Jon Hassell

BONO

"A brilliant musician."

DAVID TOOP

"Almost all of the musicians I meet at the moment seem to regard Jon Hassell as one of the God-like geniuses of contemporary music."

PAT METHENY

"A visionary."

BRIAN ENO

"I've really gotten into Fascinoma. There's real clarity and honesty about it...The music is fantastic, and its undefendedness inspires instant confidence. This is very much the mood of the times."

VANITY FAIR

"Hassell has long been admired for his work with Brian Eno, the Peters Gabriel and Sellars and the Kronos Quartet...If there were any justice, Hassell's 10 majestic albums would already be broadcast on their own radio and cable stations 24 hours a day: they're the secret sound track of our public and private lives."

ROLLING STONE

"Extraordinary, otherworldly music"

JACK NITZSCHE

"The most innovative, important composer alive."

PLAYBOY

"Jon Hassell is an extraterrestrial in the jazz galaxy... Teeming with details, free as the wind blowing in the desert, this celestial jazz is amazing. Edgy but eminently accessible, Maarifa Street leads us to the peaks where the distant horizon becomes a mirage which this music embraces. An unbelievable invitation to meditation."

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

"Power Spot is amazing!"

WIM WENDERS

"What a beautiful atmosphere he makes!"

INTERVIEW

"Jon Hassell is one of the great inventors and innovators in music."

BJÖRK

"I've always thought about your music as 'secretly happy'."

RY COODER

"One of the three or four players of wind instruments in the world who can command your attention with one note."

LONDON TIMES

"Work of quite extraordinary beauty. This pan-cultural music swirls and rises like smoke...Hassell blends his experiences in such a way that the components-African drumming, Indian microtonality, Balinese tranquility-make a new palette while forfeiting none of the individual colors."

ANI DI FRANCO

"Up before the light...The birds and Fascinoma in stereo...I come back to it again and again. Thank you."

PHILIP GLASS

"If you're looking for interesting new music, I recommend all the works of Jon Hassell."

NEW YORK TIMES

"Miles Davis and Jon Hassell are both trumpet players who have transcended the instrument's inherent limitations and now use it as flexibly, as expressively and as intimately as a great singer uses his voice. They are both visionary composers who use their knowledge of American traditions and the musics of the world to create vivid landscapes that seem to palpitate with a life of their own."

PITCHFORK MEDIA

"Lucid-dreaming music... turning breath to wind and cheating gravity with every updraft."

THE WIRE

"Music which conveys the impression of gossamer-like veils floating gradually to earth.... at once eery and beautiful."

THE WIRE

"It's difficult to think what contemporary music would sound like without his influence...there's no doubt that Jon Hassell has had an effect on contemporary music as important as Miles Davis or Jimi Hendrix or James Brown or the Velvet Underground."

MELODY MAKER

"Fourth World music is the soundtrack to an imaginary future culture based on the mingling of ancient and modern, Western sophistication and Third World primitivism. Its music for nowhere / nowhen, a place that doesn't actually exist yet."

VANITY FAIR

"A borderless bed of mystery and enchantment"

THE NEW YORKER

"Mesmerizing ... like an abstract canvas, compelling because of its unpredictability"

INTERVIEW

"Jon Hassell is one of the world's most innovative musicians and one of today's most influential composers. His music has established a genre that goes beyond the notions of jazz, neo-classicism, new music or new age. Jon Hassell's concept of Fourth World Music transcends the so-called 'primitive' and the so-called 'futurist' by seamlessly uniting traditional rhythmic and melodic concepts with recombinant aesthetics made possible by the creations of high technology."

LONDON TIMES

"Work of quite extraordinary beauty...This pan-cultural music swirls and rises like smoke...Hassell blends his experiences in such a way that the components—African drumming, Indian microtonality, Balinese tranquility—make a new palette while forfeiting none of the individual colors."