An approach to QCD vacuum as a medium describable in terms of statistical ensemble of almost everywhere homogeneous Abelian (anti-)self-dual gluon fields is briefly reviewed. These fields play the role of the confining medium for color charged fields as well as underline the mechanism of realization of chiral $SU_{\rm L}(N_f)\times SU_{\rm R}(N_f)$ and $U_A(1)$ symmetries. Hadronization formalism based on this ensemble leads to manifestly defined quantum effective meson action. Strong, electromagnetic and weak interactions of mesons are represented in the action in terms of nonlocal $n$-point interaction vertices given by the quark-gluon loops averaged over the background ensemble. New systematic results for the mass spectrum and decay constants of radially excited light, heavy-light mesons and heavy quarkonia are presented. Interrelation between the present approach, models based on ideas of soft wall AdS/QCD, light front holographic QCD, and the picture of harmonic confinement is outlined.

27 pages, 18 figures; corrected caption for fig. 10