JON HASSELL - VERNAL EQUINOX (1977)

Lovely Music Ltd. -LML 1021
Recorded at York University Electronic Media Studios (Toronto, Ontario), October/November 1976, performed by trumpetist Jon Hassell with the help of Larry Polansky, brazilian percussionist Nanà Vasconcelos, David Rosenboom, Andy Jerison, Bill Winant & Nicholas Kilbourn.
"Composer/trumpeter Jon Hassell is the visionary creator of a style of music he describes as Fourth World, a mysterious, unique hybrid of music both ancient 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 La Monte Young and Terry Riley, through whom he met the Hindustani raga master, Pandit Pran Nath, and embarked on a lifelong quest to transmute his teacher's Kirana vocal mastery into a new trumpet sound and style. In the last two decades, he has recorded albums which have, over the years, become so widely appropriated that many of their innovations have become woven anonymously into the texture of contemporary music high and low."

Tracklist
A1 Toucan Ocean
A2 Viva Shona
A3 Hex
A4 Blues Nile
B1 Vernal Equinox
B2 Caracas Night September 11, 1975

"[Vernal Equinox] introduced what Hassell called his "fourth world" style, one that unified world music with advanced electronic and futuristic techniques. Subsequent albums have further developed this vision.
"Toucan Ocean" opens with gentle steady percussion and two chords. Soon the muted and modified trumpet joins in with a charming birdcall-like timbre.
"Viva Shona" has a recording of a bird evironment with the trumpet making distant calls. A complex but gentle Mbira (African thumb piano) part soon enters.
"Hex" has a quasi-random funky bass with percussion that is both steady and like snake rattles and hisses. An electronically-modified trumpet makes a deep bamboo flute-like sound that evokes spirits.
"Blues Nile" against a drone, a sorrowful yet dignified melody is played and delayed in deep reverb as if across the desert vastness.
"Vernal Equinox" is a 22-minute improvisation in the spirit of a raga with a long arhythmic first section (alap) and a gentle rhythmic second section. The trumpet is backed up by a gentle electronic drone and excellent laid-back tabla, dumbek and conga playing.
"Caracas Night September 11, 1975" opens with an environmental recording of crickets at night over which a soulful trumpet solo with gentle conga underscoring is played." [AMG]
Information by Discogs & AMG, ripp by HOP : 320/RAR/MU