The jazz trumpeter Jon Hassell's embrace of electronic effects and extensive post-production has positioned him curiously. He is an acknowledged inheritor of Miles Davis and Teo Macero's experiments in electric jazz and studio-aided collage composition, and yet the ambient nature of his work often lands his discs in the new age racks. Hassell studied with Stockhausen and Pandit Pran Nath, played on the first recording of Terry Riley's In C, and collaborated with the likes of La Monte Young, Talking Heads, David Sylvian, and Ry Cooder. He's also the inventor of something he calls Fourth World, "a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques"-- a phrase that's hard to shake free, in 2009, of associations with Putumayo compilations, or Burning Man. It's difficult to think of another contemporary jazz musician whose reputation encompasses such opposing poles: conceptual rigor on the one hand; easy listening on the other.
Hassell's new album, Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, does in fact make for easy listening-- profoundly warm, immersive, relaxing listening. It's electric-blanket music, isolation-tank music, lucid-dreaming music that moves as assuredly as if by the power of your own suggestion. I've been tempted to call it "yoga for the mind," except that the phrase sounds way too glib, too slack, for music this rigorous. But it's also a puzzle, a non-Euclidean rendering sourced from small-ensemble sessions and recomposed via digital editing. It's as hard to separate out the music's discrete pieces as it is to discern between its structure and sense of drift.
Much of the album's pleasures are immediate and visceral. This is as sumptuous as "ambient" music gets. The album opens with a glowing song, "Aurora", that sounds exactly like its title suggests, with scratchy, glowing drones of uncertain provenance taking on a daybreak shine as Hassell's trumpet rises like a heat mirage in echoing, overlapping lines; there's a faint echo of dub in the bass. "Time and Place" is slow, spelunking funk, descending ropey bass lines through chambers where ambient shimmer illuminates melodic figures as lifelike as cave drawings: bluegrass violin, panting organs, and of course Hassell's reverberant horn melodies, which slide around the edges of the song's key signature, highlighting its contours in slippery relief. A dubby pulse echoes the percussive rattle of Hassell's Earthquake Island and, on a more contemporary note, the Moritz von Oswald Trio's Vertical Ascent, which might not be surprising, given that von Oswald has professed his admiration for Hassell's work. The track leads almost seamlessly into "Abu Gil", where violin and electric keys blow its modal structure wide open. One of the album's centerpieces, the 13-minute song is grounded in more loping percussion and a pinging bass line that wobbles like a taut clothesline; Hassell's trumpet is refracted through delays and a harmonizer effect, throwing shadows in fourths and fifths as it slinks, catlike, around the changes.