Goodbye, Nature Boy, it was a pleasure and a privilege to work with you for a brief time.
One of my Mixcloud mixes was a Jon Hassell special, a collection of odds and ends rather than a best of, but it serves as an introduction to his unique music. Or you could go here and gorge yourself on a collection of albums that only sound like the people who followed in his footsteps.
• The Guardian
• Libération
• The New York Times
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jon Hassell, live 1989
• Power Spot by Michael Scroggins
How, after all this time, did I not realize he was American? I believed all along that he was a Brit! Regardless, he was brilliant and will be missed.
Thanks John……listening to your mix now. I hadn’t appreciated you’d actually worked with him on cover artwork and his site.
Charles: I think that’s an easy mistake to make: three albums on EG, two on ECM, one on Eno’s All Saints label, and two on Warp. His groups also seemed to play more dates in Europe than the US; most of the officially released live material is from European venues. And the two main imitators of his trumpet sound, Nils Petter Molvaer and Arve Henriksen, are Norwegian.
Thanks, Graeme. I wish the title lettering for Maarifa Street looked better, I still feel I ought to have spent more time on it. Jon was happy with it, however.
We would have worked on a lot more if the timing and conditions had been right. He wanted me to design the sleeve for Listening To Pictures but Warp wanted someone else to do it. A few months later Warp’s designer had failed to produce anything suitable for Jon’s music so he asked if I’d be able to take over. I was too busy with other things unfortunately so could only make suggestions for pushing the design closer to his own sphere. I also did some sample layouts for his North and South of You book which was a project he was tinkering with for many years, longer than has been suggested in some of the obituary notices. I was working on it in 2011 but it was much older than that.