Sinopsis
I owe a lot to Jon. Actually, a lot of people owe a lot to Jon. He has planted a strong and fertile seed whose fruits are still being gathered. It is hard to avoid quoting from Brian Eno’s kind of open letter written in 2007: it seems impossible that someone who is so essential should have passed almost unnoticed by so many people. But his revolution was always a bloodless one, stealthy, muffled, just like the sound of his mutant trumpet. What counts for History, in fact, is testimonies such as this one, which are the official entries for our musical encyclopaedia. This and the records that still reverberate today with emotion and power, such as Vernal equinox, which, in 1978, fascinated Brian Eno, who had just arrived in New York. On the very first take, his concept of the Fourth World was created, a place where spirits and insinuations coming from other parts (India, Africa and South America) merge together with contemporary attitudes and tools. A spiritual and meditative fusion, above all, which even today still cements together his most recent creations.
Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street, his 2009 album, is an epilogue, if we wish to listen to it in that way, an almost perfect epilogue for everything that Jon Hassell has given to music in the last thirty years. And we refer to it as an epilogue not because this album suggests the end of anything, but because it transmits a kind of perfect framework for some of his essential creative implosions. And it is also an epilogue because there is an increasingly thicker cloak of silence that embodies his mantras. And, deep down, we are always talking about the same silence that seems to descend upon all his compositions, like an even greater refinement of his vision of In a silent way by Miles Davis.
