Blue Ba- Ya

Jon Hassell was an American trumpet player and composer who made and contributed to a huge range of twentieth century music, playing with Holger Czukay and Irwin Schmidt, Terry Riley, Talking Heads (on Remain In Light), Brian Eno, Ry Cooder, David Sylvian, Bjork, Juan Atkins and many others. He died in 2021. The Ndeya label has been set up in partnership with Warp Records as a home to Hassell's music and they have released two posthumous albums- Listening To Pictures and Seeing Through Sound- as well as a re- issue of his 1977 debut Vernal Equinox. In October Ndaya are going to release  Music Is Invisible, a live recording from May 2015 when Jon played at St John's church in Hackney as a trio, with Rick Cox and John von Seggern. This excerpt of Blue Ba- Ya came out last week.

Blue Ba- Ya (Excerpt) is a gorgeous way to spend four and a half minutes, at an intersection of jazz, global, ambient and experimental, what Hassell called Fourth World music. There are synths, drones, a two chord piano part and Hassell playing trumpet. Three people on stage, two laptops and various synths, FX devices and a load of cables and wires and a trumpet making such human sounding music. AI could never do this. It doesn't know how. 

In 2023 a compilation of late 80s recordings was re- released, an album called Psychogeography that originally came out in 1990. This track was the album's opener, a descent into the city with drones, whirrs and found sounds. 

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