Customer Reviews

Aka-Darbari-Java / Magic Realism

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

World Music is now a buzz term, but the interest in this concept began with players like Bela Bartok, Modest Mussorgsky, and in jazz, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. The 1970s saw so much of this kind of thing going on - one thinks of John McLaughlin with his solo projects like My Goal's Beyond and then Shakti, Oregon, Don Cherry playing bizarre instruments from Tibet on projects like Eternal Now and Relativity Suite, and then Hassell.

This record was one of the earliest CDs,from 1983, and its Hassell's use of precorded samples and computers to create compositions in a modular way that makes this album so interesting. The music is like a soundtrack for a film, extremley gentle and slow moving, with dense textures of precorded raga and gamalan rhthms embellished by Hassell's (backwards?) trumpet and Abdou Mboup's percussion. The engineer Dan Lanois plays as big a part as the musicians.

The personel and cover art by Mati Klarwein, who painted the popular cover art for Santana's Abraxas album and did a few covers for Miles, indicate this album was really a continuation of the ideas he explored in Earthquake Island, which was made five years ealrier (also with art by Klarwein). There are liner notes by Hassell which explain the technical and artistic realites involved in this project which sound incredibly dated now, but must have been massively difficult at that time.

This record is the most "intrinseco" and deeper work by this master, the trumpet player Jon Hassell.
One of my favorite composer.
I can't belived how the companies not make a new edition, this is the most different music art i found since the 50s till now.
Buy it and keep it for all your life and for your child.

this album is pretty strange- kind of ambient with muted trumpet and javanese influences. the most interesting thing would be how it pre-dates the current interest in ethnic and world music, although in a very non-commercial way. If you like this album see if you can locate a copy of Jah Wobble's Bedroom album, which accomplishes a similiar goal in a more accessible way.