#ndeya

The album’s final piece pulls it all into a sort of focus. “Caracas Night September 11 1975” opens on a deliciously hazy patina of evening wildlife, a dog or two in monosyllabic counterpoint, paving the way for Hassell’s sultry trumpet. Throughout the very brief miniature, he deconstructs the blues, stating, restating, reconfiguring and turning it all over again in a series of moves befitting a skater over the ice of long-established tradition. It’s not so much the notes he plays but how he lays them down, reluctantly giving each up, handling potentially sharp edges with the care of a Bill Dixon or Arve Henriksen as that gorgeously transparent environment nourishes everything. The same is true for the album’s longest track, the stirring and amoebic title track. Slowly undulating and unfurling synthesizer is complemented, periodically and aperiodically, by percussion from David Rosenboom and Naná Vasconcelos. Hassell’s raga trumpet, a technique, his new liner notes attest, that he was working on at the time resulting from his lessons with Pandit Pran Nat. Again, the fluidity of his playing, the absolutely stunning way he approaches and departs from various pitches, is indicative of the melding of style and timbre that has exemplified his work ever since, right up to his most recent studio work from 2018. There are even points at which synthesizer and trumpet demonstrate such timbral parity as to become indistinguishable.

The new package is well worth acquiring, even, as in my case, if you’ve gotten considerable mileage out of the earlier CD version. This is one of the rare cases where the new liner notes and the music are of a piece. Hassell and Brian Eno, whose future conceptions would show marked Hassell influence, have very different writing styles. Compared to Eno’s relative austerity, Hassell’s is a kind of controlled breathlessness, a wonderfully engaging transtemporal and trans-geographical precis similar to the fragmented webs he spins from fractured lines. The new restoration presents a similarly heightened experience. The percussion on “Hex” rips into the sonic environment rather than gliding over its surface. Deeper listening also yields astonishing results as the pulsating and grinding background of “Blues Nile” bites rather than caresses. Of course, Hassell’s playing exhibits many more layers of that ever-evolving breathiness and microtonal inflection which makes it unique, whether effect-driven like electric Miles Davis or beautifully unadorned. Sometimes, we are even treated to the best of both worlds, as on “Blues Nile,” where the effects create simultaneous and simultaneously shifting environments while that characteristic trumpet timbre cuts through each layer, highlighting interstice and creating its own larger space. All relationships, in wonderful flux, are enhanced by a really fine mix, and if the volume’s a bit too high, just turn it down and revel in all that multi-genre goodness. This is an album that lives up to its own legend, and, in contrast to so many of the pointless reissues flooding the market today, it just got better.