Jon Hassell | Ambassador From the Fourth World

Jul 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Geary Yelton

JON HASSELL REVEALS THE FASCINATING MUSICAL HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY BEHIND HIS LATEST RELEASE

When we did Possible Musics, Byrne's friend [was] the editor of this French magazine called Actuel, which was a big, big magazine at that time in Europe, and in France in particular. It was like a combination of Life and Rolling Stone all rolled into one, very music-heavy and art-heavy. Annie Liebovitz did this picture of Brian and David and I for this big fold-out cover. (I happened to be on the inner flap of the cover.) The cover story was called “Coup de Foudre,” which means “clap of lightning,” as in something catching fire all of a sudden. It was about this infusion of ethnic influences into pop music, with me as a kind of eminence gris behind the scenes.

That's something you're well known for.

Hassell: I wouldn't mind being in front of the scene sometime. That seems to be the unpaid version of fame. That opened up a lot of doors in Europe and a lot of interest, so we started playing there a lot. I have a European booking agent, and that's pretty much where everything has been happening. They have a broader view: If we play a so-called jazz festival over there, it can have anything in it from Philip Glass to us. In a sense, it's like the Big Ears Festival here. It could very well be that little Knoxville, Tennessee, becomes a kind of a seed bed for rare plants.

Do you have a personal studio?

Hassell: No, not really. I just got conversant with [Digidesign] Pro Tools in the last year when I was working on this piece for a choral group in Norwich, England, in this beautiful cathedral. Peter will tell you the number of phone calls to him — what do I do here, what do I do there? That's my first multitrack capability.

Everything else before, it started out with two Revoxes, kind of mirroring Terry Riley's early setup. It was all about just putting sound on sound to make a sketch of something, and then getting into a studio and using that. When you say, “I'm going to make a sketch of this and I'll do the real thing later,” often the sketch is the thing that has the vibe and is very difficult to achieve in another way.

We're always running into accidental things. Yesterday we had a soundcheck where there's no pressure, and I said, “I've got this little cut beginning on my lip. I'm just going to hold back now.” But we did this great little three- or four-minute version of “Abu Gil,” a big track on the new record. Given the immediacy of superhigh-fidelity stuff, we've become more smart about grabbing things as they happen, so Arnaud Mercier, the technical director and genius who does everything [with us live], is always recording multitrack, even when we're doing soundchecks.

Do you record those sketches directly into Pro Tools?

Freeman: It depends on what we're doing. In France, we pre-arranged the entire session. Not a lot from that session got used in the final product, but there are elements. I work on a massive TDM system. Sometimes I'm using Pro Tools as the front end for it, sometimes I'm using [Apple] Logic, and occasionally I also like to use Ableton [Live] with the native audio drivers for certain things. In the context of this [album], it's almost always in Pro Tools.

In France, the studio had a basic HD3 system, but it only had one or two interfaces, and we had a large group so we ordered a couple more interfaces. A lot of us had ADAT Lightpipe outputs, so we coordinated everyone to have complete digital connections into Pro Tools live at the same time. [We also had] a certain amount of analog because Rick [had some analog sources], and of course, Jon [was] coming in through his mic preamp. We had tons and tons of inputs all set up, so we could just go into record and everything [was] all broken out, all coming in on its own channel, all at once, all the time.

Did you decide going into the album that you were going to take that approach or did it just evolve that way?

Freeman: It's just about what Jon wanted to accomplish musically and how we could do that. He'll say he'd like a certain kind of flavor and someone's contribution, and we can find something that musician did and usually make it work. Maarifa Street was an extreme case; the entire record was constructed from live performances of the same few pieces of music in different cities. You take a keyboard part [from] the Montreal performance and then use the underlying track from a different city. You have these constant cut-and-paste hybridizations of different performances from different nights, as well as individual tracks from totally different pieces of music getting added into different contexts because they worked really well.

But we didn't really do that [on the latest album]. The basic foundations were there, whereas on the other record, sometimes the foundation of something was a programmed element, and combining that with one of two musicians' performance from a certain concert in Europe would be the basis. In this case, we had the France recordings, we had the London recordings and I would add things. So it was a little more straightforward this time.

Peter, you're credited as engineer and co-producer for Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street. What was the division of labor between you and producer Manfred Eicher?

Freeman: Manfred organized us coming over to France and recording in the studio [La Buissonne]. He was very involved in shepherding the process and making comments about things that he liked. When something happened that he really liked, he would jump up and get very involved. He was always listening closely, but when he got really deep into something, he would conduct people and take over the proceedings in a very positive way. He's a really genuinely involved artist. He has amazing ears and really pays attention to what's going on in the studio.

He's also really great at balances during the mix. The first track on the record was actually one of his mixes, even though I was credited as mixer. “Aurora” was the only mix that was done at La Buissonne, and he really balanced that in a way that we liked. If we're working on something and something's not quite right, he can pick out the one element that if you just made [it] softer, everything would fall into place. Seeing him change things for the better just by balancing, without doing any EQ or anything, was really instructive for me. The idea was, before we start playing around with effects, can this be done with just balancing?

So you did the rest of the mixing on the album?

Freeman: Yeah, I mixed the whole thing other than that. I was the only one who had his hands directly on it other than the guys who recorded the basic tracks at La Buissonne. It's important to note that there were three main sources of elements that got used in what you hear on the final record: the La Buissonne recordings (a group effort with everyone playing in the studio live into Pro Tools), concert footage from a number of places (mostly from London with individual elements taken from elsewhere) and things that we did at my house. I tried to respect the ECM tradition of mixing and sound. Jon absolutely has the last word on all the key musical decisions. He's quite conscious of what he wants in terms of relative balances.

Everything is potentially an element. There are no restrictions on where something came from. Very often there are layers, these two elements from a soundcheck and those things that were done very offhand in the studio without even being “in record,” just messing around. Like Jon was saying, sometimes the best stuff happens that way, and even if it has imperfections, you have to work within that because you won't get it again the same way. It's the result of a particular moment and the way everybody was feeling and the circumstance. [For more, see the bonus material, “Jon Hassell's Post-Production,” at http://emusician.com/online_exclusive/jon_hassell_bonus_material/.]

Hassell: I still dream of a concert situation where, instead of having everything go through a mixer, what would happen if there were enough power onstage? It would be like having super-monitors [that] mix in the air. If it were a big hall, you would have one of these super-stereo mics, as if you were recording a string quartet, and that would be the house sound. When I achieve my trumpet-shaped swimming pool [laughter] in the Hollywood Hills, we'll give it a try.

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EM senior editor Geary Yelton gave up trumpet several years before he first picked up an electric guitar at the age of 15. He lives in Charlotte, N.C.