photograph by roman koval
Jon Hassell left Memphis for the Eastman School of Music and went on to study under composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Beyond his own albums, he recorded with the Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Tears for Fears, Ani DiFranco, Ry Cooder, and many others.
If “the biggest small town in America,” Memphis, ever feels provincial to the aspiring artist, just remember that the most extraordinary life forms evolve in backwaters. Case in point: Jon Hassell, the musician who died in 2021 at age 84. Though he left his hometown of Memphis more than 60 years ago, and found global renown in his experimental approach to the trumpet, the subtle threads of childhood, family, and community tied his life’s work to Memphis in ways he often reflected on through the years.
During an interview for the podcast RA Exchange in 2016, he recalled a Black friend of the family taking him to hear Mississippi blues in a shack “made of RC Cola signs nailed together on a wooden frame … [a] proto-juke joint in the outskirts of Memphis someplace. It’s one of the biggest sound experiences I ever had.”
In hindsight, he traced his interest in global music — what Hassell would call “Fourth World” music — to such encounters, “back to the crossing of cultures thing. I thought to myself later, after I left, ‘You never really know your place.’ Even if you grow up in a small town, you don’t really know what it is until you leave and you look back on it again.”
photograph courtesy don hassell
The Hassell family with their dog Christy, ca. 1950. L-R: Frank, Don, Rhilla, Joan, and Jon.
“I myself don’t understand Jon’s music,” says his older brother, Don. “I appreciate it, but I don’t understand it to the extent that his fans do.” Still, he remembers what few could know. “He started on our father’s old cornet from the Georgia Tech band. It sat on a bookshelf in the house and Jon picked it up one day.”
Now Don sits among his home filing cabinets, their drawers full of news clippings about his little brother. Most of the clippings celebrate the utter originality of Jon Hassell’s soundscapes, which blend his trumpet playing, often electronically processed, with the rhythms and textures of what’s now called world music. Nonetheless, “I’m a classical guy,” smiles Don. “I certainly never questioned him about his music. It was best for me to say nothing.”
With Hassell’s parents and sister having passed away some time ago, his older brother Don is the only one left to honor Jon’s well-lived life. But in saluting his brother’s legacy, he’s tapped into a global network of Jon Hassell enthusiasts. He’s far from alone.
On a phone call from London, Matthew Jones of Warp Records explains how the label came to create a special imprint, Ndeya, to release Hassell’s music. “A lot of people at the label were fans of Jon’s music,” he says. “We were working with Brian Eno on a new release, and he’s produced big rock bands like U2 and Coldplay and Talking Heads, but people also know him for his ambient music. He’s had this big career full of collaborations, and one of the people he collaborated with was Jon Hassell. And a lot of the more contemporary artists on the label are really big fans of Jon’s. Like Oneohtrix Point Never has cited Jon’s work as a big influence.”
Don may not listen to Oneohtrix Point Never, but he appreciates that Brian Eno and Jon were kindred spirits. “He called Eno his brother,” says Don. “And he was, more so than me. You could see that in their interactions and in the liner notes. He met Eno in New York. Jon was playing at The Kitchen, and Eno attended that evening, and said that was just what he was looking for.”
Thanks to his brother having set up the Ndeya imprint with Warp before his death, Don is delighted that Jon’s old and new recordings are seeing the light of day. This year, two albums’ worth of unreleased material came out under the umbrella title of Further Fictions, one half a 1989 live collaboration between Hassell’s band and Eno, the other half a collection of Hassell’s studio tracks, including “Favela.” Writing about the song in the liner notes, Hassell again recalls that juke joint.
“That’s what this track reminds me of in its raw, out-of-tune, uneven-wooden-floor sort of way,” he writes. Trying to imagine what the joint’s patrons would think of the track, Hassell muses, “They might be mystified by the strange harmony and trumpet clusters and delays, but something tells me they would know the blues when they hear it.”
