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BIOGRAPHY Currently living in Los Angeles after many years in New York, composer / trumpeter Jon Hassell is the pioneer of a style of music he describes as Fourth World, a mysterious, unique hybrid of music ancient and modern, acoustic and digital, composed and improvised, Eastern and Western. After composition studies and university degrees in the USA, he went to Europe to study electronic and serial music with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Several years later, he returned to New York where his first recordings were made with minimalist masters LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, through whom he met master Indian raga singer, Pandit Pran Nath and began a long and intensive study of non-Western musics. Since 1977 he has recorded 10 solo albums, along the way working with Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads, David Sylvian, Ry Cooder, The Kronos Quartet. Most recently he was special guest performer with Seal on MTV's "Unplugged". Theatrical scores include "Sulla Strada", created for the Venice Biennale, and "Zangezi", directed by Peter Sellars. He has collaborated on presentations by fashion avant-gardists Issey Miyake and Rei Kawakubo and for choreographic works by Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey and Elisa Monte, Hubbard Street Dance and Nederlands Dans Theater. Simon Hopkins recently summed it up in the UK music magazine, THE WIRE: "Jon Hassell's ideas and techniques have so thoroughly permeated lo- and hi-brow contempary music ... that it's difficult to think what contemporary music would sound like without his influence. I repeat: there's catagorically no doubt that Jon Hassell has had as an important effect on contemporary music as Miles Davis or Jimi Hendrix or James Brown or the Velvet Underground." |