For Jon

Rest in Power

 

Ever since first hearing Jon Hassell’s singular musical voice in January 1981, I have wanted to make music like he did. I dabbled with blowing tenor sax through a harmonizer on my 1991 release The Visible Range and was quite pleased when Carl Stone said “It reminds me of Jon Hassell.” But it was just a pale echo of the real thing, and there was plenty of actual Fourth World music floating about, and there were other things I could imitate more successfully. Hassell’s music was always a guiding star for me, but when I drifted into the realm of his Fourth World explicitly, it didn’t feel like territory I could call my own.

 

In 2005 I ran a music blog called The Ten Thousand Things and when I posted an unreleased track from Hassell’s upcoming Maarifa Street album he emailed and politely asked me to cease and desist. We began a months-long conversation about many things, and he was complimentary and kind about my music and visual art. We stayed in touch, and in 2015 I was honored when Jon played trumpet on my score for the film The Trials Of Spring.

 

Across the Atlantic around 2009 my friend Richard Curson Smith started listening to Hassell’s music in his upstairs home office in Hackney while writing at night. Richard’s eight-year-old son Vincent had taken up trumpet the year before and now remembers hearing the otherworldly sounds drifting through the house while falling asleep. Vincent caught the Hassell virus which proved deeply influential on his own musical journey, culminating in 2023 with a degree in jazz trumpet from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. Vincent and I shared our passion for Hassell’s music over the years, and occasionally improvised together on trumpet and electric cello.

 

When Jon died in 2021 I wrote:

 

Now that Jon’s gone his music has a finite size and shape; there will not be any more new Jon Hassell albums.

But within that finite collection of music there is an infinite space.

 

In the following days I came across some of my abandoned Fourth World experiments and reconsidered them in the light of Jon’s passing. Instead of dead ends, some of them now sounded like seeds. Fragments with potential. Vincent and I took the seeds and grew them into a body of music, and then improvised some more, and the result is this album: The Apprentice to The Surgeon of The Nightsky.

 

As to the audacity of calling this collection “Fourth World Volume XVII” I have thought carefully, and reached the conclusion that Fourth World music is a genre, like others. There is tremendous opera and forgotten opera. Brilliant, essential polka and ephemeral polka. If you want to make some more Dubstep, you should obviously just go ahead. I don’t think Joe Strummer would have wanted punk to die with him. Now that Jon is gone, it is possible, even necessary, for others to try and carry the idea forward.

 

I am at a loss to imagine Jon’s response to this work. He might have been pleased. He might have been quite annoyed. He might have wished he had been less polite in his earlier request that I cease and desist. Worst of all, and perhaps likely, he might have just brushed it aside and dismissed it as more chatter. But this music was made with love, as a tribute. It is an attempt to extend the legacy of the Fourth World project, to continue the conversation that should continue. I hope others find it useful, and I hope there will be much more Fourth World music in the future.

 

Blake Leyh

December, 2024