John Zorn: Classic or Dud?

The blurb to this year's Virtue for guitar trio (Julian Lage, Bill Frisell & Gyan Riley) got a chuckle out of me: 'Softly spiritual music that is perfect for meditative late night listening alone or with a special friend'.

ha. i often think about what it must be like for whoever has the task of writing the blurbs for 150 Tzadik releases a year.

Ok I've really been enjoying kind & gentle Zorn (sans Zorn) the last few days, like the guitar trio album and guitar/harp/vibes trio, both with Frisell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6xPjANLZjA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJKDl7VGUyQ

Love those "Gnostic Trio" gtr/harp/vibes albums, about once a year I'll go through a stretch where I just literally cannot turn them off for a few days straight.

Ooh, I need to check these out

It sounds like Tortoise minus drums in a lot of places

Wait, that's what Tortoise sounded like??

Whereas the guitar trio album was reminding me of like '80s King Crimson-lite (in a good way)

Specifically like 'The Suspension Bridge at Iguazu Falls' Tortoise.

Wait, Sund4r, you aren't into Tortoise?!

And, yes, I do love the Gnostic Trio albums and enjoyed Virtue, which I just listened to, thanks to that Youtube stream. (Will buy this one certainly.) This is what I mean, though: if it is in fact the case that they're basically improvising on heads that Zorn gave them, should they be credited as "John Zorn" albums, as opposed to e.g. "Frisell/Lage/Riley (playing the music of John Zorn)", any more than any other recording where Frisell improvises on heads by any other composer? xp

Haha, I hated Millions Now Living when my hardcore-loving friends bought it in high school and never really gave them many other chances. Listened to TNT after it came out, when I was in university, and thought it was sort of dumbed-down Reich meets dumbed-down improv. I am far more open to 'dumbed-down' versions of things now, though.

Presumably Zorn is guiding the music as they play too.

I was watching this wonderful concert last night. It gives a pretty good view of what his direction looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQoIDkVO3mo

Just saw this is on the way. Seems like one of the most accessible, mainstream-ish things he has ever done?

John Zorn-Jesse Harris: Songs For Petra [#8374]

Singer Petra Haden excels in this beautiful and unique program of songs penned by the songwriting team of John Zorn and Jesse Harris. Friends for many years, they began working together on The Song Project in 2012, and 8 years later this CD presents the full fruits of their collaboration: 13 Zorn compositions with original lyrics by Jesse Harris. Including the most beautiful melodies from a wide variety of Zorn CDs (and one original that has never appeared on cd before), the melodies are catchy, the lyrics heartfelt, the grooves deep and the solos profound and exhilarating. Backed by the amazing Julian Lage, Jorge Roeder and Kenny Wollesen and produced by Jesse Harris, this is a CD that you will listen to again and again.
(Release date: August 2020)

I scored Frith&Zorn's "late works" for pennies and have found it surprisingly rewarding.

For a moment, I thought you meant you wrote or arranged the score.

ha, me too!

ha same

What Tortoise should I listen to if I want something like the Gnostic Trio??

I have no better recommendation than TNT, mostly that one track though. :)

It has been about 20 years since I heard it. P sure I'd appreciate it better now.

re zorn w/out zorn i've been following rjc since the imprint launched and i have an incomplete list of some of my fave stuff from it if anyone is curious:

Barbez! - Bella Ciao
Jamie Saft - Black Shabbis
Jamie Saft - Breadcrumb Sins
Sofia Rei - Beriah vol. 1
Cracow Klezmer Band - De Profundis
Mycale - Book of Angels V. 13
Deveykus - Pillar Without Mercy
New Klezmer Trio - Short for Something
Tim Sparks - Tanz
Jewlia Eisenberg - Trilectic
Dan Kaufman - Force of Light
Yoshie Fruchter - Pitom
Ayelet Rose Gottleib - Mayim Rabim
Kletka Red - Hijacking
Jon Madof - Zion80
Pharoah's Daughter - Out of the Reeds

Followed a lot of JZs projects in the 80s but the last one I really paid attention to was the original run of Masada. There seems to be a real lack of critical writing about his post 2000 releases. I liked the bomb interview and the Shteamer article was good but that's not a side of his work that I care much about. Something made me start to look through his recent stuff but I feel a bit lost. Picked up the solo Tractatus musico-philisophicus which seems like a new approach to his early solo projects.

The Jeremiah cymerman 5049 podcast has featured interview with many people in the Zorn and tzadik orbit. Cymerman seems close to Zorn personally. There was a good recent episode with engineer Marc Urselli where they talked a fair bit about
working with Zorn in the studio.

http://www.5049records.com/podcast/coronacast-3-marc-urselli

I still love Spillane because i bought it when I was 16 after watching put blood in the music and it blew my mind a bit.

if it came out now I'd still think it was pretty frazzled/inspired/brilliant.

xxp
don't mind a bit of Jeremiah Cymerman, quite bleak but I keep going back to it.

Someone should listen to everything Zorn has ever been involved in then do an AMA.

Didn't Whiney just do the listening part of that?

In case anyone is wondering about your boy, my quarantine/retirement goal is 7 more weeks of coding boot camp + listening to all 266(?) John Zorn albums. I’m on #30 right now and still maintaining sanity. 🎷🚰 🐍 🎲

— Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes) March 23, 2020

Hah, I wasn't aware. Props, I may join him on his mad endeavour someday.

Wow.

A much longer yet undoubtedly more pleasant experience than merzboxing.

I'm currently listening to #216 of 270

What's the longest streak in a row (if any) that has been a real struggle? What has been the longest streak in a row (if any) that has been a real joy?

to my ears, Zorn's genre-hopping is mainly about the encounter of cultures writ large (Jewish, American, Japanese, etc.) and/or subcultures (the avant-garde, jazz, hardcore, etc.). Sexuality is by no means absent from these juxtapositions, especially in his earlier, more overtly 'transgressive' works, but foregrounding it is not a priority for him as far as I can tell.

― pomenitul, Tuesday, June 23, 2020 1:49 PM (two days ago)

Very OTM

There's an assertion in a lot of his work that anything can be appropriated as "material". Iirc somw of his game pieces used 'found' composition fragments to this effect. The question of attribution that Sund4r has raised is something I've thought about for sure.

Anyway. I always suspected that The Suspension Bridge at Iguazu Falls is based on Encontro by Projecto III.

xxxp woah

What's the longest streak in a row (if any) that has been a real struggle? What has been the longest streak in a row (if any) that has been a real joy?

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, June 25, 2020 6:12 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

You'll have to wait for the AMA!

You better make good on your promise. I'll be sharpening my questions.

I'm like 80% in (maybe even more since those Parachute sets are multi-CDs), so I don't see myself stopping

Are you building a comprehensive power rankings list?

One for the AMA then, I reckon the game CDs would have been the biggest slog for me but is there anything in there along the same lines as 'Cynical Hysterie Hour?' I love that CD.

Do you have actual cds for most (all?!) of these? Or is this what people still use slsk for.

What would the toppermost ones be in a poll, Naked City, Spillane, Masada - Live In Sevilla?

I'd deffo put Alhambra Love Songs and Nova Express in there, just to be controversial and because I liked them.

I wonder if it's possible not to enjoy any of Zorn's work at all just by virtue of its sheer sprawl.

Do you have actual cds for most (all?!) of these? Or is this what people still use slsk for.

― change display name (Jordan), Thursday, June 25, 2020 6:42 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Most Tzadik Zorn stuff up to like 2005 is on Qobuz in CD quality.

I own about 67 Zorn albums on CD

The rest I have to pirate

I obviously would want to put in a fat, well-informed Tzadik order if I ever get employed again

re zorn w/out zorn i've been following rjc since the imprint launched...
Deveykus - Pillar Without Mercy

Have to give Zorn credit for putting out orchestral recordings that were out-of-print for years, or not available at all. He's also good at doing special one-off projects with people who don't play very often together (such as Blue Buddha and Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor tribute projects, among others).

Another nice Tzadik initiative I recently discovered is a 3-album project with jazz musician/arranger Karl Berger. "In a moment - Music for Piano and Strings" is wonderful. Berger has his own studio and the sound of the room adds something special to the music.

I recently reread the Borah Bergmann interview in The Wire, especially commenting on Zorn's Serious Composer ambitions. I didn't like his "Meditations for Piano" at first but now I think it's great.

Some other personal Tzadik favorites:

All 3 Sephardic Tinge albums
Tim Sparks - Neshamah
Tobias Picker - Invisible Lilacs
VA - Hallelujah, Anyway - Remembering Tom Cora
Eyvind Kang - Yelm Sessions

I thought of the kitchen-less John Zorn during covid lockdown. I hope he managed to eat.

I just went back to this 2015 email interview I did with all 3 members of Simulacrum. It goes into a lot of detail about how they work in the studio, how much rehearsal they have when Zorn writes new music, what's actually on the page, etc., etc., so read that if you want.

Zorn was a big influence on my listening in the '90s. I visited NYC in the summer of '94 with my parents and I dragged them to a Masada show at the Knitting Factory (that was before it moved to Soho, when it was still a fairly modest basement kind of space in the East Village). Dave Douglas wasn't there, instead Marc Ribot filled in on guitar. We were sitting at a table probably 10 feet from the "stage". It was completely amazing, but my parents were not impressed by Zorn's "smirking asshole" side (which he definitely had [has?]). At one point he cussed out the sound person because he wasn't happy about something about the sound. All that prolific hard-to-find output was incredibly tantalizing in those pre-streaming days, when visiting record stores was a kind of pilgrimage. In some ways maybe it was about sheer abundance for me, unfathomable mysteries, ars longa vita brevis and all that. Later I moved to NYC and caught a lot of shows with Zorn and related projects at the Soho Knitting Factory, Tonic, etc. I remember one show he did with Mike Patton as the Horse-Cock Kids at the Knitting Factory where they came on like an hour late, played for 15 minutes and left the stage. The lights came up. People booed. That was it. He definitely was capable of being an asshole. But somehow you knew that he was being an asshole with absolute sincerity. You believed that short abbreviated set was exactly what he wanted to present that night, even if you were kind of pissed about the price of the ticket.