While many players who grew up in Memphis’ musical stew took the city’s inspirations further afield in the wider world, none of them did so as expansively as the late Jon Hassell. Though hardly a household name here, he’s a towering figure of innovation in international circles, emblematic of an element of Memphis music that’s not often recognized: its musos’ experimental tendencies.
That impulse is embodied by the likes of MonoNeon or Charles Lloyd, giants in their own right, but even their music lacks the unique identity of the soundscapes created by Hassell. This Thursday, October 29th, at 6 p.m., however, Hassell will get his due, as Jared Boyd presides over a retrospective listening event at the Memphis Listening Lab that aims to demonstrate beyond a doubt just how inventive and galvanizing Hassell’s music was.
Boyd is the perfect host for the event, having interviewed Hassell before his death in 2021. As he puts it, “Memphis music and horns have been so closely linked … I wouldn’t say it’s more important than the guitar, but I think that the horn, the use of horns, really established what made the Memphis sound. And Jon talked about studying with [renowned Memphis trombonist] Jack Hale Sr., and admiring Bill Justis’ sound, yet we don’t think of him typically as someone who’s a quintessentially Memphis musician. He kind of zigged where everyone else zagged, and went further out than a lot of the jazz guys who probably grew up alongside him, and took it to other realms. So I think that Jon Hassell is just incredible for that.”
Indeed, what other local horn player left Memphis after high school for the Eastman School of Music, then went on to study under composer Karlheinz Stockhausen? Many of the city’s great trumpeters admired Miles Davis, as did Hassell, but who among them went on to collaborate with Brian Eno, the Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Tears for Fears, or Ani DiFranco?
Much of his appeal to such artists was based on the haunting harmonies he created by running his trumpet through effects pedals — a commonplace gambit these days, yet practically unheard of in the 1970s. Parallel to that, Hassell was expanding his listening far beyond America. He traveled to Germany in the ’60s to attend The Köln Course for New Music, where Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt were his classmates before forming the experimental rock group Can. Then he worked with La Monte Young, with whom he traveled to India to study under raga master Pran Nath.
And so, long before the term “world music” was coined, Hassell’s interest in imbuing his own compositions with what he called “Fourth World” influences led to the eerie soundscapes for which he’s known to this day. And, as Matthew Jones of the U.K.-based Warp Records, which administers Hassell’s personal Ndeya imprint, puts it, “In his archives, we found a box of cassette tapes that Jon listened to at home, and it was really eclectic. There were all sorts of things in there, like a Miles Davis record he’d taped, with Ornette Coleman on the other side. There was a mixtape of his favorite hip-hop tracks, and a few dub things. So yeah, he was a voracious listener.”
In a sense, Hassell took the beloved catchphrase, “Memphis, where everything is everything,” to heart, and those attending Thursday’s retrospective, featuring pivotal Hassell tracks selected by Ndeya, should be ready for anything. Some of the key material will be from Hassell’s final works, conceived as The Pentimento Trilogy, including the just-released Music Is Invisible (Pentimento Volume Three), drawn from his final live performance in 2015.
Furthermore, speaking to Hassell’s international tastes and impact, this week’s listening event will echo similar events going on around the world now, from the U.K. to New York, Los Angeles, and beyond. “It’s been a truly global thing,” says Jones. “There’s been an event in Taiwan, and two events happening in Japan. So having Chad at the Memphis Listening Lab reach out was perfect. We 100 percent wanted to do something in Memphis. Jon would have been really happy about that.”
