Eli Hasson is an Israeli, Tel Aviv-based, classically trained trumpeter, who has played with Israeli improvisers Harold Rubin and Albert Beger before choosing a career in hi-tech. Pianist Anat Fort mentored his return to music life, and Badlands is his second album as a bandleader, and its title captures a «word for a place where beauty and devastation sit right next to each other».
Hasson accompanied himself on his debut solo album, Seven Seas (2023), with young musicians – guitarist Yeonathan Shachar and drummer Yovel Shay. In Badlands, recorded in September 2025 in Pluto Studio in Tel Aviv, Hasson enjoys the company of the elite of Israeli musicians-improvisers – pianist Milton Michaeli, double bass player Asaf Schori, and drummer Haggai Fershtman, who played together and separately with local heroes as Beger, Assif Tsahar, and Fort.
Hasson writes that the music was written «when the world was breaking. It is dedicated to all those who have lost a home, a person, a sense of who they were». Accordingly, the album opens and closes with Ruyichi Sakamoto’s moving ballad, «Bring Them Home» (from 1996, Milan, 1996). «Bring Them Home» (from 1996, Milan, 1996), faithful to Sakamoto’s arrangement for a standard jazz trio. Hasson says it addresses «all the displaced, all the innocent people caught up in this violence, wherever they are». Hasson’s vulnerable, melancholic ballad «Dog Years» corresponds with Sakamoto’s ambient music and was inspired by the sound of a small respirator that my mother had at home in her last days.
Hasson’s quartet also covers Paul Motian’s «Endless» (originally from Garden of Eden, ECM, 2006) and adds a reflective version of Neil Young’s classic anti-war song «Cortez the Killer» (originally from Zuma, Reprise, 1975). In these covers and other Hasson’s real-time compositions, the powerful rhythm section of Michaeli, Shchori, and Fershtman cleverly enriches Hasson’s economic, ballad-like trumpet lines and embellishes the compositions’ sketchy outlines.
Eyal Hareuveni
Eli Hasson (trumpet), Milton Michaeli (piano), Asaf Shchori (double bass), Haggai Fershtman (drums)
