P R I N C I P A L   W O R K S C o l l a b o r a t i o n s / s e s s i o n s   •   S o u n d t r a c k s

F A S C I N O M A Water Lily Acoustics 1999 60:30   1  Nature Boy (Ahbez) 2.45 2  Datura (Hassell) 4.31 3  Caravanesque (Ellington/Tizol) 7.18 4  Wide Sky (Cooder/Cox/Hassell/Majumdar) 6.35 5  Mevlana Duke (Hassell/Terrasson) 6.16 6  Secretly Happy (Hassell/Majumdar/Muhoberac) 6.33 7  Poinciana (Bernier/Simon) 4.28 8  Sensuendo (Hassell/Majumdar) 5.15 9  Suite de Caravan (Ellington/Tizol) 12.09 10  Estate (Summer) (Brighetti/Martino) 4.40   Jon Hassell—trumpet Ry Cooder—guitar Jacky Terrason—piano Ronu Majumdar—bansuri Rick Cox—guitar, bass clarinet, samples Jamie Muhoberac—zendrum Joachim Cooder—drums Rick Masterson—tambura Rose Okada—tambura   Produced by Ry Cooder Cover design by Neil Kellerhouse

P R E V I O U S

Album notes: After twentysome years of recordings and performnaces, this is the first time I've ever played someone else's song. With this recording I locate myself squarely within that aspect of music which is fundamental and irreducible: the beauty of the sound. This is what Dane Rudyar calls "tone-magic" — a concept derived from ancient practice wherein the quality of the tone itself communicates meaning quite apart from any further arrangement of an "artifice" of music. At the same time I celebrate here my first contacts with musical exotica in the form of certain songs and melodies heard as a child on the radio or in movie scores. This music created a kind of permanent technicolor oasis in my spirit — a place where I always want to stop for a cool refreshing drink, whether from Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol's "Caravan", or Ravel or raga or gamelan or Gil, or Joao or Joujouka — and a place which became the underlying spring from which flowed my "fourth world" musical paradigm. Jon Hassell

A record that represents a consolidation of interests rather than the retrogressive step that some reviewers chose to see. Apart from this being somewhat lateral to Water Lily's general pure acoustics — there are samples present, for instance — the choice of music remains consistent with the earliest Hassell releases. Nature Boy composer, Eden Ahbez, produced an album for the exotica boom in 1960 called Eden's Island (in actuality closer to Gilligan's Island than Earthquake Island); Caravan pointed the way to the Fourth World years before the term was invented. The version here returns to the strange, slightly sinister atmosphere of the original, sweeping away decades of over-familiarity. Datura (the name of an hallucinogenic plant) is as typical a Hassell piece as anything before only without the trumpet being processed through harmonisers and other effects. This is the closest one gets to Jon Hassell: Unplugged. A high quality, audiophile recording, like all Water Lily releases. A SuperDisc version is also available. •