All Things John Zorn!

Masada · March 1st, 2009, 02:11 PM

I just started this thread so that news about Zorn (and Tzadik) would be concentrated in one subject...

New filmworks by Zorn, featuring the nice quarter of Wollesen, Ribot, Cohen and Burger.

Eleven cues recorded for a striking documentary focusing on the life of controversial Mexican dictator Plutarco Elias Calles who was called everything from a nunburner to the father of modern Mexico. Beautiful and dramatic, the music is scored for guitar, marimba, accordion/piano and bass and subtly draws upon Mexican, Spanish, minimalist and soundtrack traditions. Zorn’s fifth film score in as many months is a pure delight. Moody and exotic music for a creative and revealing film dealing with truth and the complexity of history!

An interesting project is coming up in the next months, John Zorn's Alhambra Love Songs, which consists of mellow piano trio compositions.

John Zorn: Alhambra Love Songs [#7374]
In an easy listening mode, Alhambra Love Songs is Zorn’s touching and lyrical ode to the San Francisco/Bay Area and the wonderful artists who have made it their home. Including tributes to artists as diverse as Vince Guaraldi, Clint Eastwood, David Lynch, Mike Patton and Harry Smith, the music is some of the most beautiful and soothing Zorn has ever written. Touching on the jazz/pop/funk trios of Vince Guaraldi and Ramsey Lewis, the music is scored for a remarkable piano trio of Rob Burger (Rufus Wainwright, Marianne Faithfull, Laurie Anderson), Greg Cohen (Ornette Coleman, Masada, Burt Bacharach) and Ben Perowsky (Uri Caine, Steve Bernstein, John Lurie). Evocative and endlessly listenable, this is perhaps the single most charming cd in Zorn’s entire catalog, and will appeal to fans of Vince Guaraldi, Ahmad Jamal, Henry Mancini and even George Winston!

CoyotePalace · March 1st, 2009, 03:06 PM

Interview taken from Jazz Times
From humble beginnings as one of the key figures on New York’s so-called Downtown improvisers scene of the late ‘70s, upstart saxophonist-composer John Zorn has emerged as an important and influential figure in the avant garde/ experiment scene.
Zorn's triumphs over the past 20 years have been many, including running his own thriving and fiercely independent record label, Tzadik. When I first met him in 1981, he was blowing duck calls in buckets of water at fringe venues like 8BC, Roulette, Chandelier and his own tiny clubhouse, the Saint. By the mid-’80s, he had developed a number of sophisticated ‘game theories’ that involved strict rules, role playing, prompters with flashcards, all in the name of melding structure and improvisation in a seamless fashion. A breakthrough was his piece “Track & Field,” which was performed in 1984 by a dozen or so musicians at the prestigious Public Theater.
As his experiments began to be taken more seriously by the critical community, there followed more showcases at New Music America, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Whitney Museum. Sensing that Zorn was emerging as a significant new voice—the poster boy for post-modernism, as he once quipped— Elektra/Nonesuch Records signed him to a lucrative, high-profile deal and released a string of important works including TheBig Gundown, Zorn’s 1985 meditation on the music of composer Ennio Morricone; Spillane, featuring Albert Collins and the Kronos Quartet; Spy vs. Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman in 1988; and Naked City in 1989, featuring the album’s titular avant superband with Bill Frisell on guitar, Joey Baron on drums, Fred Frith on bass, and Wayne Horvitz on keyboards. Since forming Tzadik in 1995’ Zorn has been incredibly prolific as a composer. He has created a variety of works including string quartets, piano concertos, chamber pieces, music for children, and compelling new music for his brilliant acoustic klezmer-meets-free-jazz band, Masada, featuring Dave Douglas on trumpet, Joey Baron on drums and Greg Cohen on bass. The current discography for Tzadik numbers over 150 and includes provocative original material by kindred spirits like bassist Bill Laswell, trumpeters Wadada Leo Smith, Steven Bernstein and Dave Douglas, violinist Eyvind Kang, and drummer Milford Graves, with whom Zorn has performed some scintillating free duets over the past couple of years. He has also performed and recorded with the hellacious power trio Painkiller, and Zorn continues to tour frequently with Masada and also plays occasionally with the harmolodic punk-funk band The Young Philadelphians.

I spoke to Zorn in the comfort of the same East Village apartment he has lived in for the past 22 years. Surrounded by his imposing and rather sprawling record collection, he spoke candidly about the state of his art, the nature of commerce, and the prospects for adventurous, art-conscious independent labels.

Generally people regard each new year as a chance to reinvent oneself And I would think the act is even more symbolic as we head into a new millennium.

ZORN: Every day is a chance to reinvent oneself, but the problem is that we’ve been so beaten down by the powers that be that people are happy to be asleep now. What I’ve been seeing is really fucking depressing and I don’t see anything turning it around. I see enormous corporations acting like slave masters, like the return of the pharaohs. I see co-opting all around. I see McDonald’s everywhere. I see the destruction of what you and I love, the small mom and pop stores—people that love the music and that’s why they have their store. I see that being replaced by Tower, HMV, Virgin. And then I see conglomerates; giant corporations merging together to get even more powerful, like that big thing that just happened with Polygram and Universal. So what are we gonna have in another hundred years? We’re gonna have the world owned by one corporation. We’re gonna have all the artists signed to this one label and anyone not signed to this one label is going to be outlawed. We’re gonna have art police running around looking for small labels and independent artists that are not tied up. And we’re gonna have an inquisition. I mean, we basically have an inquisition now.

But then there are people like yourself and Tim Berne who have taken it upon themselves to push their statements forward on their own terms with their own independent labels.

I agree, but we’re all too rare. I mean, I’m doing what I believe in. I’m trying to do what I think is the right thing, the honorable thing. I’m trying to support the music that I believe in because nobody else is either able or interested in doing it. But do I think that in the new millennium that that is going to take over? No, I’m not so naive as to believe that we can turn the world around. I think this is the way the world has been since the first caveman picked up a rock and knocked someone over the head and said, “I’m the king of the hill.” Greed is a basic part of human makeup and greedy people are usually the ones that push everybody around. And in the time of the pharaohs it was done with violence. Today it’s done in much more insidious ways. It’s done with brainwashing and brain-control. These marketing guys who are at the head of all these companies, they’re really the ones that are spoon-feeding everybody shit. And I don’t really see much hope of turning that around because they’ve been thinking about how to fuck us for so much longer than we could imagine thinking about. They think about that as long as we think about making good music.

I remember when I came to New York in 1980 there was a lot of excitement in the air regarding the music scene. Columbia had just signed James Blood Ulmer and Arthur Blythe and there seemed to be a ray of hope that the major labels might actually begin dealing in more adventur ous terms.

ZORN: But what happened? They put out a couple of records then they dropped everybody. That’s a cycle that happens every 15-20 years.

And then Wynton Marsalis came along.

ZORN: Well, I don’t want to get into personalities and pit people against one another. I think there’s a lot of what Wynton is doing that’s great. I think that solo he took on that Citizen Tam record—have you heard that? That’s fucking smokin’! I mean, this guy can play his ass off. But we’re not talking about musicians. I think for the most part musicians are saints. They give and they give and they give and they get very little back. And if someone manages to get something back, I champion that. They deserve everything that they can get because I think they really put their lives on the line and are giving. I’m talking more about the world that we live in, the machines that we have to fight. I do think that history is going to have to be rewritten in the next hundred or so years, as it always has been. People that were really popular in their time eventually disappeared and were forgotten. And people who struggled and did it the hard way and concentrated on the music and tried to make something great, eventually their work came to light. It’s often well after they’re dead. It’s rarely in their lifetime and if it is in their lifetime it’s at the end of it, like Harry Smith getting an award the year he died. That’s beautiful in a certain sense and a fucking tragedy in another sense. And, of course, most of the people who are dropping his name now have never even seen any of his films. That’s the world we live in. I don’t see that changing. We have to accept it. It’s very unfair but it ain’t gonna change. We’re not gonna have a fair world in a hundred years. Maybe we’ll see the collapse of capitalism as we know it. Maybe democracy will slowly change and become something that one would hope the people want. But I think that the people who are in power, those kinds of people are always going to be in power. Those kind of people are always going to be pushing everybody around, lining their pockets with everybody else’s money and ripping everybody else off and feeding everybody shit because they believe that people wanna be told what to do. And the sad thing is, most people do wanna be told what to do. They don’t want to get out there and make choices for themselves. That’s another part of human nature. Always has been, always will be.

But now there is more opportunity for independent labels and artists to get their stuff heard through various mediums like the Internet.

ZORN: You want a ray of hope here in what I’m saying, don’t you?

Well, I’m seeing it happen.

ZORN: Oh, it “happened” in the ‘70s. That was a big explosion of independent labels, back when New Music Distribution was around. New Music Distribution provided an incredible service for hundreds of independent labels in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was amazing. And it was also amazing that it disappeared. And the reason it went down was greed. Their mafia distribution people decided not to pay them, they didn’t pay the artists and everybody got fucked. Now people can make their own CDs on their own little labels for very cheap—cheaper than it was to make vinyl. They can distribute it through the Internet worldwide; we have MP3, we have down loadable stuff. Information is going to be traded. But I guess what I’m getting at is— who’s gonna want it when everybody’s being brainwashed by these guys who are spending 24 hours a day thinking about how to target certain groups of people, how to control people into wanting shit? That is the big problem—the pharaohs controlling us. Sure, there will be inde pendent artists, always. But they’ll always be on the fringe. And every 15-20 years those major corporations will decide, “Let’s try something new,” and they’ll sign a Blood Ulmer or they’ll sign the 13th Floor Elevators or they’ll sign Captain Beefheart. They give it a chance but it never really works because the figures they’re hoping for are way beyond what these people are capable of.

Some people thought that Columbia signing [avant garde saxophonist] David S. Ware was a very hopeful sign.
ZORN: It’s not hopeful at all. It’s a freak. It’s the same freak thing that happened when Tim Berne was signed [to Columbia] or when Blood was signed Ito Columbia] or when I was signed [to Nonesuch]. I mean, Nonesuch—maybe that’s a little bit different. Maybe [Nonesuch head] Bob Hurwitz has a little more integrity than the major labels. He really believes in what he’s doing. But at the same time, if he wasn’t selling a million copies of the Gorecki symphony by some freak of marketing, he’d be out of a job, too—absolutely. I don’t think these companies feel they need credibility in the art market anymore. Blood was signed because they thought they could sell 100,000 copies of it. And then after realizing they could only sell about 50,000—goodbye. There’s no chance that this kind of complex music is going to break into a mass market. No chance. So why bother with it? Why waste the money marketing it at all? It’ll sell what it sells and if it doesn’t sell enough, drop ‘em. That’s the prevailing attitude at the major labels and I just see that getting worse and worse.

And yet the fiercely independent artist persists in the face of this adversity and in some cases continues to thrive.

ZORN: There will always be independent artists, there will always be some freak that says, “This is not right, I’m gonna do it my way.” There will always be experimental music. There will always be people who wanna listen to it. But I just don’t see them taking over the world, you know? Maybe when I was 22 years old I thought we were gonna take over the world, that this was the real music. But now that I have a perspective and I’m 46, 1 look back and I say, “Look at the his tory.” Look at thousands of years of how it’s been and how people are manipulated and how greed functions in our society.

How do you see your own place in the scheme of things?

ZORN: I look out at the world and I see chaos. And that’s kind of the formula for being an outsider. You don’t want to be an outsider, you want to belong and you’re burdened with these human frail ties. You need companionship; you need food and drink; you need a nice place to sleep; you want to be understood even though you’re doing something that’s a lit tle difficult; you want your work to be appreciated; you want to be loved. We’re burdened with this. But what we’re doing is we’re creating something that is a little bit scary to most people. It challenges their view of the world. Most people think the world is a perfectly ordered place and they love it. The outsider looks at that and goes, “Man, this is chaos. This makes no sense at all.” And then, they try to tell the truth. And they’re compelled to tell the truth. They can’t help but tell the truth by some inner sense of responsibility.

But you seem to be thriving in spite of the way things are.

ZORN: I’m not particularly unhappy with where I am right now, or with the scene itself. I think this is an incredibly exciting time for real music. I think there’s a lot going on. And I see new generations com ing up being influenced by some of the things that I’ve done and by some of the people that this scene has given birth to. And that’s a beautiful thing. That means that we will never die. That means that death is kind of impossible as this spirit gets passed on in a real, meaningful way. The truth will always be there but you can’t force it down people’s throats. They have to be ready to see it. And, you know, there’s the machine and here we are. And I don’t think it will ever be reversed. I do feel that it’s a lot easier to keep your head clear from greed if you’re not involved with major corporations. When I was working with Nonesuch for a short period of time, I got wrapped up with the same shit of like, “Why does Bill Frisell have a bigger budget than me?” I mean like, that’s something to think about? I could feel greed growing in me like a cancer. And for me, personally, it’s very hard to deal with that kind of shit. Maybe Wynton Marsalis can deal with it; maybe Bill Laswell can deal with it. You know, Bill can sit back and laugh at those fuckers and con ‘em and take ‘em for a ride. He’s great at talking that talk. But it makes me sick to my stomach, you know? I’m better off as an independent. I’m better off doing it on my own terms. I wonder what would happen to Wynton if he started his own company and did it his way. That, I think, would be a very exciting thing—if he didn’t have to answer to anybody or listen to anybody’s subtle brainwashing—you know what I mean? He’d just have to answer to himself. That’s what I’d like to see, more of that. More of people who are in power taking the initiative to do things on their own without the help of these greedy motherfuckers. Because, you know, money is money. But it’s tainted money. There’s something really evil
about those multi-national corporations.

Is the term Jazz” even valid anymore?

ZORN: The term “jazz,” per se, is mean ingless to me in a certain way. Musicians don’t think in terms of boxes. I know what jazz music is. I studied it. I love it. But when I sit down and make music, a lot of things come together. And sometimes it falls a little bit toward the classical side, sometimes it falls a little bit towards the jazz, sometimes it falls toward rock, some times it doesn’t fall anywhere, it’s just floating in limbo. But no matter which way it falls, it’s always a little bit of a freak. It doesn’t really belong anywhere. It’s something unique, it’s something dif ferent, it’s something out of my heart. It’s not connected with those traditions.

What tradition do you feel close to?

ZORN: The avant garde. I would like to see the avant garde, experimental music being accepted as a genre in and of itself. I would like to see avant garde/experi mental sections in the major conglomer ate record stores. Not just in the stores that have intelligent buyers like Other Music or Amoeba on the West Coast— small stores that are run by people who believe, who hire people who know the music, where you can go to the store and say, “Tell me something interesting,” and they will. Remember that? Those were the days of great record stores.

You worked in one [SoHo Music Gallery] in the early ‘8os.

ZORN: Record stores used to be a power ful source of information. I used to go to Discophile when I was a teenager and say, “What’s new in the experimental/classical bin?” And the guy would say, “You gotta check this out, it’s amazing.” In ‘82, I went to Bleecker Bob’s record store and said, “What have you been listening to? What’s the outest hardcore you’ve heard?” And he’d say, “You gotta hear this Die Kreuzen record. It was on my turntable for six months, couldn’t take it off.” Now you go to Tower and you get these morons that are working for minimum wage that don’t even know where Phil Glass goes. I mean, they don’t know shit about Shinola and they’re working at record stores. Some times they’re even buyers and they don’t know what they’re talking about! So no one is getting educated. I’m talking about real grassroots education. That’s where I learned most of my important shit—listen ing, talking to people, exchanging informa tion. Again, I really believe that this music would probably have a better chance of reaching the audience that appreciates it and selling better if there was an avant garde/experimental section in Tower or HMV. It would be a great clarification of where this music is coming from. Hope fully, that will happen in the future.

What do you think about the potential of MP3, where every musician has his own Web site, where people can download new music, like John Zorn. com?

ZORN: That’s a beautiful idea. But do you really think these large corporations are going to let that happen? Because these are some greedy motherfuckers and they’re gonna find some way to fuck everybody. People who know how to manipulate other people are always going to be around and they’re always going to be working for those companies and they’re gonna know how to twirl some shiny object in front of some artist and get their fucking publishing away, and get them off their independent dot com and get them onto Warner Bros. Everybody could have their own little record company, it doesn’t cost that much to put shit out. But I get phone calls all the time, I get tapes all the time and I talk to them and say, “Man, you should put this shit out yourself. I’ll run it all down to you on how to do it.” And you know what? They don’t wanna do it! “Man, all I wanna do is make music, I don’t want to think about the business.” And they are ripe for getting ripped off. And most people are re ally like that. They’re honest musicians with integrity that just don’t want to deal with the business. They don’t want to have their own dot com. And as long as people are like that, they’re victims. That’s been going on since day one.

But more musicians are taking the respon sibility to deal on their own behalf

ZORN: Boy, I would love to think that. But I don’t think so. I mean, I would love to think that in 500 years everybody’s gonna have their own Web site, everybody’s gonna have their own thing. But I don’t care if material things disappear off the planet and we’re just dealing with brain-waves, there’s gonna be someone who knows how to manipulate that to make more money than anybody else. You know what I’m saying? Power is a drug. Money is part of that. But it’s just the instrumen tality of that. I don’t care if there’s nothing on the planet at all and we’re just spirit, there’s gonna be some fuckin’ spirit that wants more than tf~e next one.

You have gained a lot of notoriety in recent years with Masada.

ZORN: It’s a beautiful band, a pow erful band.

Do you ever feel strange being on a jazz festival bill with Masada?

ZORN: Masada relates to jazz music. It’s my pleasure to play that music on that kind of bill. In fact, it’s exciting to me. And people who never heard it at those festivals might get turned on. Like at the Chicago jazz Festival, which we just played a couple of weeks ago. It’s a free open-air festival and there were over 10,000 people out there listening to us. We got to play on a bill with Phil Woods, who is one of my all-time heroes. And I got to hang with him a bit, which was great. But is that happening more and more? No, it’s a freak; it’s one in a mil lion. To throw the weirdos a freak gig once in a while. People will listen, they may enjoy it. Maybe they’ll even go out and buy a record and get turned off. Or maybe they’ll keep following. But we’re talking about really insignificant numbers of people.

You’ve traveled a lot with Masada and spread the word by taking the music to the people, much in the same way that Frank Zappa spread his own message.

ZORN: Zappa was a very special person. He was really articulate; he really cared about politics. He had a lot of things going for him. I can’t step in Zappa’s shoes. I’m not politically aware. I don’t read newspa pers; I don’t read magazines; I don’t watch television. So I have no idea. Zappa was on top of everything, man. He was really amazing. I’m not really an articulate, polit ically minded, forward thinking person with goals that wants the world to be this way or that way. I’m not an interesting in terview in that regard. I wish I was. I wish there was someone who could be there in Zappa’s place. I’m not the guy. For me it’s more about doing things than blabbing about it. And that’s another reason why I put a moratorium on interviews. I just felt that not only was I being manipulated or misrepresented or cut down, I also felt that, in general, I just didn’t have that much to say, really. I do music. And a lot of times I don’t really understand fully what it is that I’m doing at the moment. I under stand 10 years later what it was. I gotta go on intuition a lot of the time. And I can’t always explain articulately exactly what it is that I’m doing with this new piece. I’m working on a piece now. I’ve never done anything quite like it; I’ve never composed in this way, really. And I feel like I’m taking some chances. But I don’t have the an swers to what this ‘piece is going to be or what it’s supposed to be. I feel like I’m going on a trip and I’m discovering it along the way. You get back from a trip and you don’t fully understand what you’ve seen until maybe a few years later, and then you realize, “Oh, wow, that’s how that touched me, that’s how that affected me.”

And to distill it down to one word for the purpose of categorizing music to fit into record bins somehow negates the journey.

ZORN: Well, those people who cate gorize are in the business of selling this shit. There is a business side to all of this nonsense, after all, and we’ve got to deal with that. They’re gonna be selling it so we gotta com municate to them in some kind of way. That’s why I’m hoping that maybe there’ll be an experimental section in major record store con glomerates in the near future.

Are you aware of how you have influenced younger musicians just by your own exam ple, by living the way you do and producing music on your own terms?

ZORN: Well, that’s a beautiful thing to say. I hope that that’s true.

Because you are 46 and there are 23-year-old musicians who are being fiercely inde pendent today because of the groundwork that you laid 20 years ago. I’m thinking of [saxophonist] Briggan Krauss, who has mentioned you in interviews as a huge in fluence. By example, you have helped him and other young musicians like him to be brave enough to do what they do, against all odds.

ZORN: Yeah, well, that’s what it takes— courage. It takes more courage than most people have. There’s less than one percent of people like that, but the world could not exist without them. The world would not move forward without them, and I really believe that. I think the outsiders, the indi vidualists, the people who have a messianic belief in themselves and are able to stick with their vision despite all odds—and be lieve me, Bill, every day of my life I’m haunted and tormented by the voices of people that are saying in my ear, “Maybe you’re wrong.” But the people that can stick with that, they’re the ones that are re ally going to make a difference in the world. And they will always be a small number and I’ve always aspired to be one of that number. I think about the people that I admire, people like Jack Smith, who lived in a small apartment right over here on First Avenue and died of AIDS 10 years ago. I worked with him for about eight years in the late ‘70s helping him with his theater performances that never more than 10 people attended. And, I mean, this was some of the greatest shit I ever experi enced. Here was a guy my age performing for 10 people. And I think about John Cage not getting an orchestra commission until he was over 50 years old. When he was my age he was still working as a dishwasher, you know? I think about that and I say, “Those are the models. I’ve gotta live up to that.” And if I can in any way inspire some one else, then the line gets passed on and that’s beautiful. That’s great. I really hope that it’s happening.

Do you think this music, whether it’s called the avant garde or experimental music, can be promoted properly and sold in greater numbers?

ZORN: Every once in a while someone comes along who thinks that they can sell this music to a large group of people, but that will never happen. By definition it’s for a small group of people. And I’m perfectly fine with that. I have no bitterness.

What is certain is that this continuum will go on from your mentors through you and on to the next generation.

ZORN: That continuum will happen, but it will stay very small. But as far as jazz music is concerned, which is a very different sub ject from my continuum, it’s in the hands of very conservative, greedy people. And it looks pretty bleak. There will always be a few things like that incredible solo that Wynton took on that Citizen Tam record. And that’s great that that’s there. I wish he did that all the time. But if he did that all the time maybe he wouldn’t have a major record contract, maybe he’d have to give up too many things that he’s unable to give up tight now. Or maybe he’s just not into doing that kind of music. Whatever it is, it’s his choice. I mean, he’s an intelligent person. But I do feel that getting involved with these greedy money people, these slave masters, these pharaohs, can be very damaging to your health. You can catch that disease. Greed is a very infectious thing. And you gotta be really insulated and really careful and really keep your head clear to avoid it.

And you’ve succeeded in doing that over the past 20 years.

ZORN: Because I don’t deal with those fuckers. That’s how I’ve done it! But if I were still making records for a major label I’d be just as sick as they are. And frus trated. I isolated myself completely, delib erately. Because I asked myself, “How much longer am I on this planet? How much time have I got?” So I choose not to watch TV. Instead, I choose to work. I de cided I have to cut out all distractions so I can concentrate on what’s important. And staying in this apartment has really helped me do that. I could’ve moved uptown to a big place, bought a brownstone, had a gar den room and a whole big thing. But I’m very happy here. This is where I’ve done all my really creative work—it’s happened right in this room, you know? This is where Cobra was conceived; this is where Spillane was conceived; this is where I wrote Apor ias. I mean, this is a great room! I’m very happy here. And it keeps me focused. And like Jack Smith, who lived in this small apartment on First Avenue, it keeps me in touch with what’s important, with the peo*ple that nurtured me. This is a great neigh borhood with a lot of energy. When this building was built it was for immigrants coming in who couldn’t wait to get the hell out of this neighborhood, but it had a lot of hope in it, you know? This was the jumping off point for people who succeeded in the world out there, who came from Europe and escaped the Nazis. And that feeling of hope is still alive in this building. I feel it. Ginsberg and Kerouac lived in the apart ment on my second floor. There’s a bit of history there. There’s incredible history in this neighborhood. Bird lived down the street. That kind of energy doesn’t go away, even with all these yuppies moving in and mom and pop stores turning into chain stores. That’s what’s scary, the co-opting of the world. That’s why I think eventually it’s going to be one big corporation and they’re gonna be out hunting people like you and me. Insurrection is a dream, but it ain’t gonna happen. Not in our lifetime. They have ‘so many ways of keeping us under control—with drugs, with the media, with language. I mean, these guys have been thinking about this shit for decades and decades—or centuries—how to control the masses. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a chip in every single computer that’s being sold today that actually made it into a camera with a microphone so that every body could be monitored. It would be so fucking easy; you know what I’m saying?

That’s been prophesized Big Brother, no?

ZORN: Absolutely. But you can go cuckoo with that shit. I mean, I’m not that “out.” I isolate myself but I’m still living here in the city. I’m not in some shack somewhere thinking and plotting out all of this shit.

But the point is, you’ve eliminated distraction from your life so you can focus on the work.

ZORN: That’s right. I’m insulated. I think people need insulation. Like before I was talking about how the outsider looks at the world and sees chaos. The person who’s in the world with their regular bourgeois val ues, they see an orderly existence. They’re insulated in their way because they don’t want to wake up and look at the truth. The outsider is insulated in their way so that all that chaos doesn’t destroy them. And that’s the harder road. You know, igno rance is bliss. It’s hard to stay on the out side wanting to be on the inside, climbing up the cliff, just hanging on by your finger nails. I mean, every year I hear how an other musician has gone down, either de cided to quit because he’s so frustrated or was suicided by society. It’s hard. I wish there was more support, more positive en ergy from the critical world toward people that are really on the edge trying to do shit. I wish there was more attention given to that music. It’s tough all around and we just have to stick together. And we will. I’m not going anywhere.

What are your own personal goals for the new millennium?

ZORN: One of the beautiful things in my life is that I don’t really have any goals. I just work day by day and do my thing. I don’t dream about operas on the Metropolitan Opera stage, I don’t dream about that big philharmonic commission. I work with my materi als that I have here at my hand with the musicians that are here and I’m very happy taking little baby steps one at a time.

You’re nor dreaming of the big house in Engle wood Cliffs, New Jersey, with a two-car garage?

ZORN: No, no. I’m happy here with my little two-floor apartment. I’ve been here for 22 years; I’ll be here all my life. I had an apartment in Tokyo for a while and that was a dream. It was a tiny little place that was not much bigger than this and it was like $300 a month, but I let that go. Some times I think about Indonesia—getting a little hut or something. But, come on—I’m a New Yorker. I’m not gonna get on the plane for 20 hours to sit on the beach for a week. That’s a night mare! So I don’t have a lot, really. I’m not that kind of dreamer.

CoyotePalace · March 1st, 2009, 03:08 PM

source: http://www.browbeat.com/browbeat01/zorn.htm

I had the pleasure of interviewing John Zorn on October 20th, 1990, about a year after the first Naked City album was released and just after a performance of Cobra at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.
When did you start composing and playing music? I've found some of your records from the late 70's...
Zorn: Yeah, my first records are like '76 or something like that. I started playing really hard in New York from like '74 but I've been composing and writing since the mid-60's, since I was a kid.
Are you from New York?
Zorn: Yeah, born and raised in New York. Where are you from?
I'm from [turning on my accent] Boston...the reason I ask is that some of the people you collaborate with or work with are from San Diego. It seems like a lot...
Zorn: Wayne Horvitz is...well, he's not really from San Diego. That's not true.
I was thinking Diamanda Galas...
Zorn: I've worked with her a little bit. And actually on this new Naked City record I'm working on a piece that will feature her.
That's coming out on Shimmy Disc?
Zorn: Well, no. The twelve-inch with 42 songs on it will be out on Shimmy Disc and Earache out of Britain. But I'm going to come back out here in December and record the second full album for Nonesuch and that'll have one piece with Diamanda on it.
I like the piece with Diamanda on The Big Gundown. I can't think of the name of it...
Zorn: What is it? "Metamorfosi" I think it's called. She's incredible! Actually, she may be the only musician from San Diego that I ever have worked with.
So much for that hypothesis (laugh).
Zorn: That was a great theory. You can throw that right into the trash can. Heh Heh.
You've worked with a lot of musicians from all different backgrounds. I'll throw out some examples: Fred Frith, Eugene Chadbourne, Vernon Reid, Elliot Sharp, Bill Frisell, and so forth. They...
Zorn: Those are all guitar players. Interesting. Robert Quine. I've worked with him.
Diamanda, does she play guitar? (laugh)
Zorn: Noooo. She used to play piano. And she still does play piano a little bit. Have you ever seen her play?
She was on Night Music playing some piano. It was quite good.
Zorn: She is a good piano player.
It seems like you sort of search out these...I don't know if you search out or if it just turns out that way, that artists working with you are from different backgrounds. Like Eye from the Boredoms.
Zorn: Yeah. That is definitely something that needs to be searched out. I run around, I listen to a lot of music, go to a lot of concerts. And when I see someone that gases me, I try to go out of my way to involve them somehow in what I'm doing or get involved in what they're doing. Eye was a great discovery. He is one of the great vocalists of all time.
Actually, a friend wanted me to ask, "Why are you working with Eye?"
Zorn: Now, what a silly question. Anyone who hears the record should know the answer to that. It's because he is absolutely out of his mind. (laughs) That's why. He's fantastic!...A lot of people can't take him. He's really extreme.
He's pretty agresssive.
Zorn: He's a great screamer, but he's really got a wide variety of sounds. When I first saw him he was playing in a group called...umm...Geva Geva. There is a group called Zeni Geva in Japan that's got this guitar player called Null.
K.K. Null. I interviewed him. He was here two weeks ago.
Zorn: Null was here! (speechless)
Yeah, he played with the Pain Teens.
Zorn: With the long hair. He hardly speaks any English, how was the interview? (heh heh)
(Laughing)...uh...brief.
Zorn: I bet it was, man. No, that guy is great. He is brutal. So he was playing with Yoshida Tatsuya who plays in the Ruins. Who's a great drummer also. Him, Null and Eye had a trio [Geva Geva]...and I went to see them and Yoshida asked me to come and play with them, actually. And the first set, it looked like Eye was just completely improvising, doing whatever he wanted to do while Null and Yoshida played these songs that were all really, y'know, complex and all worked out. It looked like Eye was just doing whatever he wanted to do...And, uh, I said y'know let's improvise together. Let's do some duos or something. And he said, "What's improvising?" (laugh) He didn't think what he was in was improvising. He called it kind of...in Japanese you can call it Tekito...Tekito means kinda like "do what you want"...but, he didn't make the connection between improvising and Tekito. (laughs) Even today, like we do total improv duos that are just killer! He's got a natural sense for improvising. After the gig, I'll say what did you think of that. He'll say "I had no idea what I was doing! What was that? Was that music?" (laughing)
I have the Boredoms album that's on Shimmy Disc...
Zorn: That originally came out on a label called Selfish in Japan and then...uh...I gave Kramer a tape of the Boredoms and he flipped, so he wanted to license the record and now it's out on Shimmy Disc.
You had a performance of Cobra this week at the Great American Music Hall, that's that card/war game...
Zorn: Yeah, that's my game piece. It's not a war game. A lot of people get upset with that stuff. Apparently, Willie Winant tried to do the piece down in San Diego, or somewhere down south at some school, and some girl student got really upset and tried to blockade the performance. Cause she didn't like the use of the word "tactics" or "guerilla systems" or "cutthroat." This military stuff. We gotta get rid of that.
How does that work? Is it difficult to explain?
Zorn: Well, what do we have now? Ten minutes? Really it's best to (chuckle) just go on to another subject. To put it like into one sentence, it's kind of a loose system that permits improvisers to interrelate and react to each other in different ways.
And you as conductor control it by...
Zorn: I don't control it at all. It's all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are.
Oh...so, you're not directing who is improvising. You're saying...
Zorn: No, not all.
You are telling everybody else who someone wants to improvise with?
Zorn: Right. Like someone will say, well I wanna do this now. So they will tell me and I'll tell everyone else with these cards. And then at anytime, anybody can...
Aren't you choosing? Like if several people are saying I want to do this...
Zorn: Well, of course. Like you have seven people with their hands up. I gotta make a choice. Y'know, that's tough. Sometimes I gotta go with someone that has an idea and make several calls in a row, because they got an idea. And sometimes I stick with just one person for a while. That may seem unfair. Then I'm like enough of this guy and then I'll take someone that hasn't made a call in a while or...if there are five people with their hands up and there is one person that has never made a call in the piece, then I'll take that person. And I try to be as diplomatic as I can, but it always ends up being a psychodrama up there on stage. (laughs) That's what those pieces are about.
A friend saw the show and said that when you switched from one improvisational set, I guess you could call it, to another that it was just flawless. It just jumped from one to the next...
Zorn: That's very simple. You just give a downbeat, and say at this downbeat a change is gonna happen. Some cards [are] just any kind of change. Some cards are more specific, like everybody drops out except one person. It's like a very complicated toggle switch. It's an on and off switch for the all the people in the band. I never talk about what they play, because each person has a very personal style. Y'know, they've developed a language on their instrument that nobody else can duplicate, so I wanted to find a way to harness that kind of talent in a compositional arc. What I came up with was this kind of game structure that talks about when people play, and when they don't play, but doesn't talk about what they do at all. So everyone gets gassed when they're doing it. I mean, it really is a psychodrama!
I heard it was really fun to watch.
Zorn: It's a blast to watch. It's a lot more interesting live than it is on record. I mean, it really is a theatrical event. It's a sporting event! Cause you never know what's gonna happen.
There's a lot of humor involved.
Zorn: Yeah! Usually the people in the band have a sense of humor and when they screw up, it's always a subject of ...
I hear you have a hardcore band in New York. Is that true?
Zorn: Well, in Japan, I have got a group of musicians that I have worked with a lot, that concentrate just on the hardcore stuff, say, that Naked City has been working on. We have like a repertoire of sixty songs now.
Wow. Does it have a name?
Zorn: It's called Torture Garden: Yoshida, the drummer from the Ruins; Eye is the vocalist, Ema Hori who is an incredible guitar player. And the bass player is also from the Ruins, this guy Kimoto. We just played at CB's last week. I brought them all over to New York to do some gigs.
Great. Is there going to be anything coming out on vinyl or CD of that band?
Zorn: For that particular band, nothing is planned yet. I'd like to do a twelve-inch with 5 songs or something like that. All the Torture Garden material has already been recorded by the band Naked City. That'll come out on Earache out of Great Britain and Shimmy Disc here in the States [ed. note: It came out in 1991].
Shimmy Disc is licensing the Earache record?
Zorn: Well, it's a complicated thing. Basically, this Naked City record (the first album on Nonesuch) came out, right. In the middle of it are about ten songs that are really short and hard. I said I wanted to do a record of 40 of those pieces, cause I was really interested in the compression and compactness of form that that music gets to.
Putting lots of information in a very very short amount of time...
Zorn: The guys at Nonesuch were not interested. If I wanted to do that, I better take it somewhere else. So what I managed to do was get them to bankroll the whole thing, and then I licensed it to Earache and Shimmy for basically no money and no royalties. So they are just putting this stuff out that Nonesuch bankrolled.
Neat. What a deal!...You spend a portion of your year living in Japan. How long have you been doing that? And why?
Zorn: Five months a year, something like that. For about seven years. I really like it there. There are a lot of great musicians. The scene is very open. A lot of stuff going on. People's ears are really open, they are not closed. A lot of scenes here, people just get tunnel vision and are into one thing.
They are into hardcore and that's it...
Zorn: Or they are just into classical or they are just into jazz. They get really prejudiced about that kind of stuff. They won't listen to other musics. I've always liked a lot of different kinds of music. I've always liked to listen that way. People in Japan are kinda the same. There is a lot of openess there. People aren't afraid that some weird guy comes over from New York who is interested in doing these weird things. Everyone is kinda into it, and wants to try new things. It's a really great place to experiment.
One that thing that is really interesting about your music is that people like myself (I'm originally from a punk background) are now learning about Jazz through artists like yourself. You put out an album of all Ornette Coleman covers, so I go check out Ornette's stuff, and find out it's pretty cool. So I end up branching out that way...
Zorn: That is a lot of the reason I do what I do, to really spread the word and spread information and turn people onto different things they may not be, y'know, aware of. That is what Naked City is certainly about.
What kind of music do you play just totally for fun? Like if you just wanted to have fun and were not having to play for a recording or a performance. Is there anything that you play at home by yourself?
Zorn: That band Slan that was here a couple of months ago that got trashed in the press, and is always getting trashed in the press (laugh). That is really a lot of fun for me to do. I love doing that.
What is Slan like? I am not familiar with them.
Zorn: Slan is a totally improvised hardcore band. It is the drummer from Blind Idiot God, Ted Epstein--who is an incredible musician, Elliot Sharp on guitar and vocals, and I play sax and do vocals. It's a chance to kind of totally improvise in a song form and do whatever is on our minds. It's a lot of fun. But, I mean, we can't play for more than thirty minutes without totally running out of steam (laughs).
At that pace, it is hard.
Zorn: It's hard. Ted can really kick your butt; he's really a great drummer. You should check out his band Blind Idiot God. They are really great.
It seems like the accessiblity factor for your music has stayed the same over the last ten years...
Zorn: Has it? You mean, the inaccessibility of it.
...your notoriety. You are much more well known now than you were five years ago.
Zorn: That's for sure.
What's it like, having that much more notoriety?
Zorn: It's a pain in the ass. It's a pain in the ass, definitely. As soon as you get a certain amount of attention, then everybody kinda wants to start taking pot shots at you. All your old friends that supported you don't support you any more. You know, it's really easy to support someone who is doing horrible. How can you give any sympathy to someone who is supposedly doing well? But I'm not here to complain. I'm doing fine. I'm making the records I want to make and ignoring the critics, as I always have.
Is everything busier now? Do you find yourself much more busy doing non-music stuff?
Zorn: No. Absolutely not. I'm more busy doing music stuff. Different kind of music stuff. I was always busy. In the old days, I used to practice the saxophone. Now [that] I don't practice it, I have time to compose. And more chances to perform all over the world. I really keep the nonmusical things, the business kind of things, to a level of zero. I've never called for a gig in my life. I mean, I just can't. And I've never shopped a tape around. People know where I am. They want me, they can call me up on the phone.

CoyotePalace · March 1st, 2009, 03:10 PM

FAQ:

How can I get a copy of Masada 4?
You can't. Well, it's pretty unlikely at the least. It was never available for retail; it was given away by DIW in exchange of the proof of buying the first three Masada; the deadline for getting it was June 1995.
UPDATE - Masada 4 has now been released for purchase.
How do you pronounce "Tzadik"?
TZ as in "glitzy" A as in "bad" DIK as in "deek" (the accent is on the first syllable) It means "holy man" in Hebrew .
Is "Heretic" by Naked City really a soundtrack?
The Knitting Factory page says " 'Heretic' which also features a Naked City soundtrack, is an experimental narrative in the form of an extended trailer. A very funny take on psychotherapy starring Karen Finley."
Are Mike Patton and The Melvins on Naked City's "Leng T'che"?
No, they are not. Some folks would say that "Leng T'che" is Naked City's take on The Melvins sludge style. One can only assume that is why they were thanked in the credits.
Is Zorn in Mr. Bungle?
No, he is not. Zorn did however produce Mr. Bungle's self titled major label debut on Warner Brothers. He does play alto sax on one song, "Love is a Fist."
Towards the end of the Zorn/Bailey/Parker CD "Harras," the track "Evening Harras" has about 10 minutes of silence, followed by a section of what seems to be Bailey solo. Is this a mistake?
"According to Derek Bailey, the abrupt cutoff was planned. Derek wanted to end it "on a high". The Bailey solo material appended after the silence was apparently Zorn's idea." (thanks to Peter Stubley/Lynn Rardin)
How do I order from Tzadik?
Tzadik now has a website with CD descriptions and the ability to purchase them.
Are there other places I can buy Tzadik/Avant/Zorn's music
There is the officially sanctioned Downtown Music Gallery 1-800-622-1387 and Forced Exposure (box 9102, Waltham, MA 02254 - it's an excellent site/catalog) mailorder.
Wayside claims to be an "official mail order source" for Tzadik and appear to have a complete list with brief descriptions of each one.

Is there a Zorn discography?
Patrice Roussel has compiled and maintained an unbelievable and comprehensive Zorn discography, as well as discographies for some other great musicians. The Zorn discography was most recently updated November 1996. This is the tenth version.
You can get Patrice's Zorn discography via the web at http://www.nwu.edu/WNUR/jazz/artists...hn/discog.html

Where can I read interviews with, or writings about Zorn and his ilk?
There's a great interview with Zorn in "Talking Music" by William Duckworth (Schirmer, 1995).
A brief chapter about him in "Plunderphonics Pataphysics & Pop_Mechanics: And Introduction to Musique Actuelle" by Andrew Jones (SAF, 1995).

Derek Bailey talks with Zorn in his book "Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music" (Da Capo, 1992).

American Composers - Dialogues on Contemporary Music, by Edward Strickland
Contains an interview of John Zorn by Edward Strickland (pp. 124-140)
Indiana University Press, 1991 (ISBN 0-253-35498-6)

Soundpieces 2: Interviews With American Composers, by Cole Gagne
Interview by Cole Gagne followed by a discography (pp. 507-542)
The Scarecrow Press, 1993 (ISBN 0-8108-2710-7)

Oh and there's this zine based in Oakland...

What's Zorn's phone number? I really need to ask him something.
We don't know. Your best bet is to write him a letter via Tzadik.
What's the deal with this 100 CD boxset?
In an issue of The Wire, there was an advertisement for a 100 CD boxset of Zorn/Eye from their 1995 China tour. Supposedly, it is a limited edition of 1000 copies. Each CD will be variable length with the shortest at one second! Word is that the release date has been pushed back to Fall 1997, my guess is that is optimistic.
More recent info seems to indicate that the project has been cancelled.

What is Masada, Kristallnacht?
Masada is the name of an almost impenetrable mountain-fortress which was where a group of Jews stood against the Roman army in a very prolonged seige. The Romans finally defeated the rebels by using Jewish slaves to construct a ramp up to the main gate. Unwilling to kill thier own people, the Jews inside Masada could only watch as the slaves were forced to build the ramp higher and higher. Finally, instead of giving the Romans the pleasure of conquest, the Jews inside Masada defiantly commited mass suicide.
Kristallnacht refers to the "Night of Broken Glass" when German troops smashed the windows of Jewish storefronts in Germany. I believe that this is generally considered the beginning of the Holocaust.

What are those funny song names on the Masada discs?
They're all Hebrew titles, i think. Some are names of people.
What happened to the "Radio Vol. 2" and the live box from the Zornfest?
Radio Vol. 2 (Avan 005, Avant-Japan) CD has never been recorded and thus never released. It was supposed to be NAKED CITY'S "COVER" RECORD. An album of JOHN ZORN's eclectic arrangements of some of the most important, and often overlooked compositions of the 20th century.
JERRY GOLDSMITH, ORNETTE COLEMAN, BRIAN WILSON, IGOR STRAVINSKY, DUKE ELLINGTON, TUSHIMA TOSHIAKI, WILLIAM ORBIT, GEORGE CLINTON, and many more.

According to Wayne Horvitz: this record has never been recorded.

Is there a biography on Zorn?
No.
I heard about some sort of controversy around the use of purported pornographic images on Zorn's CD covers. What's the deal?
The CAAAV (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence) targeted Zorn because of the graphic design of two of his records: TORTURE GARDEN and LENG TCH'E. They believed that these images were giving a degrading image of Asian people.
To avoid problems, Zorn decided to remove these records from retail stores. They are now available again in new packaging called the "BLACK BOX".

I'm new to the world of Zorn, he's put out so much stuff, which record(s) should i listen to first?
I think of the 30 or so that i've heard, these are pretty representational:
Masada 1 (or 2 or 3) to hear actual jazz
Naked City (the self titled one) and
Torture Garden, to hear jump-cut craziness
Painkiller: Buried Secrets, to hear big bad heavy metal noise stuff
The Big Gundown, to hear crazy arrangements
Filmworks vol. 1 to hear more accesible, backgroundy music
Elegy/Kristallnacht, to hear his chamber music
Could you tell me something about the various photographers and artists used for CD covers and the sources of the pics.
Rumor is that art-books released during the time before CDs would come out were the source of the pictures and titles in some cases. The Naked City photograph was taken by WeeGee who documented crimes in NY. He would sleep in his car with a police radio so he could get to the scene of a crime quickly, and often he was there before the police. This is how he got his nickname. Get it? Ouija board? "Naked City" is one of several excellent books by WeeGee.
It appears the same sort of thing is true of "Absinthe," ie: an art-book by the same name came out with the very pictures which now grace the cover of the album.

There is also a book by Man Ray which probably came out around the time his photographs were used for the Radio album. He is a French photographer, whose work is very influential, especially on the use of shape/form in expression. I'm not sure when his work dates from, although I would guess the 1930s or 40s.

Is this super-heavy Zorn guy really as old as/older than my dad?
Born in 1953. How old's your dad?
What's a "game piece"?
A game piece, of which Cobra is the best known and most recorded (at least three different versions on Avant, Hat, and Knitting Factory), is a method of group improvisation where the structure of the piece (the rules of the game) is set by a prompter at performance time, and the players have complete freedom within the structure. It differs from free improvisation (jazz) because of the prompter. It differs from contemporary classical aleatory music (Cage, Stockhausen, Pousseur) and conduction (Butch Morris) in the complete absence of any notated musical notes of any kind. The playful and whimsical connotations of the word "game" are also relevant to Zorn's game pieces.
In the late 1970s an early 1980s, Zorn was often quoted as saying "My concern is not so much with how things sound, as with how things work." The game pieces were his most concerted early efforts at creating musical structures that didn't dictate "how things sound."

While most of the game pieces are named after a sport or game (Pool, Hockey, Archery, Lacrosse, Cobra, Tennis, Golf, Curling, Cricket, Jai Alai, Go, Sebastopol are among those recorded or other wise referred to), the term "game pieces" refers as much to the structures of the works. Just as people playing games or sports must follow certain rules which determine how they interact, but not exactly what they do (in baseball, for instance, the infield fly rule says what to do when one occurs, but there is no rule governing when a player must hit an infield fly), in his game pieces, Zorn creates structures and situations for improvisors to perform in, while providing little, if any, actual notated music.

In early game pieces, like Pool & Archery, the structures may be as simple as providing an order for the possible solos, duos, trios, and quartets available for a particular size ensemble and then providing specific ways in which participating musicians can interrupt this order. In several of these early game pieces, Zorn provides very brief notated material, to be used by players when or if certain options occur. In later game pieces, like Cobra (the most recorded and performed of Zorn's game pieces), the rules are more open (there is, for example, no attempt at having all possible combinations of players perform together, and there is no notated material) and the ways in which performers can interupt the proceedings are more elaborate.

In all of the game pieces a prompter, who does not play an instrument during the piece, keeps track of where players are within the structure, making sure that everyone knows what's going on. The prompter acts as a referee or conductor, making choices when more than one player desires to interupt the proceedings and otherwise shaping the music as it progresses.

While these pieces, in part, grow out of the modern tradition of aleatoric and/or intuitive music created by avant garde composers like John Cage, Earl Brown, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, Jerry Hunt, Mauricio Kagel, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Zorn's game pieces differ primarily in the nature of the structured interactions and performer choices allowed, and in Zorn's use of musicians who are (often) more comfortable with improvising in several styles of music.

Are there other cool saxophone players?
Tons. John Butcher, Tim Berne, Peter van Bergen, Mats Gustafsson are some great younger players. John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Peter Brotzmann, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Ornette Coleman, Frank Lowe, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Oliver Lake, and Albert Ayler are among the legends of the previous generation.
Did the singer of the Boredoms change his name?
Yes. In 1996, Yamatsuka Eye changed his name to Yamantaka Eye.
Is there a Mr Bungle mailing list?
There's one official one (where Trey Spruance sends out any infos on his current projects) write to mimicry@humboldt1.com to get on that one.
And there's that Caca Volante mailing list, which also features Faith No More, John Zorn or basically any related. the address for that one is majordomo@optera.com (as usual with Majordomo, send "subscribe cv-list" to that address to get on the list.)

Can someone give me the scoop on Keiji Haino? Y'know the guy who has recordings on both Avant and Tzadik.
He is a first rate skronker! He has been around for over 20 years apparently, recording with a variety of bands and solo. I haven't heard a great deal of his work but he does play truly terrifying, cataclysmic free-rock guitar improvisations. If you can imagine a heavy rock Derek Bailey then you are just about in the same galaxy as Haino. He is prone to 45 minute improvisations involving massive feedback and metallic noise, also shrieking and shouting when he gets really emotional. His band Fushitsusha have released a variety of albums but I can heartily reccomend The Caution Appears. This has a selection of "approachable" shortish tracks which are heavy on the devastating, white noise rock-out! There are a few Haino/Fushitsusha web pages about, you can find them through Lycos and The Wire magazine has been covering this kind of mayhem for the last 18 months in a fair amount of detail.
Who was Bar Kokhba?
The leader of the rebelion against Rome in 140AD.

Masada · March 1st, 2009, 05:46 PM

Thanks for the great interviews, CoyotePalace. I could do a 5 hours interview with this man and still have questions. He should write like Braxton did with the Tri-Axiom books. His views of art/industry/music/conventions is just great. He's being modest when he says he's not as articulate as Zappa.

peterdubya · March 1st, 2009, 06:42 PM

Let's not forget the John Zorn's Yoshi's San Francisco Residency: March 10-15 - www.yoshis.com/zorn

A RARE opportunity to catch Zorn in a variety of settings west of the Mississippi

Masada · March 1st, 2009, 07:44 PM

I SO wish I was in Cali.

It's quite great that Zorn will be playing songs from Book of Angels (2)... since he never plays on the records.

And Sc3 doing Masada will also be a treat for the lucky people from SF!

thedwork · March 1st, 2009, 07:49 PM

imo, any thread titled "All Things John Zorn" is required to have this short video clip included:

Who's Not Honoring Me Now? "Genius Grant Please!"

one of my personal favorites.

shiatoru · March 1st, 2009, 08:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thedwork

imo, any thread titled "All Things John Zorn" is required to have this short video clip included:

Who's Not Honoring Me Now? "Genius Grant Please!"

one of my personal favorites.

I'll be posting a .pdf file of that tune he did with Kareem Abdul Jabar when I'm finished transcribing it....

pele_trane · March 1st, 2009, 09:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thedwork

imo, any thread titled "All Things John Zorn" is required to have this short video clip included:

Who's Not Honoring Me Now? "Genius Grant Please!"

one of my personal favorites.

OK, I've never seen THAT before. Even though it was fairly obvious to guess the punchline (the self-professed 'avant-guard' are pretty easy targets, perhaps in the same way that the Brittney Spears of the world are--aw, hell, I can't even spell it correctly, is it French, is it English? What is it? Is it avant-guard? Avante-Guarde? ), that was still pretty damn hilarious.

"What genius came up with that toe-tapper??"

EDIT: ya think that was a 4/4 PLUS size double bass Kareem was playing there?

Masada · March 1st, 2009, 09:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thedwork

imo, any thread titled "All Things John Zorn" is required to have this short video clip included:

Who's Not Honoring Me Now? "Genius Grant Please!"

one of my personal favorites.

That was hilarious, like most of Colbert's antics. Hes definitely my favorite out there with Letterman and Conan.

thedwork · March 1st, 2009, 09:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pele_trane

OK, I've never seen THAT before. Even though it was fairly obvious to guess the punchline (the self-professed 'avant-guard' are pretty easy targets, perhaps in the same way that the Brittney Spears of the world are--aw, hell, I can't even spell it correctly, is it French, is it English? What is it? Is it avant-guard? Avante-Guarde? ), that was still pretty damn hilarious.

"What genius came up with that toe-tapper??"

EDIT: ya think that was a 4/4 PLUS size double bass Kareem was playing there?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Masada

That was hilarious, like most of Colbert's antics. Hes definitely my favorite out there with Letterman and Conan.

Yea!!! i love turning people onto that clip. the first time i saw it i was laughing so hard i couldn't breath, i shit you not. dangerous man. and i think anyone who really digs music will crack up. but of course especially jazzbos and avant-gardinistas. colbert 1, Zorn 0. hilarious

peterdubya · March 11th, 2009, 06:29 PM

anyone here attending the Yoshis shows?

peterdubya · March 11th, 2009, 08:28 PM

KTVU.com Talks To Saxophonist John Zorn
By David Pehling

Posted: 5:05 pm PDT March 10, 2009Updated: 1:08 am PDT March 11, 2009
Over the course of the past three decades, saxophonist and composer John Zorn has amassed a staggering body of work. Starting with his early experiments in structured improvisation games, Zorn has taken an iconoclastic and omnivorous approach to music throughout his career, drawing elements of modern classical, free jazz and soundtrack music as well as sounds from the more extreme experimental fringes of hardcore punk, metal and industrial music.

Zorn first came to wider appreciation through his remarkable recorded tributes to Italian soundtrack maestro Ennio Morricone ('The Big Gundown,' released in 1985 on Nonesuch) and Ornette Coleman (the corrosive collection 'Spy vs Spy,' released in 1989 on Elektra Musician), but his own music soon came to the fore. The explosive jazz-punk of Naked City -- a super group featuring Zorn alongside such luminaries as guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Fred Frith, keyboard player Wayne Horovitz and drummer Joey Baron -- and the saxophonist's explorations of grindcore with Painkiller (a trio with bassist Bill Laswell and Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris) made Zorn a hero for fans of both experimental jazz and heavy music in the late '80s.

John Zorn

While Zorn has continued to record soundtrack music at a feverish rate, starting in the early '90s, he began to focus much of his attention on his Masada songbook project. A conscious attempt to push traditional Jewish music into the the modern era, the Masada songbook puts a 21st century twist on traditional sephardic scales of klezmer. Performing the music around the globe with his acoustic Masada Quartet (with includes drummer Baron, trumpet player Dave Douglas and bassist Greg Cohen), Zorn revealed a level of melodicism only hinted at by some of his soundtrack work. The prolific artist took time to talk to KTVU.com in advance of his six-day residency at Yoshi's in San Francisco largely dedicated to showcasing his Masada songbooks with performances by local avant-rock band Secret Chiefs 3, the Masada String Trio, both the acoustic Masada Quartet and the volcanic Electric Masada group and much more.

KTVU.com: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.

John Zorn: Glad to do it. I don't do it often, but I'm really excited about this run at Yoshi's…

KTVU.com: So am I! When I see all the shows you play in New York City, I get really sad that I'm not there and don't get to see what you're doing there. The last time you were in the Bay Area for more than a single show was Edgefest in Berkeley in 2004, from what I could tell…

John Zorn: Yeah. I have a lot of friends in the Bay Area and I go there quite often to hang with Willie Wynant, Larry Ochs, Mike Patton. And I have a lot of other friends there like Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser and Bruce Ackley. It really goes on and on, my connection to the Bay Area goes back to 1973. I do go there quite often. But when I've played - you're right - it's been a single one off or quick hit with Mike or the ROVA people or doing a game piece or what have you. This is the first chance that I've had to bring what I've been working on for the past some 20 years out to this beautiful city that I love so much.

I really want to thank Peter Williams at Yoshi's [the club's artistic director] for making it possible. He's really going out on a limb to do it. I hope that people come out to support it. Live music is a very important and special event. We have to make sure it survives and keeps going.

KTVU.com: With all the musicians in the area you've been associated with and worked with in the past, it seems like someone could have approached you to do a residency with just local collaborators…

John Zorn: This is something I've been doing more often in Europe. I got very tired of being on airplanes. You know a musician's life; to perform involves a lot of travel. And my body is just beginning to say 'Don't put me there again.' A typical tour for a musical group you hit 12 different cities; every day a different place. Some bands go out for a month or two months. By the time I was doing Naked City in the '80s, I was already restricting my touring to two weeks tops. Then it became one week tops. Then it became 'I'll go just for single hits, just for a couple of days and come back,' which is difficult.

So my new plan as of about a year or two ago, is instead of taking one band to 12 different cities, I take 12 bands to one city. Do a residency. Take one plane there, one plane home, and spend a week in a city. Get to know it and really get to present a wide variety of what I'm up to. That's been really satisfying and fulfilling to not just do one hit and split. To get some time to know the city. Because I'm involved in so many different things, it became absurd to just do one concert or one gig. I felt that was no longer a true presentation of what I'm about.

So I did a residency in Paris: 5 days at the Cite de la Musique and at the Salle Pleyel. I did many of the bands performing at Yoshi's in addition to some classical concert things and some of the rock bands like Moonchild and projects with Bill Laswell such as Painkiller. I did it in Italy as well. I'm going to be doing it at North Sea [Jazz Festival in the Netherlands] this year and am going back to Polermo [in Italy] to do it there. So I've been very fortunate to present this retrospective in a variety of cities around the world. It's delightful to do in SF, because it's really the only other city in the states that I've spent a lot of time in.

KTVU.com: Your output is so voluminous I have to admit it's kind of hard to keep up. When I was preparing to speak to you, I went out and bought a few albums to catch up. The band I was most curious about was Electric Masada since I'd seen you play several times with the Masada Quartet. I was just floored by the band's intensity. It's one of my favorite musical discoveries in ages…

John Zorn: That's a great band. It should be exciting to present that band again. It's hard for us to get together, but when we do, it really takes off.

KTVU.com: It touches on some of the noise aspects of Naked City, but it also to me echoes some of the music of one of my favorite groups ever, the mid-1970s electric group Miles Davis led. I was wondering what the genesis of electric band was and if you knew the direction you wanted to take the band?

John Zorn: The Electric Masada band came about in an interesting way. I was at a midnight show at Tonic [a now closed Manhattan club] some years back. It must have been six or seven years ago. It was a very fine presentation by a great musician doing really interesting music and there was nobody there. And I was like 'Man, this is great, but people just aren't coming out. What's going on? Why aren't they coming out? Why don't they care about this music that's happening?' So I scratching my head and trying to figure out 'Well, what would they be excited about? What would be very exciting for an audience to hear?' And that's where I came up with the Electric Masada Group.

I just put together a band that I thought was really wild and decided to take some of the Masada material and try to push the envelope. So we brought in some influences from Naked City and even from Cobra some of the downbeats and some of the spontaneous conduction techniques that are used in game pieces like Cobra are brought to the fore in the Electric Masada group. As well as the Masada music which, as you know now, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. So many different bands have been performing it.

KTVU.com: The breadth of your output over the past two decades has been impressive between the Masada songbook, your soundtrack work and a variety of other bands. When you started the Masada project, did have any inkling it would grow to this size?

John Zorn: You never know what's going to happen with a project. You begin it because it's interesting and you're passionate about it and it hits a lot of places that are meaningful to you and do the best you can with it. And how can you know what's going to happen? You never know. That's one of the beautiful things; I don't have those kinds of goals. I just kind of live my life a day at a time.

John Zorn

The project for Masada was to create something positive in the Jewish tradition something that maybe takes the idea of Jewish music into the 21st century the way jazz developed from the teens and 1920s into the '40s, the '50s, the '60s and on. That was something that was very inspiring. My idea was 'Well, can that happen with Jewish music as well?'

Why is Jewish music only considered cantorial and klezmer? Let's see if we can make some modern statements using new ideas and young imagination and new inst and create something positive. I began writing tunes. My initial plan was to write 100 tunes in a year that touched upon the Jewish tradition and that was an interesting challenge. It was really fun as a composer to come home and write a something that could be finished sometimes in 10 minutes, sometimes in an hour or sometimes an evening. I'd never worked that way before, although Naked City had some pieces that were kind of like that.

The Masada songbook was really something that was like the Irving Berlin songbook or the Burt Bacharach songbook or the Thelonius Monk songbook. Here's another lifetime for me. So when I look at what's been accomplished in the world of Masada, it's kind of unbelievable. Of course I had no idea at the times I started. My initial idea was to write a hundred tunes. And then I ended up writing over 200 for the first book and then performed it countless time for years.

After 10 years of performing the first book, I thought 'Maybe it'd be nice to write some more tunes.' And I wrote 300 more tunes. When I started writing those it was 'Let's see if I can write a hundred songs in a month this time.' I've been working on these scales and playing these tunes all this time. In the back of my head somewhere are lodged all kinds of new ideas. Let's see if I can come up with 100 tunes in a month instead of in a yr. So in the first month, I popped out a hundred tunes; the second month, another hundred; in the third month, a third 100 tunes. I had no idea that was going to happen.

And now there's already a third book, so you never really know what's going to happen next. At least in my life I don't know. That's one of the beautiful things. That's what makes me want to celebrate the joy of life. There's always a surprise and there's always something inspiring and challenging around the corner. If you just keep yourself involved and keep yourself focused and make sure that you're not distracted by everything that's around us, you can get a lot of work done.

KTVU.com: You've did a retrospective of first Masada songbook on the tenth anniversary of the project and looked back on a number of past bands for your 50th birthday celebration, playing with a different act each night for the month-long series of shows at Tonic in New York. You seem open to revisiting early music from your career. I was wondering if fans will have a chance to see Naked City again or would you would ever revisit the albums 'Spillane' or 'The Big Gundown' in a live format?

John Zorn: No, that's not so interesting. I don't thing that's going to happen. Naked City got together around my 50th birthday to do two performances in Europe. We did great shows and it was fun to see each other again and it was certainly a challenge to play the music. We'd listen to the tune and look at the charts and say "S--t! How did we ever do that s--t so fast?"

But slowly we tweaked it up and we managed to make it work. But it was very evident to all of us that this was really music form another part of our lives. And it's very important for me to present something onstage that's very honest and I don't know if I feel that music the way I felt it back then. So I don't feel like I can do that. I don't think Naked City will ever get together again. I mean you never say never. You never know what's going to happen, like I said. I don't know what the future has in store. But if you were to ask me right now is Naked City going to get together again, I'd say absolutely not. Forget it. That's the furthest thing from my mind. I have other things to do. I don't celebrate the past in that way.

As far as the Morricone record, I put in a lot of time doing other people's music and paying tribute to my heroes. That was mostly in the '80s that I did that. And it was very satisfying and exciting to do, both for the players and for the audience and for myself. But I think I've put my time in and I'm not interested in interpreting other people's works anymore.

KTVU.com: You have plenty of your own songs to work with, obviously…

John Zorn: I've got a lot on my plate, and I'm not one of these guys who wants to relive my days of beatnik glory. That's not my modus operandi. I want to keep moving forward come up w/ new ideas and try things out. I think my role in this society -- on the planet -- is to take some chances and to make some music and ask some questions. Some of what I do is entertaining and fun for people to listen to, but entertainment is not why I'm doing this. This is art music. This is music that in some ways can raise questions and can deal with consciousness and -- I honestly believe -- can make the world a better place.

[A discussion about John Zorn's label Tzadik -- which puts out his records as well as those of a myriad of other artists -- and his work ethic that followed at this point was unfortunately lost to a digital recorder malfunction.]

KTVU.com: You've been closely associated with a couple of New York City venues like the Knitting Factory and Tonic. I wanted to ask you about your current artist-focused performance space, the Stone. To what extent do you use that as a forum to workshop new material and how deep is your involvement?

John Zorn: Well that's how I started out. I mean I started playing in my living room, you know? In my little one room apartment and two people would come upstairs and I'd do a concert for them. That's like 1975. And actually, at that time, one of the two people listening to what I was doing was Kazunori Sugiyama, who helps me run Tzadik. So this is a tightly knit community and we've really stuck together.

John Zorn

I've always thought of what I do as concert music. We had to play in clubs and bars by default, because we had no other place to play. We did what we could where we could. And we worked in places like the Knitting Factory and Tonic because the people that ran those establishments appreciated we brought in a crowd. I wouldn't exactly say they were philanthropists; these are business people. As long as you brought in a crowd, you were fine. If you didn't bring in a crowd, then you were not fine. Business is business.

I've existed in the marketplace not in the ivory tower of asking Uncle Sam for grant money. Grants are problematic. Sometimes the money comes way late, where you're already on to another project when the money comes in for a project you wanted to do years back. It's all f----d up. I think grant money almost gets in the way of projects at times.

So I've never gone that route. We existed in the marketplace. We played in clubs because we had no other place to play. But this music was never meant for clubs. It was never meant for bars. It was never meant to be in the background of people drinking and picking each other up or talking. This is concert music. It's the concert music of the future. It's still not appreciated the way it should be. Lincoln Center? They're not going to call us. Carnegie Hall? They're not going to call us. Not even BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music ] would call us. So we had to do what we had to do.

The reality is this music has been written about for thirty years by generous, intelligent and like-minded people who were excited about what we're doing and maybe find a relation to it because of the improvisation involved, because of the creativity involved because of the imagination involved. But the reality is a lot of what we do and it's different for every person in the community does not relate to any specific genre. It's not rock, it's not really jazz, it's not really classical, it's not really world music. It's something that falls in the gaps. It's really something new and something different.

We haven't had a dedicated outlet, a magazine that can handle what it is that we do in the proper way. There are jazz magazines and people who write for jazz magazines and improvisation is involved and they're able to convince their editor 'Hey, I can place a piece about Wayne Horovitz or about Bill Frisell or about Elliot Sharp or about Fred Frith or about Bill Laswell or about Ikue Mori or about Sylvie Corvoisier or about myself because a little improvisation is involved. And they place the piece in a jazz magazine and it kind of creates a big misunderstanding because that's not where a lot of these people are coming from.

So, kind of a big roundabout answer to your question, we've played where we had to play. We've been represented and misrepresented in a variety of publications over the decades of doing what we do. The Stone is a place where we can do our music for people who want to hear the music and that's all they want to do. People that come to the Stone focus on the music. And everybody that's performed at the Stone all say the same thing: there's something unusual going on there there's a level of listening and a level of focus that they rarely get when they play out. And that's because most of the places we are forced to play in are bars and people are talking and distracted and this and that. The Stone is a concert venue. It's just a room with a sound system and some chairs and a piano. That's it. But that's all you need. That's a performance space. That's our Carnegie Hall, and we really enjoy playing at a venue with people that just want to focus on the music and nothing else. Long answer. Sorry.

KTVU.com: One last thing that I wanted to get your take on. Steven Colbert mentioned you on his show in a bit about the MacArthur Fellowship back in 2006…

John Zorn: Yeah, that was hilarious.

KTVU.com: I thought it was hysterical too. Colbert is known for setting up adversarial positions with people and then having them on his show. What are the chances of you playing some blowtorch alto sax on the Report in the future?

John Zorn: I have no idea. I don't know the man. It was a hilarious spot. I don't know what his commitments are to this kind of music or what would happen. TV is not something I'm really interested in. I don't own one, I don't look at it. I don't want to have anything to do with it. I'm not going to put myself in the position of ridicule on some comedy show. I wouldn't even go on any of these late night talk shows. That's not what I'm doing here. It really has nothing to do … in fact, it's almost antithetical. So I'd rather stay where I am, keep plugging away bit by bit. If someone's interested, that's great.

This music is for the world to enjoy. It's not elitist in any way. I want everyone to enjoy it. But I understand the reality that it's challenging music and not everybody can enjoy it or appreciate it. Not everybody has the time to do the thinking and do the work to unravel the mysteries that are being presented in these concerts and on these CDs. It's not an easy thing. And people have enough problems in their lives that they don't need further problems. But I do champion the fact that this music is important and that the world is better for its existence and that, in some small way, it represents a cry of freedom in the dark ages.

Masada · March 11th, 2009, 09:01 PM

I'm so happy he has started to do more interviews. I love his views of art and he's also a pretty good example of how avant-garde is not necessarily elitist and snobby.

I wish I could see his residency in SF, man. He'll play both Masada Books!!

I also love the fact that he's absolutely against nostalgia. While I would like to see Naked City perform, I can only agree with his progressive (and not regressive( vision!

March 1st, 2009, 02:11 PM	#1
Masada Spirits Rejoice Join Date: Oct 2008 Posts: 396	All Things John Zorn! I just started this thread so that news about Zorn (and Tzadik) would be concentrated in one subject... New filmworks by Zorn, featuring the nice quarter of Wollesen, Ribot, Cohen and Burger. Eleven cues recorded for a striking documentary focusing on the life of controversial Mexican dictator Plutarco Elias Calles who was called everything from a nunburner to the father of modern Mexico. Beautiful and dramatic, the music is scored for guitar, marimba, accordion/piano and bass and subtly draws upon Mexican, Spanish, minimalist and soundtrack traditions. Zorn’s fifth film score in as many months is a pure delight. Moody and exotic music for a creative and revealing film dealing with truth and the complexity of history! An interesting project is coming up in the next months, John Zorn's Alhambra Love Songs, which consists of mellow piano trio compositions. John Zorn: Alhambra Love Songs [#7374] In an easy listening mode, Alhambra Love Songs is Zorn’s touching and lyrical ode to the San Francisco/Bay Area and the wonderful artists who have made it their home. Including tributes to artists as diverse as Vince Guaraldi, Clint Eastwood, David Lynch, Mike Patton and Harry Smith, the music is some of the most beautiful and soothing Zorn has ever written. Touching on the jazz/pop/funk trios of Vince Guaraldi and Ramsey Lewis, the music is scored for a remarkable piano trio of Rob Burger (Rufus Wainwright, Marianne Faithfull, Laurie Anderson), Greg Cohen (Ornette Coleman, Masada, Burt Bacharach) and Ben Perowsky (Uri Caine, Steve Bernstein, John Lurie). Evocative and endlessly listenable, this is perhaps the single most charming cd in Zorn’s entire catalog, and will appeal to fans of Vince Guaraldi, Ahmad Jamal, Henry Mancini and even George Winston!

March 1st, 2009, 03:06 PM	#2
CoyotePalace Heuristic of the Mystic Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: Colorado Posts: 1,769	Interview taken from Jazz Times From humble beginnings as one of the key figures on New York’s so-called Downtown improvisers scene of the late ‘70s, upstart saxophonist-composer John Zorn has emerged as an important and influential figure in the avant garde/ experiment scene. Zorn's triumphs over the past 20 years have been many, including running his own thriving and fiercely independent record label, Tzadik. When I first met him in 1981, he was blowing duck calls in buckets of water at fringe venues like 8BC, Roulette, Chandelier and his own tiny clubhouse, the Saint. By the mid-’80s, he had developed a number of sophisticated ‘game theories’ that involved strict rules, role playing, prompters with flashcards, all in the name of melding structure and improvisation in a seamless fashion. A breakthrough was his piece “Track & Field,” which was performed in 1984 by a dozen or so musicians at the prestigious Public Theater. As his experiments began to be taken more seriously by the critical community, there followed more showcases at New Music America, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Whitney Museum. Sensing that Zorn was emerging as a significant new voice—the poster boy for post-modernism, as he once quipped— Elektra/Nonesuch Records signed him to a lucrative, high-profile deal and released a string of important works including TheBig Gundown, Zorn’s 1985 meditation on the music of composer Ennio Morricone; Spillane, featuring Albert Collins and the Kronos Quartet; Spy vs. Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman in 1988; and Naked City in 1989, featuring the album’s titular avant superband with Bill Frisell on guitar, Joey Baron on drums, Fred Frith on bass, and Wayne Horvitz on keyboards. Since forming Tzadik in 1995’ Zorn has been incredibly prolific as a composer. He has created a variety of works including string quartets, piano concertos, chamber pieces, music for children, and compelling new music for his brilliant acoustic klezmer-meets-free-jazz band, Masada, featuring Dave Douglas on trumpet, Joey Baron on drums and Greg Cohen on bass. The current discography for Tzadik numbers over 150 and includes provocative original material by kindred spirits like bassist Bill Laswell, trumpeters Wadada Leo Smith, Steven Bernstein and Dave Douglas, violinist Eyvind Kang, and drummer Milford Graves, with whom Zorn has performed some scintillating free duets over the past couple of years. He has also performed and recorded with the hellacious power trio Painkiller, and Zorn continues to tour frequently with Masada and also plays occasionally with the harmolodic punk-funk band The Young Philadelphians. I spoke to Zorn in the comfort of the same East Village apartment he has lived in for the past 22 years. Surrounded by his imposing and rather sprawling record collection, he spoke candidly about the state of his art, the nature of commerce, and the prospects for adventurous, art-conscious independent labels. Generally people regard each new year as a chance to reinvent oneself And I would think the act is even more symbolic as we head into a new millennium. ZORN: Every day is a chance to reinvent oneself, but the problem is that we’ve been so beaten down by the powers that be that people are happy to be asleep now. What I’ve been seeing is really fucking depressing and I don’t see anything turning it around. I see enormous corporations acting like slave masters, like the return of the pharaohs. I see co-opting all around. I see McDonald’s everywhere. I see the destruction of what you and I love, the small mom and pop stores—people that love the music and that’s why they have their store. I see that being replaced by Tower, HMV, Virgin. And then I see conglomerates; giant corporations merging together to get even more powerful, like that big thing that just happened with Polygram and Universal. So what are we gonna have in another hundred years? We’re gonna have the world owned by one corporation. We’re gonna have all the artists signed to this one label and anyone not signed to this one label is going to be outlawed. We’re gonna have art police running around looking for small labels and independent artists that are not tied up. And we’re gonna have an inquisition. I mean, we basically have an inquisition now. But then there are people like yourself and Tim Berne who have taken it upon themselves to push their statements forward on their own terms with their own independent labels. I agree, but we’re all too rare. I mean, I’m doing what I believe in. I’m trying to do what I think is the right thing, the honorable thing. I’m trying to support the music that I believe in because nobody else is either able or interested in doing it. But do I think that in the new millennium that that is going to take over? No, I’m not so naive as to believe that we can turn the world around. I think this is the way the world has been since the first caveman picked up a rock and knocked someone over the head and said, “I’m the king of the hill.” Greed is a basic part of human makeup and greedy people are usually the ones that push everybody around. And in the time of the pharaohs it was done with violence. Today it’s done in much more insidious ways. It’s done with brainwashing and brain-control. These marketing guys who are at the head of all these companies, they’re really the ones that are spoon-feeding everybody shit. And I don’t really see much hope of turning that around because they’ve been thinking about how to fuck us for so much longer than we could imagine thinking about. They think about that as long as we think about making good music. I remember when I came to New York in 1980 there was a lot of excitement in the air regarding the music scene. Columbia had just signed James Blood Ulmer and Arthur Blythe and there seemed to be a ray of hope that the major labels might actually begin dealing in more adventur ous terms. ZORN: But what happened? They put out a couple of records then they dropped everybody. That’s a cycle that happens every 15-20 years. And then Wynton Marsalis came along. ZORN: Well, I don’t want to get into personalities and pit people against one another. I think there’s a lot of what Wynton is doing that’s great. I think that solo he took on that Citizen Tam record—have you heard that? That’s fucking smokin’! I mean, this guy can play his ass off. But we’re not talking about musicians. I think for the most part musicians are saints. They give and they give and they give and they get very little back. And if someone manages to get something back, I champion that. They deserve everything that they can get because I think they really put their lives on the line and are giving. I’m talking more about the world that we live in, the machines that we have to fight. I do think that history is going to have to be rewritten in the next hundred or so years, as it always has been. People that were really popular in their time eventually disappeared and were forgotten. And people who struggled and did it the hard way and concentrated on the music and tried to make something great, eventually their work came to light. It’s often well after they’re dead. It’s rarely in their lifetime and if it is in their lifetime it’s at the end of it, like Harry Smith getting an award the year he died. That’s beautiful in a certain sense and a fucking tragedy in another sense. And, of course, most of the people who are dropping his name now have never even seen any of his films. That’s the world we live in. I don’t see that changing. We have to accept it. It’s very unfair but it ain’t gonna change. We’re not gonna have a fair world in a hundred years. Maybe we’ll see the collapse of capitalism as we know it. Maybe democracy will slowly change and become something that one would hope the people want. But I think that the people who are in power, those kinds of people are always going to be in power. Those kind of people are always going to be pushing everybody around, lining their pockets with everybody else’s money and ripping everybody else off and feeding everybody shit because they believe that people wanna be told what to do. And the sad thing is, most people do wanna be told what to do. They don’t want to get out there and make choices for themselves. That’s another part of human nature. Always has been, always will be. But now there is more opportunity for independent labels and artists to get their stuff heard through various mediums like the Internet. ZORN: You want a ray of hope here in what I’m saying, don’t you? Well, I’m seeing it happen. ZORN: Oh, it “happened” in the ‘70s. That was a big explosion of independent labels, back when New Music Distribution was around. New Music Distribution provided an incredible service for hundreds of independent labels in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was amazing. And it was also amazing that it disappeared. And the reason it went down was greed. Their mafia distribution people decided not to pay them, they didn’t pay the artists and everybody got fucked. Now people can make their own CDs on their own little labels for very cheap—cheaper than it was to make vinyl. They can distribute it through the Internet worldwide; we have MP3, we have down loadable stuff. Information is going to be traded. But I guess what I’m getting at is— who’s gonna want it when everybody’s being brainwashed by these guys who are spending 24 hours a day thinking about how to target certain groups of people, how to control people into wanting shit? That is the big problem—the pharaohs controlling us. Sure, there will be inde pendent artists, always. But they’ll always be on the fringe. And every 15-20 years those major corporations will decide, “Let’s try something new,” and they’ll sign a Blood Ulmer or they’ll sign the 13th Floor Elevators or they’ll sign Captain Beefheart. They give it a chance but it never really works because the figures they’re hoping for are way beyond what these people are capable of. Some people thought that Columbia signing [avant garde saxophonist] David S. Ware was a very hopeful sign. ZORN: It’s not hopeful at all. It’s a freak. It’s the same freak thing that happened when Tim Berne was signed [to Columbia] or when Blood was signed Ito Columbia] or when I was signed [to Nonesuch]. I mean, Nonesuch—maybe that’s a little bit different. Maybe [Nonesuch head] Bob Hurwitz has a little more integrity than the major labels. He really believes in what he’s doing. But at the same time, if he wasn’t selling a million copies of the Gorecki symphony by some freak of marketing, he’d be out of a job, too—absolutely. I don’t think these companies feel they need credibility in the art market anymore. Blood was signed because they thought they could sell 100,000 copies of it. And then after realizing they could only sell about 50,000—goodbye. There’s no chance that this kind of complex music is going to break into a mass market. No chance. So why bother with it? Why waste the money marketing it at all? It’ll sell what it sells and if it doesn’t sell enough, drop ‘em. That’s the prevailing attitude at the major labels and I just see that getting worse and worse. And yet the fiercely independent artist persists in the face of this adversity and in some cases continues to thrive. ZORN: There will always be independent artists, there will always be some freak that says, “This is not right, I’m gonna do it my way.” There will always be experimental music. There will always be people who wanna listen to it. But I just don’t see them taking over the world, you know? Maybe when I was 22 years old I thought we were gonna take over the world, that this was the real music. But now that I have a perspective and I’m 46, 1 look back and I say, “Look at the his tory.” Look at thousands of years of how it’s been and how people are manipulated and how greed functions in our society. How do you see your own place in the scheme of things? ZORN: I look out at the world and I see chaos. And that’s kind of the formula for being an outsider. You don’t want to be an outsider, you want to belong and you’re burdened with these human frail ties. You need companionship; you need food and drink; you need a nice place to sleep; you want to be understood even though you’re doing something that’s a lit tle difficult; you want your work to be appreciated; you want to be loved. We’re burdened with this. But what we’re doing is we’re creating something that is a little bit scary to most people. It challenges their view of the world. Most people think the world is a perfectly ordered place and they love it. The outsider looks at that and goes, “Man, this is chaos. This makes no sense at all.” And then, they try to tell the truth. And they’re compelled to tell the truth. They can’t help but tell the truth by some inner sense of responsibility. But you seem to be thriving in spite of the way things are. ZORN: I’m not particularly unhappy with where I am right now, or with the scene itself. I think this is an incredibly exciting time for real music. I think there’s a lot going on. And I see new generations com ing up being influenced by some of the things that I’ve done and by some of the people that this scene has given birth to. And that’s a beautiful thing. That means that we will never die. That means that death is kind of impossible as this spirit gets passed on in a real, meaningful way. The truth will always be there but you can’t force it down people’s throats. They have to be ready to see it. And, you know, there’s the machine and here we are. And I don’t think it will ever be reversed. I do feel that it’s a lot easier to keep your head clear from greed if you’re not involved with major corporations. When I was working with Nonesuch for a short period of time, I got wrapped up with the same shit of like, “Why does Bill Frisell have a bigger budget than me?” I mean like, that’s something to think about? I could feel greed growing in me like a cancer. And for me, personally, it’s very hard to deal with that kind of shit. Maybe Wynton Marsalis can deal with it; maybe Bill Laswell can deal with it. You know, Bill can sit back and laugh at those fuckers and con ‘em and take ‘em for a ride. He’s great at talking that talk. But it makes me sick to my stomach, you know? I’m better off as an independent. I’m better off doing it on my own terms. I wonder what would happen to Wynton if he started his own company and did it his way. That, I think, would be a very exciting thing—if he didn’t have to answer to anybody or listen to anybody’s subtle brainwashing—you know what I mean? He’d just have to answer to himself. That’s what I’d like to see, more of that. More of people who are in power taking the initiative to do things on their own without the help of these greedy motherfuckers. Because, you know, money is money. But it’s tainted money. There’s something really evil about those multi-national corporations. Is the term Jazz” even valid anymore? ZORN: The term “jazz,” per se, is mean ingless to me in a certain way. Musicians don’t think in terms of boxes. I know what jazz music is. I studied it. I love it. But when I sit down and make music, a lot of things come together. And sometimes it falls a little bit toward the classical side, sometimes it falls a little bit towards the jazz, sometimes it falls toward rock, some times it doesn’t fall anywhere, it’s just floating in limbo. But no matter which way it falls, it’s always a little bit of a freak. It doesn’t really belong anywhere. It’s something unique, it’s something dif ferent, it’s something out of my heart. It’s not connected with those traditions. What tradition do you feel close to? ZORN: The avant garde. I would like to see the avant garde, experimental music being accepted as a genre in and of itself. I would like to see avant garde/experi mental sections in the major conglomer ate record stores. Not just in the stores that have intelligent buyers like Other Music or Amoeba on the West Coast— small stores that are run by people who believe, who hire people who know the music, where you can go to the store and say, “Tell me something interesting,” and they will. Remember that? Those were the days of great record stores. You worked in one [SoHo Music Gallery] in the early ‘8os. ZORN: Record stores used to be a power ful source of information. I used to go to Discophile when I was a teenager and say, “What’s new in the experimental/classical bin?” And the guy would say, “You gotta check this out, it’s amazing.” In ‘82, I went to Bleecker Bob’s record store and said, “What have you been listening to? What’s the outest hardcore you’ve heard?” And he’d say, “You gotta hear this Die Kreuzen record. It was on my turntable for six months, couldn’t take it off.” Now you go to Tower and you get these morons that are working for minimum wage that don’t even know where Phil Glass goes. I mean, they don’t know shit about Shinola and they’re working at record stores. Some times they’re even buyers and they don’t know what they’re talking about! So no one is getting educated. I’m talking about real grassroots education. That’s where I learned most of my important shit—listen ing, talking to people, exchanging informa tion. Again, I really believe that this music would probably have a better chance of reaching the audience that appreciates it and selling better if there was an avant garde/experimental section in Tower or HMV. It would be a great clarification of where this music is coming from. Hope fully, that will happen in the future. What do you think about the potential of MP3, where every musician has his own Web site, where people can download new music, like John Zorn. com? ZORN: That’s a beautiful idea. But do you really think these large corporations are going to let that happen? Because these are some greedy motherfuckers and they’re gonna find some way to fuck everybody. People who know how to manipulate other people are always going to be around and they’re always going to be working for those companies and they’re gonna know how to twirl some shiny object in front of some artist and get their fucking publishing away, and get them off their independent dot com and get them onto Warner Bros. Everybody could have their own little record company, it doesn’t cost that much to put shit out. But I get phone calls all the time, I get tapes all the time and I talk to them and say, “Man, you should put this shit out yourself. I’ll run it all down to you on how to do it.” And you know what? They don’t wanna do it! “Man, all I wanna do is make music, I don’t want to think about the business.” And they are ripe for getting ripped off. And most people are re ally like that. They’re honest musicians with integrity that just don’t want to deal with the business. They don’t want to have their own dot com. And as long as people are like that, they’re victims. That’s been going on since day one. But more musicians are taking the respon sibility to deal on their own behalf ZORN: Boy, I would love to think that. But I don’t think so. I mean, I would love to think that in 500 years everybody’s gonna have their own Web site, everybody’s gonna have their own thing. But I don’t care if material things disappear off the planet and we’re just dealing with brain-waves, there’s gonna be someone who knows how to manipulate that to make more money than anybody else. You know what I’m saying? Power is a drug. Money is part of that. But it’s just the instrumen tality of that. I don’t care if there’s nothing on the planet at all and we’re just spirit, there’s gonna be some fuckin’ spirit that wants more than tf~e next one. You have gained a lot of notoriety in recent years with Masada. ZORN: It’s a beautiful band, a pow erful band. Do you ever feel strange being on a jazz festival bill with Masada? ZORN: Masada relates to jazz music. It’s my pleasure to play that music on that kind of bill. In fact, it’s exciting to me. And people who never heard it at those festivals might get turned on. Like at the Chicago jazz Festival, which we just played a couple of weeks ago. It’s a free open-air festival and there were over 10,000 people out there listening to us. We got to play on a bill with Phil Woods, who is one of my all-time heroes. And I got to hang with him a bit, which was great. But is that happening more and more? No, it’s a freak; it’s one in a mil lion. To throw the weirdos a freak gig once in a while. People will listen, they may enjoy it. Maybe they’ll even go out and buy a record and get turned off. Or maybe they’ll keep following. But we’re talking about really insignificant numbers of people. You’ve traveled a lot with Masada and spread the word by taking the music to the people, much in the same way that Frank Zappa spread his own message. ZORN: Zappa was a very special person. He was really articulate; he really cared about politics. He had a lot of things going for him. I can’t step in Zappa’s shoes. I’m not politically aware. I don’t read newspa pers; I don’t read magazines; I don’t watch television. So I have no idea. Zappa was on top of everything, man. He was really amazing. I’m not really an articulate, polit ically minded, forward thinking person with goals that wants the world to be this way or that way. I’m not an interesting in terview in that regard. I wish I was. I wish there was someone who could be there in Zappa’s place. I’m not the guy. For me it’s more about doing things than blabbing about it. And that’s another reason why I put a moratorium on interviews. I just felt that not only was I being manipulated or misrepresented or cut down, I also felt that, in general, I just didn’t have that much to say, really. I do music. And a lot of times I don’t really understand fully what it is that I’m doing at the moment. I under stand 10 years later what it was. I gotta go on intuition a lot of the time. And I can’t always explain articulately exactly what it is that I’m doing with this new piece. I’m working on a piece now. I’ve never done anything quite like it; I’ve never composed in this way, really. And I feel like I’m taking some chances. But I don’t have the an swers to what this ‘piece is going to be or what it’s supposed to be. I feel like I’m going on a trip and I’m discovering it along the way. You get back from a trip and you don’t fully understand what you’ve seen until maybe a few years later, and then you realize, “Oh, wow, that’s how that touched me, that’s how that affected me.” And to distill it down to one word for the purpose of categorizing music to fit into record bins somehow negates the journey. ZORN: Well, those people who cate gorize are in the business of selling this shit. There is a business side to all of this nonsense, after all, and we’ve got to deal with that. They’re gonna be selling it so we gotta com municate to them in some kind of way. That’s why I’m hoping that maybe there’ll be an experimental section in major record store con glomerates in the near future. Are you aware of how you have influenced younger musicians just by your own exam ple, by living the way you do and producing music on your own terms? ZORN: Well, that’s a beautiful thing to say. I hope that that’s true. Because you are 46 and there are 23-year-old musicians who are being fiercely inde pendent today because of the groundwork that you laid 20 years ago. I’m thinking of [saxophonist] Briggan Krauss, who has mentioned you in interviews as a huge in fluence. By example, you have helped him and other young musicians like him to be brave enough to do what they do, against all odds. ZORN: Yeah, well, that’s what it takes— courage. It takes more courage than most people have. There’s less than one percent of people like that, but the world could not exist without them. The world would not move forward without them, and I really believe that. I think the outsiders, the indi vidualists, the people who have a messianic belief in themselves and are able to stick with their vision despite all odds—and be lieve me, Bill, every day of my life I’m haunted and tormented by the voices of people that are saying in my ear, “Maybe you’re wrong.” But the people that can stick with that, they’re the ones that are re ally going to make a difference in the world. And they will always be a small number and I’ve always aspired to be one of that number. I think about the people that I admire, people like Jack Smith, who lived in a small apartment right over here on First Avenue and died of AIDS 10 years ago. I worked with him for about eight years in the late ‘70s helping him with his theater performances that never more than 10 people attended. And, I mean, this was some of the greatest shit I ever experi enced. Here was a guy my age performing for 10 people. And I think about John Cage not getting an orchestra commission until he was over 50 years old. When he was my age he was still working as a dishwasher, you know? I think about that and I say, “Those are the models. I’ve gotta live up to that.” And if I can in any way inspire some one else, then the line gets passed on and that’s beautiful. That’s great. I really hope that it’s happening. Do you think this music, whether it’s called the avant garde or experimental music, can be promoted properly and sold in greater numbers? ZORN: Every once in a while someone comes along who thinks that they can sell this music to a large group of people, but that will never happen. By definition it’s for a small group of people. And I’m perfectly fine with that. I have no bitterness. What is certain is that this continuum will go on from your mentors through you and on to the next generation. ZORN: That continuum will happen, but it will stay very small. But as far as jazz music is concerned, which is a very different sub ject from my continuum, it’s in the hands of very conservative, greedy people. And it looks pretty bleak. There will always be a few things like that incredible solo that Wynton took on that Citizen Tam record. And that’s great that that’s there. I wish he did that all the time. But if he did that all the time maybe he wouldn’t have a major record contract, maybe he’d have to give up too many things that he’s unable to give up tight now. Or maybe he’s just not into doing that kind of music. Whatever it is, it’s his choice. I mean, he’s an intelligent person. But I do feel that getting involved with these greedy money people, these slave masters, these pharaohs, can be very damaging to your health. You can catch that disease. Greed is a very infectious thing. And you gotta be really insulated and really careful and really keep your head clear to avoid it. And you’ve succeeded in doing that over the past 20 years. ZORN: Because I don’t deal with those fuckers. That’s how I’ve done it! But if I were still making records for a major label I’d be just as sick as they are. And frus trated. I isolated myself completely, delib erately. Because I asked myself, “How much longer am I on this planet? How much time have I got?” So I choose not to watch TV. Instead, I choose to work. I de cided I have to cut out all distractions so I can concentrate on what’s important. And staying in this apartment has really helped me do that. I could’ve moved uptown to a big place, bought a brownstone, had a gar den room and a whole big thing. But I’m very happy here. This is where I’ve done all my really creative work—it’s happened right in this room, you know? This is where Cobra was conceived; this is where Spillane was conceived; this is where I wrote Apor ias. I mean, this is a great room! I’m very happy here. And it keeps me focused. And like Jack Smith, who lived in this small apartment on First Avenue, it keeps me in touch with what’s important, with the peo*ple that nurtured me. This is a great neigh borhood with a lot of energy. When this building was built it was for immigrants coming in who couldn’t wait to get the hell out of this neighborhood, but it had a lot of hope in it, you know? This was the jumping off point for people who succeeded in the world out there, who came from Europe and escaped the Nazis. And that feeling of hope is still alive in this building. I feel it. Ginsberg and Kerouac lived in the apart ment on my second floor. There’s a bit of history there. There’s incredible history in this neighborhood. Bird lived down the street. That kind of energy doesn’t go away, even with all these yuppies moving in and mom and pop stores turning into chain stores. That’s what’s scary, the co-opting of the world. That’s why I think eventually it’s going to be one big corporation and they’re gonna be out hunting people like you and me. Insurrection is a dream, but it ain’t gonna happen. Not in our lifetime. They have ‘so many ways of keeping us under control—with drugs, with the media, with language. I mean, these guys have been thinking about this shit for decades and decades—or centuries—how to control the masses. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a chip in every single computer that’s being sold today that actually made it into a camera with a microphone so that every body could be monitored. It would be so fucking easy; you know what I’m saying? That’s been prophesized Big Brother, no? ZORN: Absolutely. But you can go cuckoo with that shit. I mean, I’m not that “out.” I isolate myself but I’m still living here in the city. I’m not in some shack somewhere thinking and plotting out all of this shit. But the point is, you’ve eliminated distraction from your life so you can focus on the work. ZORN: That’s right. I’m insulated. I think people need insulation. Like before I was talking about how the outsider looks at the world and sees chaos. The person who’s in the world with their regular bourgeois val ues, they see an orderly existence. They’re insulated in their way because they don’t want to wake up and look at the truth. The outsider is insulated in their way so that all that chaos doesn’t destroy them. And that’s the harder road. You know, igno rance is bliss. It’s hard to stay on the out side wanting to be on the inside, climbing up the cliff, just hanging on by your finger nails. I mean, every year I hear how an other musician has gone down, either de cided to quit because he’s so frustrated or was suicided by society. It’s hard. I wish there was more support, more positive en ergy from the critical world toward people that are really on the edge trying to do shit. I wish there was more attention given to that music. It’s tough all around and we just have to stick together. And we will. I’m not going anywhere. What are your own personal goals for the new millennium? ZORN: One of the beautiful things in my life is that I don’t really have any goals. I just work day by day and do my thing. I don’t dream about operas on the Metropolitan Opera stage, I don’t dream about that big philharmonic commission. I work with my materi als that I have here at my hand with the musicians that are here and I’m very happy taking little baby steps one at a time. You’re nor dreaming of the big house in Engle wood Cliffs, New Jersey, with a two-car garage? ZORN: No, no. I’m happy here with my little two-floor apartment. I’ve been here for 22 years; I’ll be here all my life. I had an apartment in Tokyo for a while and that was a dream. It was a tiny little place that was not much bigger than this and it was like $300 a month, but I let that go. Some times I think about Indonesia—getting a little hut or something. But, come on—I’m a New Yorker. I’m not gonna get on the plane for 20 hours to sit on the beach for a week. That’s a night mare! So I don’t have a lot, really. I’m not that kind of dreamer. __________________ You will find that their minds rarely move in a line... http://web.mac.com/flowe/iWeb/Farrell%20Lowe/Welcome.html

March 1st, 2009, 03:08 PM	#3
CoyotePalace Heuristic of the Mystic Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: Colorado Posts: 1,769	source: http://www.browbeat.com/browbeat01/zorn.htm I had the pleasure of interviewing John Zorn on October 20th, 1990, about a year after the first Naked City album was released and just after a performance of Cobra at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. When did you start composing and playing music? I've found some of your records from the late 70's... Zorn: Yeah, my first records are like '76 or something like that. I started playing really hard in New York from like '74 but I've been composing and writing since the mid-60's, since I was a kid. Are you from New York? Zorn: Yeah, born and raised in New York. Where are you from? I'm from [turning on my accent] Boston...the reason I ask is that some of the people you collaborate with or work with are from San Diego. It seems like a lot... Zorn: Wayne Horvitz is...well, he's not really from San Diego. That's not true. I was thinking Diamanda Galas... Zorn: I've worked with her a little bit. And actually on this new Naked City record I'm working on a piece that will feature her. That's coming out on Shimmy Disc? Zorn: Well, no. The twelve-inch with 42 songs on it will be out on Shimmy Disc and Earache out of Britain. But I'm going to come back out here in December and record the second full album for Nonesuch and that'll have one piece with Diamanda on it. I like the piece with Diamanda on The Big Gundown. I can't think of the name of it... Zorn: What is it? "Metamorfosi" I think it's called. She's incredible! Actually, she may be the only musician from San Diego that I ever have worked with. So much for that hypothesis (laugh). Zorn: That was a great theory. You can throw that right into the trash can. Heh Heh. You've worked with a lot of musicians from all different backgrounds. I'll throw out some examples: Fred Frith, Eugene Chadbourne, Vernon Reid, Elliot Sharp, Bill Frisell, and so forth. They... Zorn: Those are all guitar players. Interesting. Robert Quine. I've worked with him. Diamanda, does she play guitar? (laugh) Zorn: Noooo. She used to play piano. And she still does play piano a little bit. Have you ever seen her play? She was on Night Music playing some piano. It was quite good. Zorn: She is a good piano player. It seems like you sort of search out these...I don't know if you search out or if it just turns out that way, that artists working with you are from different backgrounds. Like Eye from the Boredoms. Zorn: Yeah. That is definitely something that needs to be searched out. I run around, I listen to a lot of music, go to a lot of concerts. And when I see someone that gases me, I try to go out of my way to involve them somehow in what I'm doing or get involved in what they're doing. Eye was a great discovery. He is one of the great vocalists of all time. Actually, a friend wanted me to ask, "Why are you working with Eye?" Zorn: Now, what a silly question. Anyone who hears the record should know the answer to that. It's because he is absolutely out of his mind. (laughs) That's why. He's fantastic!...A lot of people can't take him. He's really extreme. He's pretty agresssive. Zorn: He's a great screamer, but he's really got a wide variety of sounds. When I first saw him he was playing in a group called...umm...Geva Geva. There is a group called Zeni Geva in Japan that's got this guitar player called Null. K.K. Null. I interviewed him. He was here two weeks ago. Zorn: Null was here! (speechless) Yeah, he played with the Pain Teens. Zorn: With the long hair. He hardly speaks any English, how was the interview? (heh heh) (Laughing)...uh...brief. Zorn: I bet it was, man. No, that guy is great. He is brutal. So he was playing with Yoshida Tatsuya who plays in the Ruins. Who's a great drummer also. Him, Null and Eye had a trio [Geva Geva]...and I went to see them and Yoshida asked me to come and play with them, actually. And the first set, it looked like Eye was just completely improvising, doing whatever he wanted to do while Null and Yoshida played these songs that were all really, y'know, complex and all worked out. It looked like Eye was just doing whatever he wanted to do...And, uh, I said y'know let's improvise together. Let's do some duos or something. And he said, "What's improvising?" (laugh) He didn't think what he was in was improvising. He called it kind of...in Japanese you can call it Tekito...Tekito means kinda like "do what you want"...but, he didn't make the connection between improvising and Tekito. (laughs) Even today, like we do total improv duos that are just killer! He's got a natural sense for improvising. After the gig, I'll say what did you think of that. He'll say "I had no idea what I was doing! What was that? Was that music?" (laughing) I have the Boredoms album that's on Shimmy Disc... Zorn: That originally came out on a label called Selfish in Japan and then...uh...I gave Kramer a tape of the Boredoms and he flipped, so he wanted to license the record and now it's out on Shimmy Disc. You had a performance of Cobra this week at the Great American Music Hall, that's that card/war game... Zorn: Yeah, that's my game piece. It's not a war game. A lot of people get upset with that stuff. Apparently, Willie Winant tried to do the piece down in San Diego, or somewhere down south at some school, and some girl student got really upset and tried to blockade the performance. Cause she didn't like the use of the word "tactics" or "guerilla systems" or "cutthroat." This military stuff. We gotta get rid of that. How does that work? Is it difficult to explain? Zorn: Well, what do we have now? Ten minutes? Really it's best to (chuckle) just go on to another subject. To put it like into one sentence, it's kind of a loose system that permits improvisers to interrelate and react to each other in different ways. And you as conductor control it by... Zorn: I don't control it at all. It's all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are. Oh...so, you're not directing who is improvising. You're saying... Zorn: No, not all. You are telling everybody else who someone wants to improvise with? Zorn: Right. Like someone will say, well I wanna do this now. So they will tell me and I'll tell everyone else with these cards. And then at anytime, anybody can... Aren't you choosing? Like if several people are saying I want to do this... Zorn: Well, of course. Like you have seven people with their hands up. I gotta make a choice. Y'know, that's tough. Sometimes I gotta go with someone that has an idea and make several calls in a row, because they got an idea. And sometimes I stick with just one person for a while. That may seem unfair. Then I'm like enough of this guy and then I'll take someone that hasn't made a call in a while or...if there are five people with their hands up and there is one person that has never made a call in the piece, then I'll take that person. And I try to be as diplomatic as I can, but it always ends up being a psychodrama up there on stage. (laughs) That's what those pieces are about. A friend saw the show and said that when you switched from one improvisational set, I guess you could call it, to another that it was just flawless. It just jumped from one to the next... Zorn: That's very simple. You just give a downbeat, and say at this downbeat a change is gonna happen. Some cards [are] just any kind of change. Some cards are more specific, like everybody drops out except one person. It's like a very complicated toggle switch. It's an on and off switch for the all the people in the band. I never talk about what they play, because each person has a very personal style. Y'know, they've developed a language on their instrument that nobody else can duplicate, so I wanted to find a way to harness that kind of talent in a compositional arc. What I came up with was this kind of game structure that talks about when people play, and when they don't play, but doesn't talk about what they do at all. So everyone gets gassed when they're doing it. I mean, it really is a psychodrama! I heard it was really fun to watch. Zorn: It's a blast to watch. It's a lot more interesting live than it is on record. I mean, it really is a theatrical event. It's a sporting event! Cause you never know what's gonna happen. There's a lot of humor involved. Zorn: Yeah! Usually the people in the band have a sense of humor and when they screw up, it's always a subject of ... I hear you have a hardcore band in New York. Is that true? Zorn: Well, in Japan, I have got a group of musicians that I have worked with a lot, that concentrate just on the hardcore stuff, say, that Naked City has been working on. We have like a repertoire of sixty songs now. Wow. Does it have a name? Zorn: It's called Torture Garden: Yoshida, the drummer from the Ruins; Eye is the vocalist, Ema Hori who is an incredible guitar player. And the bass player is also from the Ruins, this guy Kimoto. We just played at CB's last week. I brought them all over to New York to do some gigs. Great. Is there going to be anything coming out on vinyl or CD of that band? Zorn: For that particular band, nothing is planned yet. I'd like to do a twelve-inch with 5 songs or something like that. All the Torture Garden material has already been recorded by the band Naked City. That'll come out on Earache out of Great Britain and Shimmy Disc here in the States [ed. note: It came out in 1991]. Shimmy Disc is licensing the Earache record? Zorn: Well, it's a complicated thing. Basically, this Naked City record (the first album on Nonesuch) came out, right. In the middle of it are about ten songs that are really short and hard. I said I wanted to do a record of 40 of those pieces, cause I was really interested in the compression and compactness of form that that music gets to. Putting lots of information in a very very short amount of time... Zorn: The guys at Nonesuch were not interested. If I wanted to do that, I better take it somewhere else. So what I managed to do was get them to bankroll the whole thing, and then I licensed it to Earache and Shimmy for basically no money and no royalties. So they are just putting this stuff out that Nonesuch bankrolled. Neat. What a deal!...You spend a portion of your year living in Japan. How long have you been doing that? And why? Zorn: Five months a year, something like that. For about seven years. I really like it there. There are a lot of great musicians. The scene is very open. A lot of stuff going on. People's ears are really open, they are not closed. A lot of scenes here, people just get tunnel vision and are into one thing. They are into hardcore and that's it... Zorn: Or they are just into classical or they are just into jazz. They get really prejudiced about that kind of stuff. They won't listen to other musics. I've always liked a lot of different kinds of music. I've always liked to listen that way. People in Japan are kinda the same. There is a lot of openess there. People aren't afraid that some weird guy comes over from New York who is interested in doing these weird things. Everyone is kinda into it, and wants to try new things. It's a really great place to experiment. One that thing that is really interesting about your music is that people like myself (I'm originally from a punk background) are now learning about Jazz through artists like yourself. You put out an album of all Ornette Coleman covers, so I go check out Ornette's stuff, and find out it's pretty cool. So I end up branching out that way... Zorn: That is a lot of the reason I do what I do, to really spread the word and spread information and turn people onto different things they may not be, y'know, aware of. That is what Naked City is certainly about. What kind of music do you play just totally for fun? Like if you just wanted to have fun and were not having to play for a recording or a performance. Is there anything that you play at home by yourself? Zorn: That band Slan that was here a couple of months ago that got trashed in the press, and is always getting trashed in the press (laugh). That is really a lot of fun for me to do. I love doing that. What is Slan like? I am not familiar with them. Zorn: Slan is a totally improvised hardcore band. It is the drummer from Blind Idiot God, Ted Epstein--who is an incredible musician, Elliot Sharp on guitar and vocals, and I play sax and do vocals. It's a chance to kind of totally improvise in a song form and do whatever is on our minds. It's a lot of fun. But, I mean, we can't play for more than thirty minutes without totally running out of steam (laughs). At that pace, it is hard. Zorn: It's hard. Ted can really kick your butt; he's really a great drummer. You should check out his band Blind Idiot God. They are really great. It seems like the accessiblity factor for your music has stayed the same over the last ten years... Zorn: Has it? You mean, the inaccessibility of it. ...your notoriety. You are much more well known now than you were five years ago. Zorn: That's for sure. What's it like, having that much more notoriety? Zorn: It's a pain in the ass. It's a pain in the ass, definitely. As soon as you get a certain amount of attention, then everybody kinda wants to start taking pot shots at you. All your old friends that supported you don't support you any more. You know, it's really easy to support someone who is doing horrible. How can you give any sympathy to someone who is supposedly doing well? But I'm not here to complain. I'm doing fine. I'm making the records I want to make and ignoring the critics, as I always have. Is everything busier now? Do you find yourself much more busy doing non-music stuff? Zorn: No. Absolutely not. I'm more busy doing music stuff. Different kind of music stuff. I was always busy. In the old days, I used to practice the saxophone. Now [that] I don't practice it, I have time to compose. And more chances to perform all over the world. I really keep the nonmusical things, the business kind of things, to a level of zero. I've never called for a gig in my life. I mean, I just can't. And I've never shopped a tape around. People know where I am. They want me, they can call me up on the phone. __________________ You will find that their minds rarely move in a line... http://web.mac.com/flowe/iWeb/Farrell%20Lowe/Welcome.html

March 1st, 2009, 03:10 PM	#4
CoyotePalace Heuristic of the Mystic Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: Colorado Posts: 1,769	FAQ: How can I get a copy of Masada 4? You can't. Well, it's pretty unlikely at the least. It was never available for retail; it was given away by DIW in exchange of the proof of buying the first three Masada; the deadline for getting it was June 1995. UPDATE - Masada 4 has now been released for purchase. How do you pronounce "Tzadik"? TZ as in "glitzy" A as in "bad" DIK as in "deek" (the accent is on the first syllable) It means "holy man" in Hebrew . Is "Heretic" by Naked City really a soundtrack? The Knitting Factory page says " 'Heretic' which also features a Naked City soundtrack, is an experimental narrative in the form of an extended trailer. A very funny take on psychotherapy starring Karen Finley." Are Mike Patton and The Melvins on Naked City's "Leng T'che"? No, they are not. Some folks would say that "Leng T'che" is Naked City's take on The Melvins sludge style. One can only assume that is why they were thanked in the credits. Is Zorn in Mr. Bungle? No, he is not. Zorn did however produce Mr. Bungle's self titled major label debut on Warner Brothers. He does play alto sax on one song, "Love is a Fist." Towards the end of the Zorn/Bailey/Parker CD "Harras," the track "Evening Harras" has about 10 minutes of silence, followed by a section of what seems to be Bailey solo. Is this a mistake? "According to Derek Bailey, the abrupt cutoff was planned. Derek wanted to end it "on a high". The Bailey solo material appended after the silence was apparently Zorn's idea." (thanks to Peter Stubley/Lynn Rardin) How do I order from Tzadik? Tzadik now has a website with CD descriptions and the ability to purchase them. Are there other places I can buy Tzadik/Avant/Zorn's music There is the officially sanctioned Downtown Music Gallery 1-800-622-1387 and Forced Exposure (box 9102, Waltham, MA 02254 - it's an excellent site/catalog) mailorder. Wayside claims to be an "official mail order source" for Tzadik and appear to have a complete list with brief descriptions of each one. Is there a Zorn discography? Patrice Roussel has compiled and maintained an unbelievable and comprehensive Zorn discography, as well as discographies for some other great musicians. The Zorn discography was most recently updated November 1996. This is the tenth version. You can get Patrice's Zorn discography via the web at http://www.nwu.edu/WNUR/jazz/artists...hn/discog.html Where can I read interviews with, or writings about Zorn and his ilk? There's a great interview with Zorn in "Talking Music" by William Duckworth (Schirmer, 1995). A brief chapter about him in "Plunderphonics Pataphysics & Pop_Mechanics: And Introduction to Musique Actuelle" by Andrew Jones (SAF, 1995). Derek Bailey talks with Zorn in his book "Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music" (Da Capo, 1992). American Composers - Dialogues on Contemporary Music, by Edward Strickland Contains an interview of John Zorn by Edward Strickland (pp. 124-140) Indiana University Press, 1991 (ISBN 0-253-35498-6) Soundpieces 2: Interviews With American Composers, by Cole Gagne Interview by Cole Gagne followed by a discography (pp. 507-542) The Scarecrow Press, 1993 (ISBN 0-8108-2710-7) Oh and there's this zine based in Oakland... What's Zorn's phone number? I really need to ask him something. We don't know. Your best bet is to write him a letter via Tzadik. What's the deal with this 100 CD boxset? In an issue of The Wire, there was an advertisement for a 100 CD boxset of Zorn/Eye from their 1995 China tour. Supposedly, it is a limited edition of 1000 copies. Each CD will be variable length with the shortest at one second! Word is that the release date has been pushed back to Fall 1997, my guess is that is optimistic. More recent info seems to indicate that the project has been cancelled. What is Masada, Kristallnacht? Masada is the name of an almost impenetrable mountain-fortress which was where a group of Jews stood against the Roman army in a very prolonged seige. The Romans finally defeated the rebels by using Jewish slaves to construct a ramp up to the main gate. Unwilling to kill thier own people, the Jews inside Masada could only watch as the slaves were forced to build the ramp higher and higher. Finally, instead of giving the Romans the pleasure of conquest, the Jews inside Masada defiantly commited mass suicide. Kristallnacht refers to the "Night of Broken Glass" when German troops smashed the windows of Jewish storefronts in Germany. I believe that this is generally considered the beginning of the Holocaust. What are those funny song names on the Masada discs? They're all Hebrew titles, i think. Some are names of people. What happened to the "Radio Vol. 2" and the live box from the Zornfest? Radio Vol. 2 (Avan 005, Avant-Japan) CD has never been recorded and thus never released. It was supposed to be NAKED CITY'S "COVER" RECORD. An album of JOHN ZORN's eclectic arrangements of some of the most important, and often overlooked compositions of the 20th century. JERRY GOLDSMITH, ORNETTE COLEMAN, BRIAN WILSON, IGOR STRAVINSKY, DUKE ELLINGTON, TUSHIMA TOSHIAKI, WILLIAM ORBIT, GEORGE CLINTON, and many more. According to Wayne Horvitz: this record has never been recorded. Is there a biography on Zorn? No. I heard about some sort of controversy around the use of purported pornographic images on Zorn's CD covers. What's the deal? The CAAAV (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence) targeted Zorn because of the graphic design of two of his records: TORTURE GARDEN and LENG TCH'E. They believed that these images were giving a degrading image of Asian people. To avoid problems, Zorn decided to remove these records from retail stores. They are now available again in new packaging called the "BLACK BOX". I'm new to the world of Zorn, he's put out so much stuff, which record(s) should i listen to first? I think of the 30 or so that i've heard, these are pretty representational: Masada 1 (or 2 or 3) to hear actual jazz Naked City (the self titled one) and Torture Garden, to hear jump-cut craziness Painkiller: Buried Secrets, to hear big bad heavy metal noise stuff The Big Gundown, to hear crazy arrangements Filmworks vol. 1 to hear more accesible, backgroundy music Elegy/Kristallnacht, to hear his chamber music Could you tell me something about the various photographers and artists used for CD covers and the sources of the pics. Rumor is that art-books released during the time before CDs would come out were the source of the pictures and titles in some cases. The Naked City photograph was taken by WeeGee who documented crimes in NY. He would sleep in his car with a police radio so he could get to the scene of a crime quickly, and often he was there before the police. This is how he got his nickname. Get it? Ouija board? "Naked City" is one of several excellent books by WeeGee. It appears the same sort of thing is true of "Absinthe," ie: an art-book by the same name came out with the very pictures which now grace the cover of the album. There is also a book by Man Ray which probably came out around the time his photographs were used for the Radio album. He is a French photographer, whose work is very influential, especially on the use of shape/form in expression. I'm not sure when his work dates from, although I would guess the 1930s or 40s. Is this super-heavy Zorn guy really as old as/older than my dad? Born in 1953. How old's your dad? What's a "game piece"? A game piece, of which Cobra is the best known and most recorded (at least three different versions on Avant, Hat, and Knitting Factory), is a method of group improvisation where the structure of the piece (the rules of the game) is set by a prompter at performance time, and the players have complete freedom within the structure. It differs from free improvisation (jazz) because of the prompter. It differs from contemporary classical aleatory music (Cage, Stockhausen, Pousseur) and conduction (Butch Morris) in the complete absence of any notated musical notes of any kind. The playful and whimsical connotations of the word "game" are also relevant to Zorn's game pieces. In the late 1970s an early 1980s, Zorn was often quoted as saying "My concern is not so much with how things sound, as with how things work." The game pieces were his most concerted early efforts at creating musical structures that didn't dictate "how things sound." While most of the game pieces are named after a sport or game (Pool, Hockey, Archery, Lacrosse, Cobra, Tennis, Golf, Curling, Cricket, Jai Alai, Go, Sebastopol are among those recorded or other wise referred to), the term "game pieces" refers as much to the structures of the works. Just as people playing games or sports must follow certain rules which determine how they interact, but not exactly what they do (in baseball, for instance, the infield fly rule says what to do when one occurs, but there is no rule governing when a player must hit an infield fly), in his game pieces, Zorn creates structures and situations for improvisors to perform in, while providing little, if any, actual notated music. In early game pieces, like Pool & Archery, the structures may be as simple as providing an order for the possible solos, duos, trios, and quartets available for a particular size ensemble and then providing specific ways in which participating musicians can interrupt this order. In several of these early game pieces, Zorn provides very brief notated material, to be used by players when or if certain options occur. In later game pieces, like Cobra (the most recorded and performed of Zorn's game pieces), the rules are more open (there is, for example, no attempt at having all possible combinations of players perform together, and there is no notated material) and the ways in which performers can interupt the proceedings are more elaborate. In all of the game pieces a prompter, who does not play an instrument during the piece, keeps track of where players are within the structure, making sure that everyone knows what's going on. The prompter acts as a referee or conductor, making choices when more than one player desires to interupt the proceedings and otherwise shaping the music as it progresses. While these pieces, in part, grow out of the modern tradition of aleatoric and/or intuitive music created by avant garde composers like John Cage, Earl Brown, Christian Wolff, Pauline Oliveros, Jerry Hunt, Mauricio Kagel, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Zorn's game pieces differ primarily in the nature of the structured interactions and performer choices allowed, and in Zorn's use of musicians who are (often) more comfortable with improvising in several styles of music. Are there other cool saxophone players? Tons. John Butcher, Tim Berne, Peter van Bergen, Mats Gustafsson are some great younger players. John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Peter Brotzmann, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Ornette Coleman, Frank Lowe, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Oliver Lake, and Albert Ayler are among the legends of the previous generation. Did the singer of the Boredoms change his name? Yes. In 1996, Yamatsuka Eye changed his name to Yamantaka Eye. Is there a Mr Bungle mailing list? There's one official one (where Trey Spruance sends out any infos on his current projects) write to mimicry@humboldt1.com to get on that one. And there's that Caca Volante mailing list, which also features Faith No More, John Zorn or basically any related. the address for that one is majordomo@optera.com (as usual with Majordomo, send "subscribe cv-list" to that address to get on the list.) Can someone give me the scoop on Keiji Haino? Y'know the guy who has recordings on both Avant and Tzadik. He is a first rate skronker! He has been around for over 20 years apparently, recording with a variety of bands and solo. I haven't heard a great deal of his work but he does play truly terrifying, cataclysmic free-rock guitar improvisations. If you can imagine a heavy rock Derek Bailey then you are just about in the same galaxy as Haino. He is prone to 45 minute improvisations involving massive feedback and metallic noise, also shrieking and shouting when he gets really emotional. His band Fushitsusha have released a variety of albums but I can heartily reccomend The Caution Appears. This has a selection of "approachable" shortish tracks which are heavy on the devastating, white noise rock-out! There are a few Haino/Fushitsusha web pages about, you can find them through Lycos and The Wire magazine has been covering this kind of mayhem for the last 18 months in a fair amount of detail. Who was Bar Kokhba? The leader of the rebelion against Rome in 140AD. __________________ You will find that their minds rarely move in a line... http://web.mac.com/flowe/iWeb/Farrell%20Lowe/Welcome.html

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March 1st, 2009, 05:46 PM	#5
Masada Spirits Rejoice Join Date: Oct 2008 Posts: 396	Thanks for the great interviews, CoyotePalace. I could do a 5 hours interview with this man and still have questions. He should write like Braxton did with the Tri-Axiom books. His views of art/industry/music/conventions is just great. He's being modest when he says he's not as articulate as Zappa.

March 1st, 2009, 06:42 PM	#6
peterdubya Registered User Join Date: Apr 2004 Posts: 114	Let's not forget the John Zorn's Yoshi's San Francisco Residency: March 10-15 - www.yoshis.com/zorn A RARE opportunity to catch Zorn in a variety of settings west of the Mississippi

March 1st, 2009, 07:44 PM	#7
Masada Spirits Rejoice Join Date: Oct 2008 Posts: 396	I SO wish I was in Cali. It's quite great that Zorn will be playing songs from Book of Angels (2)... since he never plays on the records. And Sc3 doing Masada will also be a treat for the lucky people from SF!

March 1st, 2009, 07:49 PM	#8
thedwork Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Albany, NY Posts: 2,719	imo, any thread titled "All Things John Zorn" is required to have this short video clip included: Who's Not Honoring Me Now? "Genius Grant Please!" one of my personal favorites.

March 11th, 2009, 06:29 PM	#13
peterdubya Registered User Join Date: Apr 2004 Posts: 114	anyone here attending the Yoshis shows?

March 11th, 2009, 08:28 PM	#14
peterdubya Registered User Join Date: Apr 2004 Posts: 114	KTVU.com Talks To Saxophonist John Zorn By David Pehling Posted: 5:05 pm PDT March 10, 2009Updated: 1:08 am PDT March 11, 2009 Over the course of the past three decades, saxophonist and composer John Zorn has amassed a staggering body of work. Starting with his early experiments in structured improvisation games, Zorn has taken an iconoclastic and omnivorous approach to music throughout his career, drawing elements of modern classical, free jazz and soundtrack music as well as sounds from the more extreme experimental fringes of hardcore punk, metal and industrial music. Zorn first came to wider appreciation through his remarkable recorded tributes to Italian soundtrack maestro Ennio Morricone ('The Big Gundown,' released in 1985 on Nonesuch) and Ornette Coleman (the corrosive collection 'Spy vs Spy,' released in 1989 on Elektra Musician), but his own music soon came to the fore. The explosive jazz-punk of Naked City -- a super group featuring Zorn alongside such luminaries as guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Fred Frith, keyboard player Wayne Horovitz and drummer Joey Baron -- and the saxophonist's explorations of grindcore with Painkiller (a trio with bassist Bill Laswell and Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris) made Zorn a hero for fans of both experimental jazz and heavy music in the late '80s. John Zorn While Zorn has continued to record soundtrack music at a feverish rate, starting in the early '90s, he began to focus much of his attention on his Masada songbook project. A conscious attempt to push traditional Jewish music into the the modern era, the Masada songbook puts a 21st century twist on traditional sephardic scales of klezmer. Performing the music around the globe with his acoustic Masada Quartet (with includes drummer Baron, trumpet player Dave Douglas and bassist Greg Cohen), Zorn revealed a level of melodicism only hinted at by some of his soundtrack work. The prolific artist took time to talk to KTVU.com in advance of his six-day residency at Yoshi's in San Francisco largely dedicated to showcasing his Masada songbooks with performances by local avant-rock band Secret Chiefs 3, the Masada String Trio, both the acoustic Masada Quartet and the volcanic Electric Masada group and much more. KTVU.com: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. John Zorn: Glad to do it. I don't do it often, but I'm really excited about this run at Yoshi's… KTVU.com: So am I! When I see all the shows you play in New York City, I get really sad that I'm not there and don't get to see what you're doing there. The last time you were in the Bay Area for more than a single show was Edgefest in Berkeley in 2004, from what I could tell… John Zorn: Yeah. I have a lot of friends in the Bay Area and I go there quite often to hang with Willie Wynant, Larry Ochs, Mike Patton. And I have a lot of other friends there like Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser and Bruce Ackley. It really goes on and on, my connection to the Bay Area goes back to 1973. I do go there quite often. But when I've played - you're right - it's been a single one off or quick hit with Mike or the ROVA people or doing a game piece or what have you. This is the first chance that I've had to bring what I've been working on for the past some 20 years out to this beautiful city that I love so much. I really want to thank Peter Williams at Yoshi's [the club's artistic director] for making it possible. He's really going out on a limb to do it. I hope that people come out to support it. Live music is a very important and special event. We have to make sure it survives and keeps going. KTVU.com: With all the musicians in the area you've been associated with and worked with in the past, it seems like someone could have approached you to do a residency with just local collaborators… John Zorn: This is something I've been doing more often in Europe. I got very tired of being on airplanes. You know a musician's life; to perform involves a lot of travel. And my body is just beginning to say 'Don't put me there again.' A typical tour for a musical group you hit 12 different cities; every day a different place. Some bands go out for a month or two months. By the time I was doing Naked City in the '80s, I was already restricting my touring to two weeks tops. Then it became one week tops. Then it became 'I'll go just for single hits, just for a couple of days and come back,' which is difficult. So my new plan as of about a year or two ago, is instead of taking one band to 12 different cities, I take 12 bands to one city. Do a residency. Take one plane there, one plane home, and spend a week in a city. Get to know it and really get to present a wide variety of what I'm up to. That's been really satisfying and fulfilling to not just do one hit and split. To get some time to know the city. Because I'm involved in so many different things, it became absurd to just do one concert or one gig. I felt that was no longer a true presentation of what I'm about. So I did a residency in Paris: 5 days at the Cite de la Musique and at the Salle Pleyel. I did many of the bands performing at Yoshi's in addition to some classical concert things and some of the rock bands like Moonchild and projects with Bill Laswell such as Painkiller. I did it in Italy as well. I'm going to be doing it at North Sea [Jazz Festival in the Netherlands] this year and am going back to Polermo [in Italy] to do it there. So I've been very fortunate to present this retrospective in a variety of cities around the world. It's delightful to do in SF, because it's really the only other city in the states that I've spent a lot of time in. KTVU.com: Your output is so voluminous I have to admit it's kind of hard to keep up. When I was preparing to speak to you, I went out and bought a few albums to catch up. The band I was most curious about was Electric Masada since I'd seen you play several times with the Masada Quartet. I was just floored by the band's intensity. It's one of my favorite musical discoveries in ages… John Zorn: That's a great band. It should be exciting to present that band again. It's hard for us to get together, but when we do, it really takes off. KTVU.com: It touches on some of the noise aspects of Naked City, but it also to me echoes some of the music of one of my favorite groups ever, the mid-1970s electric group Miles Davis led. I was wondering what the genesis of electric band was and if you knew the direction you wanted to take the band? John Zorn: The Electric Masada band came about in an interesting way. I was at a midnight show at Tonic [a now closed Manhattan club] some years back. It must have been six or seven years ago. It was a very fine presentation by a great musician doing really interesting music and there was nobody there. And I was like 'Man, this is great, but people just aren't coming out. What's going on? Why aren't they coming out? Why don't they care about this music that's happening?' So I scratching my head and trying to figure out 'Well, what would they be excited about? What would be very exciting for an audience to hear?' And that's where I came up with the Electric Masada Group. I just put together a band that I thought was really wild and decided to take some of the Masada material and try to push the envelope. So we brought in some influences from Naked City and even from Cobra some of the downbeats and some of the spontaneous conduction techniques that are used in game pieces like Cobra are brought to the fore in the Electric Masada group. As well as the Masada music which, as you know now, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. So many different bands have been performing it. KTVU.com: The breadth of your output over the past two decades has been impressive between the Masada songbook, your soundtrack work and a variety of other bands. When you started the Masada project, did have any inkling it would grow to this size? John Zorn: You never know what's going to happen with a project. You begin it because it's interesting and you're passionate about it and it hits a lot of places that are meaningful to you and do the best you can with it. And how can you know what's going to happen? You never know. That's one of the beautiful things; I don't have those kinds of goals. I just kind of live my life a day at a time. John Zorn The project for Masada was to create something positive in the Jewish tradition something that maybe takes the idea of Jewish music into the 21st century the way jazz developed from the teens and 1920s into the '40s, the '50s, the '60s and on. That was something that was very inspiring. My idea was 'Well, can that happen with Jewish music as well?' Why is Jewish music only considered cantorial and klezmer? Let's see if we can make some modern statements using new ideas and young imagination and new inst and create something positive. I began writing tunes. My initial plan was to write 100 tunes in a year that touched upon the Jewish tradition and that was an interesting challenge. It was really fun as a composer to come home and write a something that could be finished sometimes in 10 minutes, sometimes in an hour or sometimes an evening. I'd never worked that way before, although Naked City had some pieces that were kind of like that. The Masada songbook was really something that was like the Irving Berlin songbook or the Burt Bacharach songbook or the Thelonius Monk songbook. Here's another lifetime for me. So when I look at what's been accomplished in the world of Masada, it's kind of unbelievable. Of course I had no idea at the times I started. My initial idea was to write a hundred tunes. And then I ended up writing over 200 for the first book and then performed it countless time for years. After 10 years of performing the first book, I thought 'Maybe it'd be nice to write some more tunes.' And I wrote 300 more tunes. When I started writing those it was 'Let's see if I can write a hundred songs in a month this time.' I've been working on these scales and playing these tunes all this time. In the back of my head somewhere are lodged all kinds of new ideas. Let's see if I can come up with 100 tunes in a month instead of in a yr. So in the first month, I popped out a hundred tunes; the second month, another hundred; in the third month, a third 100 tunes. I had no idea that was going to happen. And now there's already a third book, so you never really know what's going to happen next. At least in my life I don't know. That's one of the beautiful things. That's what makes me want to celebrate the joy of life. There's always a surprise and there's always something inspiring and challenging around the corner. If you just keep yourself involved and keep yourself focused and make sure that you're not distracted by everything that's around us, you can get a lot of work done. KTVU.com: You've did a retrospective of first Masada songbook on the tenth anniversary of the project and looked back on a number of past bands for your 50th birthday celebration, playing with a different act each night for the month-long series of shows at Tonic in New York. You seem open to revisiting early music from your career. I was wondering if fans will have a chance to see Naked City again or would you would ever revisit the albums 'Spillane' or 'The Big Gundown' in a live format? John Zorn: No, that's not so interesting. I don't thing that's going to happen. Naked City got together around my 50th birthday to do two performances in Europe. We did great shows and it was fun to see each other again and it was certainly a challenge to play the music. We'd listen to the tune and look at the charts and say "S--t! How did we ever do that s--t so fast?" But slowly we tweaked it up and we managed to make it work. But it was very evident to all of us that this was really music form another part of our lives. And it's very important for me to present something onstage that's very honest and I don't know if I feel that music the way I felt it back then. So I don't feel like I can do that. I don't think Naked City will ever get together again. I mean you never say never. You never know what's going to happen, like I said. I don't know what the future has in store. But if you were to ask me right now is Naked City going to get together again, I'd say absolutely not. Forget it. That's the furthest thing from my mind. I have other things to do. I don't celebrate the past in that way. As far as the Morricone record, I put in a lot of time doing other people's music and paying tribute to my heroes. That was mostly in the '80s that I did that. And it was very satisfying and exciting to do, both for the players and for the audience and for myself. But I think I've put my time in and I'm not interested in interpreting other people's works anymore. KTVU.com: You have plenty of your own songs to work with, obviously… John Zorn: I've got a lot on my plate, and I'm not one of these guys who wants to relive my days of beatnik glory. That's not my modus operandi. I want to keep moving forward come up w/ new ideas and try things out. I think my role in this society -- on the planet -- is to take some chances and to make some music and ask some questions. Some of what I do is entertaining and fun for people to listen to, but entertainment is not why I'm doing this. This is art music. This is music that in some ways can raise questions and can deal with consciousness and -- I honestly believe -- can make the world a better place. [A discussion about John Zorn's label Tzadik -- which puts out his records as well as those of a myriad of other artists -- and his work ethic that followed at this point was unfortunately lost to a digital recorder malfunction.] KTVU.com: You've been closely associated with a couple of New York City venues like the Knitting Factory and Tonic. I wanted to ask you about your current artist-focused performance space, the Stone. To what extent do you use that as a forum to workshop new material and how deep is your involvement? John Zorn: Well that's how I started out. I mean I started playing in my living room, you know? In my little one room apartment and two people would come upstairs and I'd do a concert for them. That's like 1975. And actually, at that time, one of the two people listening to what I was doing was Kazunori Sugiyama, who helps me run Tzadik. So this is a tightly knit community and we've really stuck together. John Zorn I've always thought of what I do as concert music. We had to play in clubs and bars by default, because we had no other place to play. We did what we could where we could. And we worked in places like the Knitting Factory and Tonic because the people that ran those establishments appreciated we brought in a crowd. I wouldn't exactly say they were philanthropists; these are business people. As long as you brought in a crowd, you were fine. If you didn't bring in a crowd, then you were not fine. Business is business. I've existed in the marketplace not in the ivory tower of asking Uncle Sam for grant money. Grants are problematic. Sometimes the money comes way late, where you're already on to another project when the money comes in for a project you wanted to do years back. It's all f----d up. I think grant money almost gets in the way of projects at times. So I've never gone that route. We existed in the marketplace. We played in clubs because we had no other place to play. But this music was never meant for clubs. It was never meant for bars. It was never meant to be in the background of people drinking and picking each other up or talking. This is concert music. It's the concert music of the future. It's still not appreciated the way it should be. Lincoln Center? They're not going to call us. Carnegie Hall? They're not going to call us. Not even BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music ] would call us. So we had to do what we had to do. The reality is this music has been written about for thirty years by generous, intelligent and like-minded people who were excited about what we're doing and maybe find a relation to it because of the improvisation involved, because of the creativity involved because of the imagination involved. But the reality is a lot of what we do and it's different for every person in the community does not relate to any specific genre. It's not rock, it's not really jazz, it's not really classical, it's not really world music. It's something that falls in the gaps. It's really something new and something different. We haven't had a dedicated outlet, a magazine that can handle what it is that we do in the proper way. There are jazz magazines and people who write for jazz magazines and improvisation is involved and they're able to convince their editor 'Hey, I can place a piece about Wayne Horovitz or about Bill Frisell or about Elliot Sharp or about Fred Frith or about Bill Laswell or about Ikue Mori or about Sylvie Corvoisier or about myself because a little improvisation is involved. And they place the piece in a jazz magazine and it kind of creates a big misunderstanding because that's not where a lot of these people are coming from. So, kind of a big roundabout answer to your question, we've played where we had to play. We've been represented and misrepresented in a variety of publications over the decades of doing what we do. The Stone is a place where we can do our music for people who want to hear the music and that's all they want to do. People that come to the Stone focus on the music. And everybody that's performed at the Stone all say the same thing: there's something unusual going on there there's a level of listening and a level of focus that they rarely get when they play out. And that's because most of the places we are forced to play in are bars and people are talking and distracted and this and that. The Stone is a concert venue. It's just a room with a sound system and some chairs and a piano. That's it. But that's all you need. That's a performance space. That's our Carnegie Hall, and we really enjoy playing at a venue with people that just want to focus on the music and nothing else. Long answer. Sorry. KTVU.com: One last thing that I wanted to get your take on. Steven Colbert mentioned you on his show in a bit about the MacArthur Fellowship back in 2006… John Zorn: Yeah, that was hilarious. KTVU.com: I thought it was hysterical too. Colbert is known for setting up adversarial positions with people and then having them on his show. What are the chances of you playing some blowtorch alto sax on the Report in the future? John Zorn: I have no idea. I don't know the man. It was a hilarious spot. I don't know what his commitments are to this kind of music or what would happen. TV is not something I'm really interested in. I don't own one, I don't look at it. I don't want to have anything to do with it. I'm not going to put myself in the position of ridicule on some comedy show. I wouldn't even go on any of these late night talk shows. That's not what I'm doing here. It really has nothing to do … in fact, it's almost antithetical. So I'd rather stay where I am, keep plugging away bit by bit. If someone's interested, that's great. This music is for the world to enjoy. It's not elitist in any way. I want everyone to enjoy it. But I understand the reality that it's challenging music and not everybody can enjoy it or appreciate it. Not everybody has the time to do the thinking and do the work to unravel the mysteries that are being presented in these concerts and on these CDs. It's not an easy thing. And people have enough problems in their lives that they don't need further problems. But I do champion the fact that this music is important and that the world is better for its existence and that, in some small way, it represents a cry of freedom in the dark ages.

March 11th, 2009, 09:01 PM	#15
Masada Spirits Rejoice Join Date: Oct 2008 Posts: 396	I'm so happy he has started to do more interviews. I love his views of art and he's also a pretty good example of how avant-garde is not necessarily elitist and snobby. I wish I could see his residency in SF, man. He'll play both Masada Books!! I also love the fact that he's absolutely against nostalgia. While I would like to see Naked City perform, I can only agree with his progressive (and not regressive( vision!