John Zorn - A Little Listening Guide

Introduction

This piece is not meant to be an all-encompassing monograph on John Zorn: quite simply, it couldn't be (but then, who could really manage that?), since this composer/multi-instrumentalist's discography is nothing short of vast.

The aspect of this figure that has always fascinated me, and that I'll try to bring to light here, is his variety, his ability to constantly reinvent himself.

In one interview, for instance, he stated, “My musical world is a like a prysm”. In other words, his music is an object with a thousand faces, with infinite facets.

I'll therefore try to examine some of Zorn's “passions”, namely the influences and directions that have made him such an unusual “pop” figure, a sort of Quentin Tarantino of musicians.

What do these two artists have in common? In my view, both share the ability to pack their creations with dozens of elements drawn from utterly distant contexts, in order to create something that, even though largely made up of components familiar to the listener, still comes across as genuinely new. Let's now begin examining these elements.

The beginnings

John Zorn began studying piano and flute before the age of 10, then moved on to guitar, and at 14 he started composing, discovering a passion for contemporary classical music.

In the following years he studied at a college in St. Louis, picked up the saxophone and fell in love with free jazz, particularly the work of Anthony Braxton. After dropping out of college, he moved to New York, where he came into contact with the extremely vibrant scene of Lower Manhattan's improvisational avant-garde.

It's here that his career begins: he plays in bands of every kind, from jazz to rock, from avant-garde to free improvisation.

The tributes

The albums of this kind released by Zorn essentially fall into two categories: those in which he rearranges pieces by the composer in question, and those in which he dedicates a series of his own compositions to a particular figure (not necessarily a composer/musician) or to a particular philosophical theme.

In the first category, the most important albums are News For Lulu, Spy vs. Spy and The Big Gundown.

The latter is a tribute to Ennio Morricone, 16 of whose pieces he rearranges with the help of a multitude of musicians who, over the years, would come to form a sort of genuine clan. The Big Gundown is an extremely enjoyable record, even if initially a bit tough going due to certain gratuitous noise excursions that (alas) would plague much of his output in the future too. That said, tracks like "The Sicilian Clan" amply reward the patience invested. It's precisely on this album, in fact, that Zorn's skill as an arranger first becomes clearly evident.

News For Lulu is a tribute to a series of jazz and hard-bop composers largely unknown to the wider public (namely Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Sonny Clark and Freddie Redd), credited to a trio: Zorn on alto sax, George Lewis on trombone and Bill Frisell on guitar.

As you'll notice, there's no bass, piano or drums, the three instruments that make up the traditional jazz rhythm section: and yet, for hard-bop fans, the record is a genuine gem. There's relatively little avant-garde here, the themes are rendered very faithfully to the originals, and the solo passages swing with great elegance, drawing on the classic jazz tradition.

Spy vs Spy is another excellent album, a tribute to the great saxophonist Ornette Coleman, 17 of whose compositions are performed with considerable interpretive fury on a live recording at the Tonic in New York.

The other category consists of concept albums composed by Zorn in honor of a series of artists.

Here things get really complex, and I'll freely admit I haven't listened to many of these works.

Much of this material (generally conceived with an extremely "studied" structure, evident even just at the level of the tracklist) is nonetheless very interesting, and shows a mature, refined and cultured Zorn.

Godard/Spillane, for example, is made up of two long compositions, where the "file cards" method is put into practice.

The pieces, in fact, attempt to set to music the many images evoked by Jean-Luc Godard in his films and by Mickey Spillane in his crime novels, stringing together a series of very short musical fragments (the track "Spillane" uses as many as 60 of them in 25 minutes). The important thing is that these fragments are almost all wildly different from one another: they range from electronic music to noise, from jazz to hard rock.

The result, while ingenious, will likely prove rather tough going for anyone who doesn't have much tolerance for avant-garde music.

The album Duras: Duchamp (dedicated to the poet/writer Marguerite Duras and the Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp) leans instead more toward contemporary classical: here too there are only two long pieces, but the instrumentation is different, dominated by piano and strings, with a rather melancholic mood (especially on the first piece). In any case, it's one of (several) gorgeous Zorn albums.

There's also no shortage of albums devoted to philosophical themes: the most successful among those reviewed are Red Bird (two compositions brimming with spirituality for harp, violin, cello and percussion), Kristallnacht (dedicated to the theme of the Holocaust) and Love, Madness And Misticism (three chamber-music compositions).

Plenty of memorable tracks, meanwhile, on IAO – dedicated to mystery cults and Crowley's black magic – ("Mysteries" and "Sacred rites of the left hand path"), as well as on Taboo And Exile and Music For Children, albums that are at times brilliant but occasionally weighed down by too many gratuitous, pseudo-intellectual flourishes.

Naked City

Naked City is without doubt the most famous outfit Zorn has ever fronted.

The lineup features an all-star cast of musicians: Zorn on alto sax, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, Bill Frisell on guitar, Fred Frith on bass, Joey Baron on drums, and occasionally Yamatsuka Eye (the deranged leader of Boredoms) on vocals.

These are artists coming from completely different backgrounds: Frisell is a jazz guitarist who has also recorded several albums for Ecm, Frith came from stints first with Henry Cow and Art Bears, then with a host of improvisers, while Yamatsuka Eye could easily be classified as a "sonic terrorist."

The debut by Naked City is simply a great record: the most fitting adjective to describe it is "insane." Naked City's tracks are almost always extremely short (often even under a minute), yet each one packs a myriad of different styles inside it.

Every now and then you catch them swinging, but they'll hardly keep it up for more than 30 seconds. A grind-core (a metal/hard rock subgenre) breakdown, a crackpot tempo shift, a gratuitous burst of noise can always be lurking around the corner. Just look at the tracklist: the album consists of 26 tracks, and tracks 10 through 17 are grind pieces never longer than 40 seconds.

Naked City know perfectly well that they're making "trash" music, and it's this strong self-irony, combined with the ability to play practically any genre with ease (and extraordinary skill), that makes their debut an extraordinarily enjoyable and entertaining record.

The grind-core/jazz fusion is pursued with even greater conviction on Torture Garden, a record recommended to anyone who enjoyed the first one.

Also worth noting are other works such as Radio, Absinthe, Le Grand Guignol and Heretic, Jeux Des Dames Crudelles.

Game Pieces

The Game Pieces are a series of improvisations structured according to rules devised by Zorn himself, each time anew.

On a purely listening level, however – aside from the thoroughly entertaining Xu Feng (dominated by skewed drums, guitars and electronics) – they're largely dispensable.

An album like Cobra will seem, on first listen, like a collage of noises utterly devoid of aesthetic value… an opinion that, for this writer, hasn't changed even after repeated listens.

What's interesting about these records is the concept behind them: Zorn rarely plays directly, taking instead the role of a leader who, based on the drawing of certain cards, gives the musicians directives that constrain their improvisational possibilities.

The rules of these "games" (which Zorn himself admits are infinitely more interesting live than on record) aren't written in the CD booklets, since they're meant to be passed down orally: essentially, the only ones who know them are Zorn and his musicians.

The first album in which Zorn used this compositional method is called Lacrosse, recorded in 1978. In this writer's judgment, it's a terrible, unlistenable record, but it's nonetheless interesting to hear how Zorn (briefly) described its rules: "To make sure every note had the right weight. Each musician's task was to create small 'events' lasting between 3 and 10 seconds, concentrating completely on them and making sure every single note counted. Then they had to stop, breathe for a second, and think of another small 'event' to perform. When you have six or seven people doing that, you end up in a situation where all the musicians are extremely focused on what they themselves and the other people are playing."

Klezmer

Klezmer is Jewish folk music, the genre that perhaps influenced John Zorn's output in the Nineties more than any other.

It all began when Zorn founded Masada together with trumpeter Dave Douglas, bassist Greg Cohen and drummer Joey Baron.

This lineup would prove extremely prolific throughout the Nineties, producing no fewer than ten albums between 1994 and 2000. On these records, aided by a tremendous rhythm section and an extraordinary interplay with Dave Douglas (when the two play together on passages that aren't the themes, they really do seem telepathic), a fusion is achieved between the creativity and rhythmic drive of avant-garde jazz and the harmonies of klezmer, yielding genuinely remarkable aesthetic results. Of the ten albums, the penultimate (the gorgeous Live In Sevilla) and the last (Live At Tonic) stand out, though the overall quality of this body of work is consistently high.

Listening to these records also makes it unmistakably clear that Zorn is not only a brilliant composer, but also a tremendous saxophonist, blessed with a huge range of registers and a dazzling technique (even if he sometimes overdoes it with his famous "honks").

The Masada repertoire (the so-called "Masada Songbook") is vast, and many of these pieces have also been rearranged for lineups with markedly different instrumentation. In this respect, the key reference records are above all two (double) albums that rank among the most accessible things Zorn has ever produced: The Circle Maker and Bar Kokhba.

The Circle Maker is split into two parts: the first for the Masada String Trio (bass, cello, violin), the second for the Bar Kokhba Sextet (featuring the trio's musicians plus Cyro Baptista on percussion, Joey Baron on drums and Marc Ribot on guitar). The first part is indeed chamber music of great quality and poetry, but it's clearly inferior to the second, which — thanks above all to the extraordinary guitar talent of Ribot (a longtime regular collaborator of Zorn's) — proves simply sublime.

As for Bar Kokhba, the same applies: the pieces for strings alone (about a third of the total) are indeed lovely, but pale next to those with the expanded lineup. Compared to The Circle Maker (with which it nonetheless shares a general mood, elegiac and melancholy), new instruments appear here too, chief among them piano and clarinet. The final result is wonderful, one of Zorn's very best works.

From the idea of rearranging Masada's compositions for a larger ensemble came Electric Masada as well, who in this writer's opinion are perhaps the greatest band of all time.

This lineup unfortunately released only one official record, 50th Birthday Celebration Volume 4, a live album made up of seven simply sensational tracks. Listening to the record, it's impossible to remain indifferent to Zorn's genius as an arranger: Fender Rhodes, laptop, organ, alto sax, percussion, two drum kits, guitar and bass coexist in the most natural way possible, with thrilling results. Much of the credit, however, also goes to the other musicians in the ensemble: the rhythm section is nothing short of overwhelming and forceful, and Ikue Mori has the rare gift of good taste in her (restrained) use of electronics. But one could go on forever: Electric Masada's record truly never grows tiresome.

The soundtracks

In the late Eighties, Zorn also began composing soundtracks, though these were for documentaries and films with very limited distribution.

Here too, the "collaborative" component of his music comes through clearly, since Zorn almost never actually plays on these records: he usually limits himself to composing and arranging, leaving the rest to his (extraordinary) collaborators.

As things stand, 14 records in this series have been released, with the fifteenth due out in a few weeks. So, business as usual.

The early works seem rather fragmentary, full of ideas but too much like mere "sketches" to convey any real sense of purpose. Recently, however, the quality of these soundtracks has markedly improved.

Those who prefer non-noisy moods and not-too-short compositions will particularly appreciate Volume 4 (the first track especially is gorgeous, titled "Pueblo," a relaxing one-chord jam with strong blues-western echoes dominated by Ribot's guitar), 10, 8 (a continuation of the Bar Kokhba project), 9, 13 and 14 (in these last two as well, Ribot's contribution is of enormous value). Unfortunately, like many soundtrack composers, Zorn too is not immune to churning out a whole series of pointless reprises, though this certainly doesn't stop the best releases in the "Filmworks" series from being genuine gems.

Conclusion

As stated at the outset, I don't claim to offer a complete guide to Zorn's discography (listening to all of it is a feat that borders on the impossible). I've limited myself to pointing out what seemed to me the most important directions taken by his music, pairing them with mini-reviews of the records I liked best. I've also left out plenty for the sake of space and readability (such as the recent "50th Birthday Celebration" series, a kind of summation of the various works Zorn has created over his career, condensed into a series of live shows - later released on record - held at the Knitting Factory in New York for his fiftieth birthday, or a review of the splendid The Gift, another record with warm, understated tones), trying instead to bring out the defining traits of Zorn the character: a learned musician, certainly, but also one endowed with great humor; a lover of rock and even grind-core, but also a composer of contemporary classical music (other excellent chamber works by Zorn include Cartoon S & M and 50th Celebration Volume 1).

The most extraordinary thing about this singular composer is that after 25 years of career he keeps churning out great masterpieces (albeit interspersed with some spectacular missteps), displaying a compositional ability that almost all of today's musicians can only dream of. The hope is that he keeps doing so.

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