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avalon-digest       Thursday, November 29 2007       Volume 12 : Number 286



                               Today's Subjects:
                               -----------------
  [AVALON] ENO IOU                                       [Chandla911@aol.com]
  [AVALON] Otis back in the news  [Andrew Shearer <shearerandrew@hotmail.com]

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Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 06:31:55 EST
From: Chandla911@aol.com
Subject: [AVALON] ENO IOU

THE DEBT I OWE TO JON HASSELL

I arrived in New York on a beautiful  spring day in April 1978. I'd intended 
to stay for a week but the visit  stretched on and on and I ended up staying 
for about five years.

Those  first few months in the city were a formative time for me. I didn't 
know many  people, and I had time on my hands, so I was open to things in a way 
that I  might not have been in a more familiar landscape. I listened to a lot 
of live  music and bought a heap of records. One of the most important was by 
a musician  I'd never heard of - a trumpeter called Jon Hassell. It was called 
*Vernal  Equinox*.

This record fascinated me. It was a dreamy, strange, meditative  music that 
was inflected by Indian, African and South American music, but also  seemed 
located in the lineage of tonal minimalism. It was a music I felt I'd  been 
waiting for. I discovered later, after I met and became friends with Jon,  that he 
referred to his invention as Fourth World Music (which became the  subtitle of 
the first album we made together: Possible Musics). I learned  subsequently 
that Jon had studied at Darmstadt with Stockhausen (as indeed had  Holger 
Czukay from Can, another occasional colleague), that he'd played on the  first 
recording of Terry Riley's seminal In C, and that he'd studied with the  great 
Indian singer Pran Nath.

We had a lot to talk about. We had both  come through experimental music 
traditions - the European one, as exemplified by  Stockhausen and Cornelius 
Cardew, and the American one of Cage and Terry Riley  and LaMonte Young. At the same 
time, we were aware of the beauty and  sophistication of all the music being 
made outside our culture - what is now  called "world music". And we were both 
intrigued by the possibilities of new  musical technology.

But beyond these issues, there was a deeper idea:  that music was a place 
where you conducted and displayed new social experiments.  Jon's experiment was 
to imagine a "coffee coloured" world - a globalised world  constantly 
integrating and hybridising, where differences were celebrated and  dignified - and to 
try to realise it in music.

His unusual articulacy - and the unexpected scope of his references -  
inspired me. In general, artists don't talk much about how or why they make  their 
work, especially "why". Jon does. He is a theorist and a practitioner, and  his 
theories are as elegant and as attractive as his music: because in fact his  
music is the embodiment of those theories.

We spent a lot of time  together, time that changed my mind in many ways. We 
talked about music as  embodied philosophy, for every music implies a 
philosophical position even when  its creators aren't conscious of it. And we talked 
about sex and sensuality,  about trying to make a music that embraced the whole 
being and not just the bit  above the neck (or just the bit below it). It was 
in these conversations that,  among other things, My Life In The Bush Of 
Ghosts, which I made with David Byrne  in 1981, was nurtured. All of us were 
interested in collage, in making musical  particle colliders where we could crash 
different cultural forms with all their  emotional baggage and see what came 
out of the collisions, what new worlds they  suggested.

If I had to name one over-riding principle in Jon's work it  would be that of 
respect. He looks at the world in all its momentary and  evanescent moods 
with respect, and this shows in his music. He sees dignity and  beauty in all 
forms of the dance of life.

I owe a lot to Jon. Actually, a lot of people owe a lot to Jon. He has  
planted a strong and fertile seed whose fruits are still being gathered.
 
Brian Eno, Nov 9 2007
www.guardian.www.g


All good  things
Richard Mills


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Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:02:28 +0000
From: Andrew Shearer <shearerandrew@hotmail.com>
Subject: [AVALON] Otis back in the news

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7115533.stm
_________________________________________________________________
Telly addicts unite!
http://www.searchgamesbox.com/tvtown.shtml


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