Jon Hassell plays trumpet, and if you've heard him, you know just how inadequate that simple statement is. Jon studied Indian vocal ragas, and that's probably the most obvious influence you'll hear. But he plays 'world music' in the best sense of the term, before it came to mean "adding a bagpipe player to a group from Africa". His earlier albums (including "Earthquake Island") sound like they could have spun off a Weather Report album, but soon he was electronically processing his horn sounds even further (with the help of Brian Eno on "Fourth World, Volume 1: Possible Musics"). Sometimes there's a high whining vocal effect, sometimes it sounded like he was blowing through a vacuum cleaner hose. Drum sounds were distant and murky. It was like Les Baxter & "Quiet Village" exotica all spiffed up and unearthly. Later albums grew even murkier, with the trumpet barely rising to the surface of the primordial sludge. For his ECM release "Power Spot", there were a few spots brightened by flute flurries.
Start with "Fourth World", which is basically the template for most of his later albums. "Aka/Darbari/Java" adds some choppy electronic trumpet manipulations and a gamelan sound, "Dream Theory in Malaya" features a Malayan water-splash rhythm and frog sounds, but both have long stretches where not a lot happens (which I totally get into). "Power Spot" has a little more instrumental variety, and the more recent "Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street", also on ECM, adds violin. The 'live' album "The Surgeon of the Nightsky Restores Dead Things by the Power of Sound" I find hypnotic, with a feeling you are on a train headed on a dark and mysterious journey. The 'live' is I suppose technically correct, but in this and also "Last Night the Moon...", original live recordings are used as a framework to hang studio enhancements.
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