John Zorn Week (Coda): A Beginner’s Guide to John Zorn

By Martin Schray

Colin suggested that we should have a selection of recommendations of John Zorn albums at the end of the birthday week but this turns out to be rather difficult because Zorn appears on over 400 recordings as a composer or performer. Now I tried to compile a selection of recordings which is highly subjective, of course. I thought it might be useful for listeners who are not so familiar with Mr Zorn’s work and for those who have discovered him just recently. I concentrated on albums that were released before this blog started. Please feel free to criticize my selection and add whatever you think is necessary. Here it comes:


Early Works:

• The Big Gundown (1985) – Zorn’s notion of Ennio Morricone, a great and accessible album
• Spillane (1987) – an early classic, especially the title track already gathers a bunch of long-time collaborators like Bill Frisell or Anthony Coleman

Naked City:
Maybe Naked City was Zorn’s most popular group, in any case it was his most spectacular one (Mike Patton/Yamazuka Eye on vocals, Zorn on saxes, Bill Frisell on guitars, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, Fred Frith on bass, Joey Baron on drums). The music is a weird collage of country & western, grindcore, free jazz, soundtrack snippets, electronics, ambient etc. and very often simultaneously. I would say that the first two albums are must-haves but all of them are fantastic.

• Naked City (1990)
• Torture Garden (1990)
• Grand Guignol (1992)
• Leng Tch'e (1992)
• Heretic (1992)
• Radio (1993)
• Absinthe (1993)

Masada:
Masada is his jazziest group, here he combines his love for Ornette Coleman with his Jewish roots. The actual band was Zorn on sax, Dave Douglas on trumpet, Greg Cohen on bass and Joey Baron on drums. The interplay is simply gorgeous, with such a line up you can’t go wrong. Maybe you don’t need all the releases, just pick one or two, you won’t be disappointed.

• Alef (1994)
• Beit (1994)
• Gimel (1994)
• Dalet (1995) EP
• Hei (1995)
• Vav (1995)
• Zayin (1996)
• Het (1997)
• Tet (1998)
• Yod (1998)

The Dreamers:
… are the alternative draft to bands like Naked City. You think you don’t like Easy Listening? Wait until you hear this band!

• The Dreamers –The Gentle Side (vinyl only)

Electric Masada
Of all his contemporary bands this is the most exciting one. It consists of the same members as The Dreamers, except that Kenny Wollesen plays the drums instead of the vibes and that there is Ikue Mori on electronics. This says a lot more about Zorn than all the stuff that has been written about him.

• 50th Birthday Celebration Volume 4 (2004)
• At the Mountains of Madness (2005)

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John Zorn: Tzadik Round-up

Closing out our John Zorn birthday week celebration is a round-up of recent releases on Zorn's label Tzadik. From his work with his prolific label to the ever interesting live concerts offered at his music room, "The Stone" in New York City, to his own work that was highlighted this past week, Zorn's influence hovers large over avant-garde music.

A big thank you to Martin Schray for all his work in making this week of celebration possible!

- Freejazzblog.org 

Bester Quartet: The Golden Land ****

By Martin Schray

The Bester Quartet is one of this blog’s favorite groups, they have released seven albums on John Zorn's Tzadik label and their new one is again part of his "Radical Jewish Culture" series, presenting songs by the Polish-Jewish poet and songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig, who – like the band – was a Krakow native (where he was also killed by the Nazis).

The band basically still consists of Jaroslaw Bester (bayan), Jaroslaw Tyrala (v), Oleg Dyyak (bayan, cl, perc) and Mikolaj Pospieszalski (b). On this album the lineup is augmented by trumpeter Tomasz Zietek, cellist Magdalena Pluta (from Samech, which is also a Tzadik/Radical Jewish Culture band) and bass clarinetist Marcin Malinowski and similar to other collaborations like Shofar they also want to revive what is left of Jewish musical culture after the holocaust in Eastern Europe. Interestingly enough, this approach, which is worthy of praise, was also criticized accusing the bands to use the Jewish tag as a promotional help (which is something I can’t see).

Like on their earlier releases they are clearly in the klezmer tradition again but the songs they chose are of an almost ecstatic vividness due to tango elements (“Di Lalke”) and gypsy jazz influences (“Shloymele Liber”).

The highlight of the album is “Unser Orem Kind” (Our Poor Child), a beautiful, sad and mournful ballad which forebodes the future of the Jews in Europe, and in which Zietek, whose style reminds me of Nils-Petter Molvaer, and Tyrala play heartfelt solos supported by a reluctant yet tight string arrangement.

Listen to a mix here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgIgFV2C670

Jon Madof - Zion80 (Tzadik, 2013) ****

Okay, how weird can it get? What can you expect when someone tries to mix the music of the Jewish religious folk songs by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach with Fela Kuti’s Afrofunk? Has anybody tried to do anything like that before? Can it work?

The common denominator between the two musicians is their political approach. Fela Kuti fought Nigeria’s military governments of the 1970s and ’80s, while Carlebach’s composition “Am Yisroel Chai” (“The People of Israel Live”) was used by Russian Jews as an anthem to get rid of the oppressive Soviet government of the cold war era.
 
Jon Madof, a guitarist and orthodox Jew, gave this unorthodox mixture of styles a try. To be honest I was really skeptical about this project but I was also absolutely surprised when I heard it in the end. The wind section arrangements are extremely tight and funky, they remind me of the great maverick US songwriter John Trubee and his band Ugly Janitors of America, the organ and the guitars alienate the originals very nicely adding a cool hippie element to the songs, a track like “Nygun” even stands in the tradition of Pharoah Sanders’ and John Coltrane’s African projects.

This is excellent, unusual and good-humored party music, played by a great band (13 musicians!) – a real treat.

Listen to “Holy Brother” here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5WD56Uaygc


Gabriele Coen Jewish Experience - Yiddish Melodies in Jazz (Tzadik, 2013) **½

Compared to Madof’s project Gabriele Coen’s album, which is part of John Zorn’s Radical Jewish Culture” series as well, sounded much more promising but cannot fulfill the expectations.

In Yiddish Melodies in Jazz Coen (soprano and tenor sax, clarinet) and his band (Pietro Lussi on piano; Lutte Berg on electric guitar; Marco Loddo on bass and Luca Caponi on drums) wanted to explore the relationship between Jewish music and American Jazz, especially the influence classical Jewish music like klezmer has had on this most American of all musics. That’s why they chose tracks that have become standards of the great American jazz songbook like “Bei mir bist du schoen” or “Di grine Kusine”.

In the end Mr Coen’s approach does not always work, though. Especially the sound of the soprano and the guitar in the first pieces is too smooth making it sound like “muzak” that can be heard in elevators. The last four tracks are more interesting but all in all the band can hardly add new ideas to the well-known melodies.

Listen to the first track ”Bublitcki“ here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoKJUYINlOI


Massacre: Love me tender (Tzadik, 2013) ***½

Unfortunately this is not really a new album by this almost legendary free rock band consisting of Bill Laswell (b), Fred Frith (g) and Charles Hayward (dr, melodica, voice). The album presents five songs which were recorded live in 1999 during their European tour, the other songs are from 2008.

What we get is the usual Massacre brew with Laswell’s massive, dark wah-wah bass, Frith’s shredded and echoing guitar lines and Hayward’s stoic beats which he can turn into wild drumming, it is the well-known mixture of gloomy dub reggae (“The North Reaches to the Ankle”), sound sculptures (“Chapter Amber”), free rock (“In Search of the Nervous System”), ambient noise (“Madness is Medicine”) and disco funk á la Parliament (“Rosey Good Shook”). The result are very tight and varied soundscapes, especially when Hayward adds his melodica. Hopefully there will be a real new album soon.

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John Zorn: Filmworks XXV – City of Slaughter/Schmatta/Beyond the Infinite (Tzadik, 2013) ****

By Martin Schray

Another of John Zorn’s long time projects are his filmworks, which he officially started in 1992 and allegedly will finish with this album. Zorn has always been interested in the cinematic possibilities of music as you could see on other albums like “The Big Gundown” from 1986, on which he processed the music of Ennio Morricone, or “Godard/Spillane” from 1999, for example. On “Filmworks XXV” Zorn has collected music for three projects, the first one – “City of Slaughter” – being the music for a documentary by Oren Rudavsky (with whom he also worked for “The Treatment” and “Hiding and Seeking”) for the Museum of Jewish History and Tolerance Center in Moscow. It consists of 14 rather short miniatures for solo piano for which Zorn hired the young Israeli jazz pianist Omri Mor (who will also be working on one of the next Book of Angels albums with him). The music itself is typical Zorn merging piano jazz, klezmer and Eastern European folk music. Mor turns out to be a very talented pianist with an interesting, crystal clear style combining Keith-Jarrett-like trills, drowsy Erik Satie chords and the swing of Bill Evans. The music – mostly in minor keys - sways between joyful vitality (“Island/Ghetto”) and a somber foreboding what is going to come (“Anti-Semitism/Pogrom”) and frantic outbreaks (“Pale of Settlements”).

“Schmatta”, the next four tracks, feature Zorn himself on piano, actually presenting ideas he has elaborated in different contexts – motives played by The Dreamers, for example. Of course he is limited as a pianist but it is very interesting to see such work in progress. The music is composed for Marc Levin's “Schmatta” (the Yiddish word for “old rags”), a documentary on the rise and fall of New York’s garment district.

The album closes with “Beyond the Infinite”, a very elaborate mystical piece played by pianist Rob Burger. It is the original version of a track already released by a quartet (Burger on Piano, Kenny Wollesen on vibes, Trevor Dunn on bass and Ben Perovsky on drums) on “Goddess: Music for the Ancient of Days“, which brings the music full circle and back to the first 14 tracks.

All in all these are typical Zorn compositions presented in an unusual context.

Listen to an excerpt here:

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John Zorn - Lemma (Tzadik, 2013) ***½

By Martin Schray

Although John Zorn has been widely acclaimed for his music, his compositions in the field of new classical music deserve more attention. Lemma is another album on which he presents music for strings, it consists of compositions for violin(s).

The first part of the album, "Apophthegms", is an enigmatic duo suite of 12 miniatures for two violins (David Fulmer and Chris Otto) and displays everything that is taken on later on the album: romantic allusions, Schönberg, Webern, and Cage as main influences. The interplay between the two musicians is absolutely flawless and elegant, they complement each other excellently.

The second piece is a solo violin composition called "Passagen" (the German word for passages), which features Pauline Kim. It is based on the legendary B-A-C-H motif (something which was recently important on “Das Wohltemperierte Spunk” as well) and it is the highlight of the album. Kim is an extraordinary musician who is able to transfer Zorn’s arpeggios, snap sounds, sharp, hard pizzicatos, wild glissandi, sudden stops, elegant runs, tender melodies, the reminiscences to Paganini or Schnittke  on the one hand and the Naked City collage approach on the other hand into a fireworks of everything this music has to offer.

The third part, "Ceremonial Magic", consists of four pieces starring David Fulmer. It has allegedly been recorded for the “Rimbaud” album in a duo realization with drums but did not make it on the album. Here it is presented as a virtuoso solo piece. “Part 1” is like a collage of rough and raw elements, scratches, and emotional glissandi while “Part 2” is more melancholic and even harmonic, there are even allusions to Beethoven’s violin concerto. “Part 3” picks up Philip-Glass-aspects and Fulmer plays them in a really harsh way which gives the music an interesting quality before “Part 4” closes the album in a very dramatic way.

Listen to “Ceremonial Magic III“ here:

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John Zorn: The Mysteries (Tzadik, 2013) ****½

By Martin Schray

In 2012 John Zorn engaged Bill Frisell (g), Carol Emanuel (harp) and Kenny Wollesen (vib, bells) for his album The Gnostic Preludes, a marvelous record which is part of his series of 21st Century Mystical Music (which is quite obvious when you have a look at titles like Consolamentum, Hymn of the Nassenenes, or Yaldabaoth). Like the first CD the music of their new collaboration has only one goal: pure magnificence! However, it is a much different album. On The Gnostic Preludes Carol Emanuel’s harp was the center of the music, but now it is Bill Frisell's guitar which has taken over the helm - with the result that in spite of all the intimacy and sheer beauty the whole concept is a bit darker than before. While the first track Sacred Oracle starts as if it could have been on the preceding album, the gloomier conception becomes obvious in a composition like Ode to the Cathars, where Frisell starts alone with spooky feedbacks (something which was unimaginable on The Gnostic Preludes) and although Emanuel’s entrance tries to break up the atmosphere, it is only Wollesen’s contribution that finally seem to change it. If he doesn’t really succeed it is because nevertheless there is a weird, constant undercurrent and Frisell wins back the struggle for predominance in this track when he adds distorted guitar lines. Another example is The Nymphs, the album's longest track at nearly 11 minutes. Here Frisell’s playing reminds of post-Morricone-soundtracks. His style is perfidiously delicious and the compositional structure is full of interesting twists albeit its minimal approach – especially when Wollesen uses his bells, Once upon a Time in the West is not far.

The Mysteries is a very exciting follow-up to The Gnostic Preludes, particularly in its details. And again it is pure joy listening to the outstanding interplay of these master musicians.

Listen to “Consolamentum“ here:

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John Zorn at 60: Birthday Week

By Martin Schray

In May and July I had the opportunity to watch Wynton Marsalis and John Zorn, maybe the two most prominent figures in jazz in the last 20 years, live with some of their bands. Marsalis played Karlsruhe with his Lincoln Jazz Center Orchestra and Zorn played the Moers New Music Festival with several of his projects (The Dreamers, Electric Masada and Moonchild, among others). I saw both of them some time ago (Marsalis in Hamburg in a great performance in which he played a lot of New Orleans stuff) and Zorn with Naked City (twice) and with Masada – all three gigs were absolutely fascinating. Now the Marsalis Orchestra was – frankly speaking – disappointing (especially the Monk and Coltrane adaptations were boring) while Zorn was still outstanding - fresh and adventurous. It was pure fun just to see him sitting on his haunches at the edge of the stage watching his “babies”, absolutely concentrated, pure electricity, pride and enthusiasm in his eyes. The icing on the cake was his performance with Electric Masada, when he joined the band on the saxophone (start at 13 minutes and watch the second part of this excerpt from the Zorntag in Moers and you know what I mean). The audience literally freaked out. It is incredible that it is the man’s 60th birthday today, he looks like a 40-year-old.

Over the course of this week, we'll be reviewing some of his latest releases. Today, we begin with Dreammachines.

Happy birthday, Mr Zorn, we are looking forward to the next 60 years.

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John Zorn - Dreamachines (Tzadik, 2013) ****

By Martin Schray

Lately Karlsruhe’s art museum ZKM presented a large show on the works of William Burroughs with a lot of wonderful exhibits including the famous dream machine, a device he developed with Brion Gysin, who defines it as “a cylinder with holes in it attached to a record-player turntable. In the middle of the cylinder sits a light bulb. The turntable is set to spin at 78 RPM. Subjects sit in front of the cylinder and close their eyes. The light shines through the holes in the spinning cylinder and flickers on the eyelids.” If you keep looking into it (no matter if you have your eyes closed or not), it has a weird but pleasant psychedelic effect.

John Zorn’s work has been influenced by a lot of non-musical stuff and the ideas of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, their writing and their revolutionary techniques of third mind collaboration are definitely among them. Dreamachines picks up Burroughs’ and Gysin’s innovative style, the absence of linear stories, the cut-up technique and their fascination for so-called routines and neologisms. Especially the cut-up technique has always been a crucial element of Zorn’s music (to the extreme in Naked City) which has always given a dramatic surprise to his compositions.

Dreamachines  marks the third part of a trilogy that started with the multi-part suite Interzone  in 2010, and was followed by Nova Express a year later. Dreamachines continues Nova Express because it makes use of the same band - John Medeski (p), Trevor Dunn (b), Kenny Wollesen (vib), and Joey Baron (dr) – and it is the jazziest one of this bundle of albums. The first track, “Psychic Conspirators”, presents Wollesen gone mad in front of a relentless rhythm section, like an elaborate Naked City segment that also refers back to an early work like Spillane. The track looks like a typical Burroughs routine, it is a surreal composition which grows, expands, implodes and folds in on itself. “Gît-Le-Couer” (the name of the hotel in which Gysin and Burroughs lived in Paris, which went down in history as the so-called Beat Hotel) is another example of Zorn’s processing of the cut-up technique: it starts very relaxed breathing the cliché intellectual Paris atmosphere of the 1960 before it takes a turn to a typical spooky Dreamers track and then goes back to where it started off. The highlights are “1001 Nights in Marrakech” with its Arabian influence and its dark piano riff and the psychedelic sparkling title track, both having strong soundtrack qualities. Great album, indeed.

Listen to “The Third Mind” here:

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