The strangely beautiful title of Jon Hassell's Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street on ECM is taken from a poem by the great 13th century Sufi mystic Jalaluddin Rumi. The rest of it, in the context of the sound here, is also instructional: "Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street/I took it as a sign to start singing/Falling up into the bowl of sky." Hassell's electronically enhanced trumpet playing follows directly in a line from Miles Davis' experiments of the 1970s. It comes off more as "singing" than anything else. He sounds like no one else, but many trumpet players and sound collagists have been deeply influenced by his work. The "bowl of sky" in the poem is referent, too: it reflects the quality of Hassell's musical montages and sonic investigations. This has been true since the very beginning in the 1970s, but became his trademark "sound" while working with Brian Eno as he developed his "Fourth World" music -- showcased on his EG albums from the early '80s (Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics, Fourth World, Vol. 2: Dream Theory in Malaya, Aka/Darbari/Java ) -- and was acutely articulated on his last ECM release, 1985's brilliant Power Spot. Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street is Hassell's first recording since 2005's Maarifa Street: Magic Realism, Vol. 2; it's an assembled montage of sessions recorded in France and Los Angeles, and concerts are also woven into the rich fabric here. Hassell's music, even now, sounds alien, beguiling, mercurial, seemingly formless and airy but full of subtle washes, shifts of tone, and polyrhythmic strategies. The ten cuts here are mostly middle-length pieces that range between five and eight minutes, but three -- Time and Place, Clairvoyance, and Scintilla -- act as transitions segmenting, however seamlessly, the album into roughly thirds.

1		Aurora
2		Time And Place
3		Abu Gil
4		Last Night The Moon Came
5		Clairvoyance
6		Courtrais
7		Scintilla
8		Northline
9		Blue Period
10		Light On Water
11		Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street