Has anyone had the chance to see Jon & Maarifa Street playing this music live? I saw him in Kristiansand,NO in September. He ended the set with “moon” morphing into Maarifa Street. The band was: Kheir-Eddine M’Kachiche (violin), Jan Bang (live remixing), Jon Hassell (tp, kb), Peter Freeman (bass, loops), Pedram Khavarzamini (tombak [drum]).

Then I saw them again in February in Vancouver, this time with JA (Dino) Deane on (loops, live remix). The set in Norway was better but the set in Vancouver was dynamite. We all went out to dinner after the set and hung out until 4AM. The restaurant owner in Vancouver knew who Jon was so just kept the place open for us.

I wrote about Punkt on my SomaFM blog – lotsa pictures!

http://somafm.com/articles/punkt08-1.html
http://somafm.com/articles/punkt08-2.html
http://somafm.com/articles/punkt08-3.html

In the untitled photos I am the bald guy.

For those that don’t know I am music director for SomaFM’s Sonic Universe.

Avant garde – is there still one in music? Marc, an excellent subject for another Disquiet discussion!

Regarding your preference for Maarifa Street and Richard’s struggle to get a grip on it, I did mean to say that my first impressions of Last Night The Moon… were somewhat underwhelming, but like all great work in my experience, it’s taken concentration and many listenings to begin to assimilate it. The music is oblique and drifts in under the radar like a coastal mist: at first there’s nothing to see, then next time you look around it’s enveloped you.

Nitya, don’t get me wrong about Nils Molvaer, I’ve really enjoyed his music I just don’t think he’s in the same league as JH.

Richard, re atemporality – that’s a core quality which marks out pretty much all of Hassell’s oeuvre (except for City a friend argues, but I disagree). It’s one of the things that makes Molvaer’s music enjoyable but shortlived, the focus upon the contemporary. Funny you should refer to Forbidden Planet, I’ve always thought that City should be playing in the bar in the original Star Wars film or somewhere in Bladerunner.

Marc, your reference to Hassell as bandleader strikes a chord – he clearly is. I also think of him as an auteur director marshalling his team of experts to discover something new guided by a particular vision. Just as Miles did. That brings us back to the cinematic qualities we touched on earlier.

Your alienation from City echoes others’ opinions about JH’s oeuvre, also to Bluescreen. I love City’s edits, aggressive approach, unpredictability and alienness. I also love the short fictions written to accompany it, that extending of the music towards something larger than even just the music. The presentation is the one area where I struggle with Last Night The Moon… They’re very nice photographs, but all those pics of the musicians smiling is in danger of dragging the project away from the magical and into the mundane. I suspect that’s the price of rejoining ECM, but it’s not a welcome one. Mystery is essential to magic.

Will check out Jeff Rona and the others, I’m always on the lookout for soundtrack tips as you know!

Michael, you confirm what I’d heard about Freeman’s input. He plays a role with Hassell not dissimilar to that played by Henning Schmitz and Fritz Hilpert in Kraftwerk’s rebirth.

I’ve really enjoyed this chat as well, thanks for inviting me Marc.

Mar: I was talking to Gino Robair about this in January and we agreed that this music can seem simple on some level if you have never tried to make it. I interviewed Hassell and Peter Freeman and in answer to your questions: The studio sessions were planned but very little was used from them. Hassell and Freeman assemble the music from studio, live, soundchecks, and previous records (Blue Period is from a Wim Wenders soundtrack). Hassell is the final arbiter: the recordings serve as the palette and he paints the picture in the mix. He said, “The method shouldn’t control the content. Wherever the spark is, wherever the feeling lies is where I go, whether or not it is a collage of samples, or whether it is the collage of having a live track along with a studio track, that is secondary.”

It has been a great discussion
Thanks to all

I was listening last night to a lot of Sun Ra, which brought to mind specifically how similarly loose and (to our early discussion-point about group groove) free the music is. It also made me think of Hassell as a band leader — the way Ra was a band leader, and of course Miles Davis was a band leader. I’d love to read a thorough oral history of people who’ve played with him, to know more about how he captures what he captures. How planned are the studio recordings, and how much are they the best takes of numerous group semi-improvisations?

To Colin’s question about favorite Hassell records, mine are Possible Musics Volume 1, followed closely by the new one. It’s been some time since I’ve listened closely to Fascinoma, but I imagine that would rate high up there, and I’m going to put it back on, shortly.

It’s comforting to see City: Works of Fiction that high on Colin’s list, because it was the record that turned me off Hassell. To me the electronic element was too front forward, the beats too self-evident. It makes sense that Jeff Rona played on that — I like his movie-score stuff OK, but he’s always struck me as considerably less subtle than others (Cliff Martinez, Clint Mansell, Lisa Gerrard) who do that underscoring-type music (some of whom he has worked alongside).

Man, this has been a great conversation. Thanks to everyone for participating.

Once again I have to say though he obviously and admittedly influenced by Hassell, the differences seem derived from Hassell’s roots in classical minimalism verses Molvaer’s roots in jazz

Hassell’s work has always had that quality for me, but this album has it in spades. And I can’t tell you exactly why. The combination of instruments? The textures? The rhythms that sometimes feel as if they’re just tagging along for the ride, that the melodic instruments are way beyond needing their direction?

The album doesn’t feel composed as much as found, not in the sense of old school found sound recordings, but like some intact artifact someone turned up in the basement of a shuttered warehouse. Remember the Krell music in Forbidden Planet? How it was just lying around the interior of the alien world waiting for someone to find it? That’s how this Hassell feels to me.

And yet, I still don’t know how I feel about it. It’s so loose and snakelike that I’m having a hard time coming to any conclusions about it. I feel like I’m chasing it as much as it’s chasing itself, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. I can’t say that I love it, but I’ve been playing it constantly since I got it. Maybe that’s a good review. I don’t know what this album is, but I keep coming back for more.

Nitya, thanks for weighing in. Any sense of what, then, is the “11th track” on the jonhassell.com listing that didn’t make the commercial release?

“Isortoq Unartoq” became Aurora

“Abu Gil From One Place to Another” became Abu Gil

Bravo you guys for mentioning Eivind Aarset in the conversation.

JH, Arve and Nils all released albums within a few months of each other and Jan Bang did live remixing on all three. Eivind also played guitar on all three yet each are very different IMHO.

Has anyone listened to Hamada by Nils? he is not so much a JH protege as he was back in the Khmer days.

For that matter I was lucky to see Hassell, he doesn’t exactly tour like Dylan.

As to the tradition, all the greats in jazz broke with what was considered “the tradition” at the time. As a guitarist I tend to focus on that instrument and unfortunately most of the distinctive forward thinking jazz voices there, outside of Aarset (who is no kid), are in their 50’s (Nguyen Le, Scofield and Frisell) and 70’s (Jim Hall who just keeps getting better and more adventurous).

We may just be going through that cyclical period where the avant-garde is throwing the baby (melody, harmony, emotion, personality) out with the bathwater (old forms, techniques and technology), and the rest are entrenching in the safety of what has sold before.

But I definitely see a light on the horizon. Violinists like Caleb Buhans and Todd Reynolds are melding classical, electronic and improv in exciting ways, and better yet this seems part of a trend. Guitarist Bill Horist turned in a brilliant sound and noise performance at the Stone quite awhile back.

I attend and occasionally perform at these Warper parties where I see a host of young artists trying to figure out how to create something new that has value with this wealth of available technology. Even though I don’t listen to him as much as I might I think Fennesz is on to something. His performance with Ryuchi Sakamoto last summer was special.

I am just delving back into Hassell’s work and want to check out City again–I think I listened to it years before I was ready. I love Fascinoma, as it shows how his vision does not require modern technology. I confess to a preference for the slightly more aggressive Maarifa Street over the new one but only a slight one.