HAP-HAP-HAP-HAP-PY-PY-PY-PY Birthday Philip Glass

Philip Glass turns 75

Do you remember the first time you heard Philip Glass?  It’s something that’s pretty hard to forget.  For me it was Music with Changing Parts, a double LP released on the Chatham Square label in 1973.   I heard it in 1974 at WXPN where it was on the essential listening list put together by Emmett Ryan and Pat Sherbourne.   Nearly 40 years later, this would still be diving into the deep end listening.   The relentless arpeggios and cycles played on Farfisa organs, saxophones and voice would lead me to call Glass the heavy metal of minimalism.  This was Glass at his strict minimalist best.  To the uninitiated, it was a wall of unchanging noise, but deep listening revealed a wealth of changes and detail.  The repetition itself became something of a sonic mandala, taking you deeper in although it wasn’t nearly as repetitive as some would have you believe.  In concert, watching the musicians keeping up with the dervish pace, it was exhilarating to hear.

This video of a live performance from 1982 samples the Glass oeuvre from the strict minimalism of Music in Similar Motion to the more lyrical side he revealed on the album, Glassworks, with “Facade.”

Over the years, the melodies became more expansive, elements of straight classical music emerged, especially in his symphonies.  The operas actually became operatic after Einstein on the Beach and the sound Glass created became imitated and adapted throughout music from rock to electronic to classical. His trilogy of films with Godfrey Reggio, Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi ,  revealed an emotional and evocative core to his music that Hollywood has been ripping off ever since.

At 75, Glass is still churning out works, often pillaging his own materiel, reinventing it for new efforts.  He’s just released his 9th Symphony on iTunes.

Happy Birthday Philip Glass who turns 75 today, January 31.

John Diliberto ((( echoes ))) 

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Echo Location: Jon Hassell Drops His Clothes

Jon Hassell returns with first US tour in 20 years and new CD

You can hear an audio version of this blog, with music.

Listen to records by Björk, Baaba Maal, Talking Heads, Ani DiFranco, Ry Cooder, or  K.D. Lang,  and you’ll hear the trumpet of Jon Hassell.  It’s not always that obvious and often doesn’t even sound like a trumpet, but Jon Hassell has been quietly impacting music since he began working with minimalist icons Lamonte Young and Terry Riley in the 1960s.  The Memphis-born trumpeter played on the 1968 recording of Riley’s seminal minimalist masterpiece, In C.

But it’s not as a sideman that Hassell has reshaped the music horizon. His 1980′s albums like Fourth World Volume One, Possible Musics, recorded in collaboration with Brian Eno, sent musicians like Peter Gabriel and film composer Mark Isham, off into ethno exotica territories, mixing technology and global music, improvisation and digital composition.   Hassell had many names for his sound, among them, Fourth World Music.

Jon Hassell: Let’s say there was a computer profile of an average man in the world.  Put all the physiognomy all the skin color all the everything together and what would you come out with.  You’d come out with a citizen of the world.  And what I wanted to do was a make a music that had that kind of universal appeal.

After more than four decades,  Jon Hassell continues to create a sound that’s beyond categories, shaping new music directions. Among musicians, Jon Hassell is a legend. Synthesist Steve Roach.

Steve Roach: With Jon Hassell he’s absolutely the musicians musician.  The innovations he’s brought through have filtered through a lot of people’s work.

Composer Jeff Rona has played with Hassell and now works in films, including projects with Lisa Gerrard.

Jeff Rona: He’s beyond the original guy.  Everyone else who is original still got it from Jon as far I’m concerned.

But Brian Eno admits, he’s not made the transition to popular icon.

Brian Eno: I’m sort of an evangelist for his music.  I really think it’s important music, and beautiful music too.  And I always wish that people would listen to it more.

Jon Hassell’s latest album is called Last Night the Moon Came Dropping It’s Clothes in the Street,  a title taken from a 13th century poem by Rumi.    Mixing laptops, layered compositions,, and live sound processing, it often sounds like Miles Davis meeting Arvo Pärt, tuning in signals from space.  You can hear Hassell referencing Miles Davis’s spaciest piece, “He Loved Him Madly,” throughout the album.

His band on the album is a mix of old and new.  Bassist Peter Freeman, and sampler artist Dino J.A. Deane have been with him for years.  New comers include the between worlds violinist, Kheir Eddine M’Kachiche, who’s solos seem to reach for the sky while Hassell trawls the calm at the center.  Even more than Hassell’s previous albums, Last Night exists in a netherworld of swampy atmosphere’s and mysterious touches as music is resampled, looped and processed, creating odd rustlings, subtle rattles and subliminal pulses.  It’s the music of unsettled dreams and foreign terrain.

Jon Hassell is currently making his first North American tour in 20 years.  Tour dates include New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.  This has been an echo location, soundings for new music.  Echo Locations are run Wednesday mornings about 9:30 AM on WXPN, 88.5, Philadelphia.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Thoughts in Sound: Cage, Eno, Jarrett, Riley

Thoughts in Sound from musicians at the bleeding edges of music including John Cage, Brian Eno, Terry Riley and Keith Jarrett.

You can also hear an Audio Version of this blog, with music.

Every musician plays notes, but some of them think about the nature of sound a lot more than others. For them, music isn’t just a conveyor of melody and rhythm, but a pathway into sound itself. No one captured the meaning of sound better than avant-garde iconoclast, John Cage. John Cage died 1992, but in the spring of 1987, he was still enjoying the sounds of the city permeating his Chelsea home.

John Cage: I have a friend, Paul Zukofsky, the violinist, who used to come and stay where I lived in New York when I left and when Merce Cunningham left because it was so quiet but he no longer comes because this is so noisy. For me it’s a great pleasure though, to hear all the sounds. I find it very, just plain musical.

John Cage finds his concepts reborn in the work of ambient music pioneer and pop music producer, Brian Eno.

Brian Eno: Music has become part of the tapestry of your life like lighting is or like the environmental sound that you here anyways…. Anyway I was excited by the idea of making music that acknowledged that and said “Here’s a music that is especially for that. Here’s a music that is intended to merge into the environment. “

Eno’s concepts were inspired by Cage and by minimalist composers who wanted to bring out sonic details and focus through repetition.                                                                                   
Terry Riley: Tape loop creates a stasis in the sound and you can watch something as if it were stopped in a camera frame and it repeats over and over again. And You start to notice the real deep details that can draw the mind in   also.

Surprisingly, pianist Keith Jarrett, who is anti-electronic, and far from minimalist, still reflects a similar desire to get to the essence of sound.
Keith Jarrett: As long ago as when I was at Slugs with Charles Lloyd I had this feeling that I might quit music because all I had to play was one note, you know, and that recurs in different guises now and then. But what it suggests is that I don’t really need all that big an instrument to justify what I want to hear.

Keith Jarrett, Terry Riley, Brian Eno and John Cage. They are musicians who have gone into the microcosms of sound, often returning to produce some of the most influential, and even popular music of the last 50 years. They are among ten artists we’ll hear next week on a special Echoes series called Thoughts in Sound. This has been an Echo Location, Soundings for New Music.

You can also hear an Audio Version of this blog, with music.

Thoughts in Sound is a series we produced through a grant from the Public Radio Exchange.  It includes interviews with Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Brian Eno, Philip Glass, LaMonte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, John Adams and Keith Jarrett.  You can read a more extensive article about this and hear each complete 5 minute audio piece here.

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))