John Zorn: Classic or Dud?

The new Book of Angels vol 28 with the Nova Express Quintet is totally ace. I haven't been much bothered about Zorn for ages but this is lush. Lol just noticed on the tzadik site that I'm behind the times, Vol 29. came out in June.

seventeen releases so far this year ! anybody keeping up ?

https://johnzornresource.com/discography

really been enjoying the "hermetic organ" series. here's vol. 6:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhsPT6AWAGI

John Zorn - The Hermetic Organ Vol. 6 - For Edgar Allan Poe

I'm a huge fan of John Zorn, and yet, I'm not sure I've heard anything he's done for a few years, at least not since all the Masada/anniversary stuff. So I'm probably, oh, 300 releases behind.

All the Simulacrum albums are really good. The two albums (so far) by Insurrection, a quartet featuring Lage Lund and Matt Hollenberg on guitars, Trevor Dunn on bass, and Kenny Grohowski on drums are also really good.

the whole beriah songbook is excellent (or at least the albums i've heard so far - sofia rei, zion80, abraxas, klezmerson, a couple others)

TRACTATUS MUSICO-PHILOSOPHICUS-PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS FROM THE INVISIBLE THEATRE

^^^

was listening to this one with the mouthful of a title the other day and it's good stuff, another one where he actually plays alto sax on it.

the other one with him playing alto sax (which has been a rarity in recent years) I'm thinking of was from last year and I've forgot the title but I think it was from the Burroughs inspired series and was very good stuff.

cool, thanks for the responses !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uN8A3TljOk

John Zorn rare interviews in his apartment

the one from last year i was trying to recall was In A Convex Mirror

if i'm not mistaken he's also playing sax (and organ simultaneously) on a number of the "hermetic" pieces

well it is easy get lost with someone so ridiculously prolific!

indeed ! but now i find it's confirmed by tzadik:

Including some extended moments with Zorn playing both organ and saxophone simultaneously, the improvisation is intense and varied, with a remarkable compositional arch and wildly dramatic changes of color and timbre. The saxophone blends beautifully with the organ, standing out at times while Zorn plays the organ with his feet, hands and elbows.

John Zorn : The Hermetic Organ Volume 8—For Antonin Artaud

i thought there was sax on vol. 6 but apparently not

x-post Did he not remove his kitchen, to use the space for his record and comic collection? "Sure, I can eat out!"

I have about 20 of his albums. His output is hilariously prolific, but you can pick and choose styles and it's mostly good stuff.

at roulette in NYC on saturday with TYSHAWN SOREY

https://roulette.org/event/john-zorn-heaven-and-earth-magick/

“hermetic” vols. 6 and 8 are both going on my EOY list btw, just incredible music

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/john-zorn-jazz-metal-interview-naked-city-1015329/

Very long and imo very good career history published today. Includes some new interview material with JZ himself as well as loads of players he's worked with.

this is great so far, thanks for sharing.

Wow, thanks!!!!

I don't think about Zorn much these days, but so much stuff flooded back while reading the article. Like younger asshole me blasting the first "Naked City" over the camp wide PA at the Maryland Boy Scout camp I worked at, or dragging my tolerant friends and their unwitting new Columbia roommates to see Zorn's Sonny Clark tribute at the Knitting Factory (after introducing the song "Dial S for Sonny" one dude in my crew quietly hissed out "Dial S for Sexxxxxxxy" and everyone cracked up) or learning about Carl Stalling and Weegee ...

Also flashed back to a zine a friend had in 9th grade with an interview with Yamatsuka Eye, the interviewer asking about someone masked on stage once throwing up, and Eye responding: "Yes, I am atomic vomit woman," and us not knowing if it was mistranslated or if he was just insane.

It's great to have a lot of the historical record filled in, but I really dug part 4 where it gets into 30-40 years of grafting different trees together, entirely different species, and bearing new and viable fruit.

“Grohowski’s a great example,” he [Spruance] adds. “He doesn’t just play jazz chops faster when he plays metal, and when he plays jazz, he’s not playing fuckin’ metal quiet. It’s really that kind of thing; you’ve got to have your feet in both worlds for real. That wasn’t happening in the Nineties. There were no players like that back then. I think it is a direct result of Zorn’s alchemical experiments in the Nineties.”

This is basically all my favorite Zorn stuff — I'm not a huge Naked City fan these days, but the s/t and Torture Garden cracked my head open at the time (I had the Shimmy-Disc cassette of Torture Garden) and loved Painkiller. I saw them once at the Knitting Factory, but Mick Harris got sick so Ted Epstein subbed in on drums. I also saw one of the few Bladerunner shows on their initial run, with Eye on vocals because they were opening for Boredoms. I never saw Moonchild, but I own all seven of those albums and they rule. I need to buy all the Simulacrum discs; they're incredibly intense, but when you're in the mood for what they do (imagine the highest intensity of live Deep Purple circa 1972, organ, guitar and drums just going at it, only it never stops, it stays that intense for a whole hour) there's nothing else like it.

Moderately related, I could have sworn I've read stories of Van Der Graaf Generator gigs where the deep rumbling organ made people barf.

Nice, looking forward to reading this. I had a big Tzadik phase in college, though I gravitated toward the more accessible records rather than the noise end of things.

I was just listening to the most recent Shabaka & the Ancestors record thinking how very much it had in common with Masada (the core group).

That wasn’t happening in the Nineties. There were no players like that back then. I think it is a direct result of Zorn’s alchemical experiments in the Nineties.

Is Zorn the 1990s Frank Zappa? Beloved of musicians whose fans have probably never heard of him, hugely influential yet too willfully uncommercial to ever achieve actual success. Not sure what Zorn thinks of his audience tbh, hopefully more than Zappa thought of his.

in a word, no!

Yeah probably not

He is so not at all like Zappa.

He definitely was inspired by Zappa's genre cross-pollination. I remember an interview wayyy back where someone asked him his favorite album and he said it was a tie between Uncle Meat and, uh, I can't remember the other one. But the lineage is there, imo. The present day composer refuses to die!

zappa ? fuck outta here

Yeah, I always thought the connection was obvious.

I'm sure Zorn hears something of value in Zappa; he hears something of value in almost everything. He's a sponge and an enthusiast. But he lacks the smirking-asshole gene, and he doesn't think he's smarter than his audience, and that makes all the difference.

I see no video of the 1991 Naked City show I saw where Mike Patton sung.
I did, however, find a review of the show in the NY Times by Peter Watrous.

Covering the ground of a well-stocked record store, John Zorn's group Naked City moves easily from reggae to country music, from mock be-bop to volcanic noise, from the chillingly tranquil stretches of Messiaen to rockabilly rumbles. And the band, with Mr. Zorn on saxophone, Bill Frisell on guitar, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, Fred Frith on bass and Joey Baron on drums, does it quickly: the music is exciting, filling the listener with flashes of recognition.

At their show at the Marquee last Thursday night, Mr. Zorn and Naked City (joined by Mike Patton, the ex-singer for Faith No More) tore through tunes that lasted 30 seconds or so. For longer pieces, Mr. Zorn had styles flying by as quickly as telephone poles seen from the inside of a moving train.

Mr. Zorn has always advocated spectacle, which explains why his shows are more interesting than his recordings. Mr. Zorn's hard-core tunes, comprising noise and Mr. Patton's screams, hurtled by quickly, but for all their intended extremism they avoided the pain that real hard-core bands produce.

Mr. Zorn, the most visible member of the downtown scene, has always positioned himself as a 19th-century European Romantic, facing down a tyrannical bourgeoisie. But his affinity for basically anti-populist Romantic ideology gets fouled up in his stated populist philosophy of elevating overlooked musical genres.

At the show, the two strains clashed. With an academic's contempt for Western contemporary pop culture, Mr. Zorn kept his pastiches away from the ecstatic or the celebratory moment that fuels so much popular music. Eggheaded to the last note, the music avoided emotional revelation.

But the crammed Marquee showed that there is a substantial audience for Mr. Zorn's brand of musical tourism. It's easy to see why: the music is eclectic and yet free of cultural baggage, offering the listener the feeling of being an insider. And Mr. Zorn's posturing as an avant-gardist helps keep his shows entertaining, adding an element of buffoonery and quixotism that he may, or may not, intend.

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/25/arts/pop-in-review-619191.html

I did find what is allegedly an audio recording of that show:
https://archive.org/details/19910418NakedCitywithMikePatton-TheMarqueeNewYorkNYUSA/01+-+intro.mp3

And yeah, that Rolling Stone piece is phenomenal.

Yep, it's very much worth everyone's time.

But he lacks the smirking-asshole gene

He may or may not have grown out of it — "his bearing has softened somewhat," as the article puts it — but he's had it in the past. He played Memphis in the mid 90s with Masada, and the young woman the promoter hired to drive the band was treated horribly by the young smirking asshole. All for the crime of not knowing enough about the right kinds of jazz, as she put it.

to be fair, he would have been in his early forties at the time. you know how kids can be.

lol, tough game is growing up in the limelight

hmmm. i don't really get zappa's overwhelming sneering misogyny from zorn, but naked city-era zorn was definitely extremely, uh, edge-lordy. look at the song titles on "torture garden" - "jazz snob eat shit", "perfume of a critic's burning flesh", "sack of shit", "new jersey scum swamp". i'll be honest with these song titles come off as a little bit hostile, and perhaps even a little bit condescending.

my biggest personal interest is trying to figure out what zorn's relationship is with people like me, historically and in the present day. so i skimmed through the whole article, all the way down to the melissa etheridge video at the end.

it took me nearly towards the end, but i did find what i was looking for. writer hank shteamer interviews one of zorn's more recent collaborators, wendy eisenberg. eisenberg does use they/them pronouns but does speak specifically to zorn's work in a queer context, and i am definitely very interested in understanding how zorn's work relates to queerness. for all of the violence and cruelty in zorn's work with naked city, the sexuality seems, well, inchoate, nebulous. he titles a track "igneous ejaculation" but what, exactly, is motivating that ejaculation is really unclear, other than, well, pain itself. he was extremely fond of s&m imagery, pictures of people chained, hooded, indeterminate.

these things take some time to figure out, certainly. i just wish the queerness of zorn's work was more explicit.

i hadn't heard of eisenberg before. i will definitely be checking out their bands "birthing hips" and "editrix".

i am definitely very interested in understanding how zorn's work relates to queerness. for all of the violence and cruelty in zorn's work with naked city, the sexuality seems, well, inchoate, nebulous. he titles a track "igneous ejaculation" but what, exactly, is motivating that ejaculation is really unclear, other than, well, pain itself. he was extremely fond of s&m imagery, pictures of people chained, hooded, indeterminate.

Since "igneous" is a type of rock, I always took that title to be about a volcanic eruption or a lava flow. That said, the sexuality expressed in Zorn's work is definitely hard to parse - as you say, there was that whole period where he was using Araki photos and other Japanese porn (torture and otherwise) as album art, but it seems to have passed once he left Japan for good. In recent years he's been much more preoccupied with religious imagery, from both Jewish and Christian mystical traditions. And I know nothing at all - does anyone? - about his personal sexuality. I've never heard or read anyone mentioning someone having had a relationship with him; he seems to have abandoned almost all normal human functions in order to maintain his pace of work. He (in)famously tore out the kitchen in his apartment to make more room for records.

Those are good questions I never considered. I always thought of Zorn as akin to Albini, another bomb-thrower iconoclast who has also lightened up as he's gotten older. (Though Zorn has about a decade on Albini.) The shocking song titles and whatnot, I wonder if he was mostly aping the, well, edge-lord stance of grindcore and hardcore. Curious, I also looked up the titles of the songs on the first Boredoms album for example; (I'm not that familiar with the Boredoms), and you find stuff like "Bite My Bollocks," "Young Assouls," "Lick'n Cock Boatpeople" and "Feedbackfuck." Zorn's discography is too unwieldy now for me to check, but at a certain point he stopped doing the shocking album covers and titles, right? The question is did he move on because it was a aesthetic phase or did he become more sensitive to its reception? Dunno.

BTW, he was interviewed a few years back on Fresh Air, of all places, and iirc it was pretty great:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/217195249

Wow, this interview from 2003, conducted by the artist Michael Goldberg, is great, too:

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/john-zorn/

Lots of interesting stuff, but this caught my eye:

MG
Is your classical music persona different than that of your other kinds of music? In other words, when you go to a concert of your classical music, do you dress differently?

JZ
This is the way I dress, day or night.

MG
You know what I mean?

JZ
I know what you mean, there are a lot of levels to what you’re talking about. There’s the persona that you put out almost inadvertently, because it’s who you are. And then there’s the persona that is perceived by other people, whether they know you or not. And then there’s the work itself. I prefer to talk about the work rather than the persona. The persona is what the rest of the world wants to talk about. And why is that? Because it’s hard to talk about nonverbal creativity? Or is it because they have some weird obsession with the cult of personality? People talk about what I wear, how I talk. I’m a down-to-earth person like you, who’s going to tell it like it is. If someone’s jiving me, I’ll say, “Fuck you, you’re jiving me.” And people are threatened by that. And then they think you’re some obnoxious asshole, when you’re just someone who is very straight about shit. People are interested in people, is that what it is? Why aren’t they interested in the work? People come to my house and it’s like, where’s the furniture? I don’t have any furniture. If you want to sit, you sit on the floor. It’s a small place, covered wall-to-wall with books, CDs, records, movies, everywhere, and that’s it. They freak out—what’s going on here? I can’t figure this out. There’s no kitchen, there’s no place to welcome a visitor. I say, “This is where I live.”

it's a pretty fine line to walk. i do believe that creators should have the right to privacy, should have the right, to, uh, _non-disclosure_ (yes i saw the new documentary and you should too). on the other hand, my experience is that who i am comes out, you know, whether or not i choose to admit it to others or even to myself, that what i do is indelibly marked by who i am. personally i'm out because i can't imagine not being out.

my experience is that sometimes the things people are hiding are things that shouldn't be hidden. i remember all the jokes about how kevin spacey was obviously gay and yet he just wouldn't admit it, and in retrospect it becomes more clear why he didn't talk about certain things. there are a lot of men who have learned to not talk about certain things. that silence is often a threat to me and to people like me.

it's none of my business what zorn _meant_ by all that extreme s&m imagery, none of my business what he gets up to in his spare time, at least to the extent that what he gets up to in his spare time is safe, sane, and consensual. (i have a hard time believing, whatever he might choose to present, that he doesn't _have_ any spare time, that he devotes every minute of every day to his art.)

birthing hips are fantastic btw. eisenberg's quarantine record, just released, also fantastic. really undersung, and i'm glad working with zorn has made more people aware of her music.

I appreciate you thinking about it, because I never did. Any more than I thought about Slayer or Iron Maiden album covers or whatever.

great thanks now i'm gonna look and see if there's any rule 34 art of eddie

for that matter i will say that i also have spent a fair amount of time thinking about the intersection between metal, queerness, and gender. if anybody reading this thread might chance to be interested in my opinions on that topic, here is a link to a review i wrote last month of feminazgul's "no dawn for men": https://weirdthingsonbetamax.blogspot.com/2020/05/reviews-of-couple-of-2020-albums.html

I remember having a Zorn cd (I think it was Taboo & Exile) that had a very child porn-y photo in the insert, and it made me very uncomfortable to have around, and thought it odd that I never saw it mentioned in reviews or whatever.

Iirc, there was an Ellie Hisama article about the S&M images of Asian women in Zorn's artwork.

Huh, apparently in a magazine called Popular Music. Anyway, that sent me in a few right (wrong?) directions:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-08-15-ca-27473-story.html

For avant-garde musician John Zorn, the naked Japanese women in S&M; bondage that adorn his “Torture Garden” CD are an aesthetic statement that cannot be separated from the discordant jazz he creates.

For many in the Asian American community, they are flat-out pornography. Earlier this year, several national groups called on Zorn to withdraw two of his CDs from distribution, condemning the covers for portraying Asian women in a stereotypical and demeaning fashion.

The controversy is gathering steam: Earlier this summer, Zorn lost a gig in New York and a San Francisco radio station withdrew sponsorship of a Zorn concert after Asian Americans complained.

“If these are his personal proclivities, I have no objection to that, but it becomes a public act when he disperses these images into the marketplace and he’s certainly accountable for them and for having them critiqued,” said Richard Oyama, a scholar and poet who is active in the San Francisco-based artist group, Godzilla West.

Asian Americans also object to a Zorn CD called “Naked City,” which includes images and text referring to a historic form of Chinese capital punishment in which a living person’s body is dismembered. A written explanation in Japanese says the CD is dedicated to this theme.

Zorn, 40, a New York-based saxophonist who has lived in Japan for much of the past decade and speaks fluent Japanese, says he is shocked by the vehemence of the attacks. He says the images were not chosen lightly but reflect his own interest and explorations into the dark side of human experience.

“I’m not an insensitive person,” Zorn said in a telephone interview. “I understand the concerns of the Asian American community. I don’t want to make it more difficult for them.”

The artist says that after the complaints started, he asked his Japanese record label to stop importing the CDs on a temporary basis. In the meantime, he has offered to wrap the offending CDs in plain covers or add a disclaimer explaining that the graphic images “have been used for their transgressive quality, illustrative of those areas of human experience hidden in the gaps between pain and pleasure, life and death, horror and ecstasy. They are not and were never intended to denigrate or insult any particular person or groups of persons.”

But Asian American groups say that’s not enough.

“It’s not like we can just slap a Band-Aid on it and say, ‘Fine,’ ” says Sherwin Yoon, a spokesman for the New York-based Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence. “We appreciate the steps he has taken, but we were hoping to work closer with him to bring this greater issue to light. There needs to be a lot more discussion about misrepresentation of Asians in the media and the art world.”

An exasperated Zorn says he isn’t willing to go any further.

Quirky and esoteric, Zorn is a leading figure in New York’s experimental art scene, where he focuses on making music solo, with collaborators or with his longtime band Naked City. Zorn is resolutely unconcerned about reaching a mass market and has a small but influential following. Few of his 30 or so recordings have sold more than 10,000 copies.

Zorn says he draws inspiration from French writer Georges Battaille, whose literature dealt with erotic and taboo themes, the macabre theater of Grand Guignol and the often-shocking photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin--who takes viewers into a nightmarish world of sexual deviance, cadavers and circus freaks.

His tastes are omnivorous and eclectic. His recordings have included a tribute to the music of film composer Ennio Morricone and avant-garde jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman. For his next Naked City project, Zorn is putting a Coleman spin on traditional Jewish klezmer music, friends say.

Zorn says he chooses the images on his CDs carefully to complement the music. Sometimes the images even inspire the music. The controversial covers--which Zorn says were released without problem in Japan--are designed in collaboration with Tomoko Tanaka, a female graphic artist in Japan. According to Zorn, both the music and art come out of deep personal experience mixed with an outsider aesthetic.

“When I lived in Japan, I got involved in the S&M; torture scene,” Zorn says. “I lived those images. If someone criticizes me, they’re not looking at the scope of my work, as an artist who deals with these themes in a consistent way. I’ve used Caucasians in violent situations too.”

Zorn’s friends and supporters say the artist is a moral person who is being used as a scapegoat to further a political agenda.

“People are unfairly assuming that he’s exploiting and taking advantage of these photos . . . and that’s not true,” says Michael Dorf, owner of the Knitting Factory, a New York-based performance space and record label that specializes in avant-garde music.

“John has artistic integrity. He’s got a huge collection of art that has to do with this theme. He’s done research on it. He’s immersed and obsessed with Asian culture. He’s not doing this without a consciousness about what it means for women and Asian women and the history of the Japanese exploiting other Asian countries.”

Battles over artistic freedom in music-related imagery are nothing new. Past furors include a mid-1970s flap over an ad for the Rolling Stones’ “Black and Blue” album that featured a bruised, tied-up woman. Geffen Records reissued a Guns N’ Roses CD after complaints about the initial “Appetite for Destruction” cover, which reproduced a Robert Williams painting of a robot raping a woman. Last year, women’s groups lodged protests against rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg, saying an eight-panel cartoon on the “Doggystyle” CD degraded women.

But the controversy defies easy solutions.

“This raised a lot of questions for me,” confesses Ginny Z. Berson, program director at KPFA, Berkeley’s Pacifica radio station whose phone lines were flooded with angry callers, many of them Asian American, after the station broadcast a Zorn concert in January.

Following the uproar, KPFA withdrew sponsorship of a concert by Zorn planned for San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. Berson also instructed a DJ to discuss the controversy on the air before playing Zorn’s music and put together a talk show program on the issue.

“Our mission is to promote understanding, the building of bridges between people of different cultures and groups . . . and artwork that depicts torture of Asian women does not promote that,” Berson said.

“But what does John Zorn playing his sax have to do with that?” she added rhetorically. “And what about Miles Davis’ misogyny? Does that mean we have to discuss his attitudes toward women each time we play his music?”

Zorn’s invitation to play at the New York Museum of Natural History’s 125th anniversary celebration in June was rescinded after Asian Americans there complained, according to the artist and Dorf, who helped broker the concert. A spokeswoman for the museum said a contract was never signed, but conceded there had been discussions with Zorn and that he was dropped because of complaints.

Zorn says he’s sorry about the lost gigs but that he’s not about to compromise.

“As an artist you can’t please everyone,” Zorn says. “If I took all their criticism to heart I’d never create anything. I don’t want to make it harder for Asians in this country; I’m on their side. But frankly, I don’t think my records are doing that.”