Trumpeter is hard to label, easy to take

Trumpeter Jon Hassell doesn't just play jazz for people who don't necessarily get jazz. He also plays pop for people who don't dig conventional pop.

Hassell showed as much during Sunday's program at World Cafe Live with his Maarifa Street ensemble.

Though he laced solos with themes familiar from John Coltrane and Miles Davis, Hassell's playing fits no category. But the Memphis-born and conservatory-educated (studies with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, yet) Hassell has been proving this since career's start.

He played with minimalist masters like La Monte Young and learned to create his trumpet's rounded tones and stammering voice from vocal teacher Pandit Pran Nath.

Hassell brought mammalian howls and minimalist ideals to a maximal deconstructionist brand of playing and composing he titled "fourth world." His is a sonic landscape with no single label or attitude, where electronic ambience, drone and sampling meet jazz and ethnic music.

Hassell's thinking has made him an elegant foil for recording mates Peter Gabriel, Baaba Maal and Talking Heads. He has crafted soundtracks for directors Martin Scorsese and Wim Wenders. And he has joined forces with Brian Eno. Their collaborative work Conversation Piece is to debut in London in April. And Hassell/Eno's Possible Musics furnished the basis for Sunday's 80-plus-minute "song."

After the audience was welcomed to the communal "living room," the hall went dim, the bar stopped serving, and Hassell's liquid music began.

With live samplers Dino Deane and Jan Bang, bassist Peter Freeman, and violinist Kheir-Eddine M'Kachiche, Hassell - who also played keyboards - crafted an eloquent language without words, cool tones amid warm flow. Sampled strings mixed eerily yet seamlessly with M'Kachiche's violin. A tune that began as vaguely Middle Eastern became left of Eastern. A steady melody was surrounded by a feeling of submersion: a sampled tabla, a record's scratch, a synth's squiggle, a fuzz-toned electric piano's sizzle. Throughout, Hassell's spare trumpet delivered epiphanies of both mourning and joy, with nods to California noir and Miles' "Seven Spanish Steps," achieving a mystical stateliness.