Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street

by

Jon Hassell

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Jon Hassell, "Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In the Street" (ECM). If Jon Hassell did indeed set out several decades back to create an idiosyncratic strain of music that would fit neatly into no single category, he has by now succeeded. In a career that found him studying in both Buffalo and Rochester, traveling to India to fully digest the glorious micro-tonal intricacies of that country's music, earning both respect and scorn in the jazz community, and becoming a first-call for the more esoteric and discerning class of rock musicians, (David Sylvian, Peter Gabriel, Brian Eno), Hassell has played by no one's rules but his own. If that meant delving into ambient sounds, or treating his trumpet to a lavish buffet of effects devices, or attempting to phrase his solos like an Indian Kiranic singer, well, then so be it. With "Last Night the Moon Came dropping Its Clothes In the Street," Hassell and his band, Maarifa Street, delve into a protean, constantly morphing melange of sound. Far from formless and nowhere near "new age," the group weaves a dreamy tapestry of sound assimilating African, Indian and American forms, all presented with a serial composer's conception of time and space. Hassell in fact studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and the late Stockhausen's tendency to create scenarios of "controlled randomness" in his pieces hangs above Hassell and company's efforts here. This is beautiful, evocative, often transcendent music, but most importantly, it's also substantive; though he's been accused of merely doodling in the dippy ooze of new age music, Hassell is in fact a radical who can be seen to have carried on the work started by Miles Davis with the albums "In a Silent Way" and "On the Corner," with much more of an emphasis on the European influences than the African- American ones. You get as much out of "Last Night the Moon Came" as you put into the listening experience. It is, as the saying goes, a real trip. (Jeff Miers)