Zorn. Nothing less!

The Polaris Music Prize today unveiled its Short List for 2020… and we’re unveiling ours too!

The Polaris Music Prize, which annually honours and rewards albums by Canadian artists, unveiled its Long List of 40 albums on Monday.

Composer and conductor Krzysztof Penderecki, certainly one of the most prominent musicians of the last six decades, died recently of “a long illness” that apparently had nothing to do with COVID-19.

A Cameroonian of Douala and Yabassi descent, Manu Dibango was the first great African musician to perish from Covid-19 at the venerable age of 86. Flagship artist of pan-African culture, he was at the forefront of all forward motion, from his connecting with compatriot Francis Bebey in the 1950s until his tragic death on Tuesday 24 March 2020. At the turn of the 1970s, Papa Groove (one of his nicknames) was already uniting the main African styles in vogue at the time – afrobeat, highlife, soukouss, etc. – and he was a pioneer in the development of a new style. This funkadelic groove, post-James Brown and contemporary to George Clinton, with its jazzy and Afro-Caribbean flavours, was also marked by an authentically pan-African approach developed by the Cameroonian multi-instrumentalist.