CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Jon Hassell & Maarifa Street

Zankel Hall
Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 8:30 PM

Jon Hassell, Trumpet and Keyboard
Peter Freeman, Bass and Laptop
Jan Bang, Live Sampling and Electronics
Dino J.A. Deane, Live Sampling and Electronics
Kheir-Eddine M'Kachiche, Violin

Innovative composer/trumpeter Jon Hassell's mysterious, genre-defying music has inspired a generation of collaborators and admirers from Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel to the Kronos Quartet, Ry Cooder and Björk. This performance with Maarifa Street will be his first New York appearance in 20 years.

Jon Hassell, Trumpet and Keyboard
Composer and trumpeter Jon Hassell is the visionary creator of a style of music described as “Fourth World,” a mysterious musical hybrid of both ancient and digital, composed and improvised, Eastern and Western. In the last two decades, his connoisseur recordings have been built around an unparalleled “vocal” trumpet style (developed in studies with Indian vocal master Pandit Pran Nath), inspiring a generation of collaborators that include Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, the Kronos Quartet, and Ry Cooder. His trumpet performances have been featured on recordings with international stars such as Björk, Baaba Maal, and Ibrahim Ferrer. Film and theater credits include scores for Wim Wenders (Million Dollar Hotel with Bono), The Netherlands Dance Theater (Lurch), Peter Sellars (Zangezi), and the theme for the hit TV series, The Practice.

Hassell’s 1999 acoustic audiophile recording, Fascinoma, was produced by Ry Cooder with bansri flute master Ronu Majumdar and jazz pianist Jacky Terrasson. Concerts in Montreal, Milan, and Paris became the raw material for the magical transformation of Hassell’s 2005 release, Maarifa Street / Magic Realism 2—another difficult-to-define musical fantasy stretched across geography and time, as was its 1983 namesake, Aka-Darbari-Java / Magic Realism. In 2005 Hassell also began touring with a new band, which he named Maarifa Street, playing throughout Europe from Norway to Madrid, Rome to Berlin, astonishing audiences with the discovery of atmospheric music that defies category. In Tsegihi—a choral work for 100 voices and chamber group—was later premiered in May 2008 at England’s 11th-century Norwich Cathedral.

In early 2009, a reconnection with the prestigious ECM label—featuring a new CD release and a “Return to USA” tour that includes stops in New York’s Zankel Hall and Los Angeles’ Royce Hall—signal the growing awareness of a master musician and a music without borders that increasingly comes into focus as time passes.

A childhood in Memphis; a classical conservatory education; composition and electronic music study with Stockhausen in Cologne; a passage through the New York minimalist sphere with Terry Riley, Reich, and Glass; a new approach to the trumpet via vocal master Pandit Pran Nath; a questioning and deconstruction of the European dichotomy between classical and popular, sacred and sensual; a pioneer of digital transformation and sampling—all of this has led to Hassell’s “Fourth World,” the blend that he has described as “worldly music” to underline a more subtle equation at work and to discourage the simplistic labeling of “world,” “jazz,” “classical,” “minimal,” or “ambient.”

Peter Freeman, Bass and Laptop

Jan Bang, Live Sampling and Electronics

Dino J.A. Deane, Live Sampling and Electronics

Kheir-Eddine M'Kachiche, Violin