John Zorn Primer
- Issue #156 (February '97) | Essays
- By: Simon Hopkins | Featuring: John Zorn
- Printable version
Simon Hopkins grapples with the genre-busting output of John Zorn
The degree to which John Zorn - composer, saxophonist, jazz musician, label organiser, conceptualiser - has polarised opinion is remarkable even in a field where polarised opinions are hardly rare. For over 20 years he has been writing and performing music of astonishing breadth, with various areas of interest (to name some: film music, free jazz, hardcore thrash, Yiddish folk music) explored almost obsessively. The records recorded under his own name or by groups he has led and co-led number at least 50, and records to which he has contributed at least three times that. In addition, the two record labels he has headed through the 90s - Tokyo-based Avant and New York's Tzadik - have been responsible for always interesting and often indispensable releases, their eclecticism naturally reflecting Zorn's own tastes, mapping the occult lines from Japanese noise to contemporary composition to Ambient atmospherics to sampling collage to thrash pop... At a time when the musical underground prides itself on an openness of attitude which so infrequently bears fruit, Zorn's labels provide a remarkable and genuinely all-embracing fund of new music. (They have also been the source of some of the most stunning cover art and graphics of recent years.)
Yet Zorn attracts at least as many detractors as he does staunch advocates - indeed, probably more. Ignored by the mainstream contemporary art music establishment (see Kristallnacht below), his methods and concepts are yet deemed too highbrow by a musical underground too often concerned with attitudes and posturing to see beyond their own nose.
To a degree Zorn is to blame for this. One accusation which can never be fairly levelled at him is that he's gone out of his way to court opinion. Quite the contrary; in recent years in particular, his attitude to standard music business practices generally and the press in particular has become increasingly entrenched. (The Wire is not exempt from his scorn; he once claimed to keep a stack of this journal in his toilet, and it plainly wasn't there to be read.) He not only refuses to give interviews himself but Tzadik remain notoriously reluctant to promote its releases, and a recent rumour had it that Zorn refuses to let the musicians in his Masada group talk to the press while on tour with him.
In the end, though, Zorn's body of work makes him one of the most vital musical assets we have, and his reluctance to be more open only make his achievements more intriguing.
First Recordings
(Tzadik TZ7304 CD)
With increasing (and rather Zappa-like) sense of self-reliance Zorn has realised that you're better off performing archaeological reclamations of your own work than letting someone else do it. One of Tzadik's projects is the "Archival Series", and opportunity to release long-forgotten tapes, reissue crucial but now unavailable recordings or record previously unheard compositions. By definition First Recordings is barely among Zorn's genuinely most important work, but if you want to get a hold on where he came from it's pretty essential.
Recorded in 1973 and 74, when their creator was, as his own oddly moving sleevennotes make apparent, a 19 year old coming to terms with his "sad lonely life of self-imposed alienation and exile", the pieces both form a picture of a prodigiously experimental mind and somehow set a blueprint for many of the records to follow over the next 20-odd years.
The music certainly explores techniques which Zorn would go on to truly make his own. "Mikhail Zoetrope" is a jump-cutting collage of screaming vocals, bashed found objects and soprano saxophone; "Variations On a Theme By Albert Ayler" and "Automata Of Al-Jarzari" reveal an innate skill for arranging sampled sound; the brutally hamfisted guitar playing on "Wind Ko/la" hints at a kind of twisted love of the instrument later revealed in his choice of extraordinary guitar players as collaborators: Derek Bailey, Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell, Keiji Haino, Robert Quine, Fred Frith, Arto Lindsay...
What comes through most strongly here - in the music's influences and in the themes on which it is based (I mean, check those titles: this is a 19 year old, remember) - is a sense of wonder at the arcane, a need to explore something beyond the mundane. Zorn once described a youthful epiphany, watching the look of horror on his schoolfriends' faces as he played them a recording of Mauricio Kagel. These early recordings see him translating that impulse into his own art, and two decades on it continues to inform his work.
Yet Zorn attracts at least as many detractors as he does staunch advocates - indeed, probably more. Ignored by the mainstream contemporary art music establishment (see Kristallnacht below), his methods and concepts are yet deemed too highbrow by a musical underground too often concerned with attitudes and posturing to see beyond their own nose.
To a degree Zorn is to blame for this. One accusation which can never be fairly levelled at him is that he's gone out of his way to court opinion. Quite the contrary; in recent years in particular, his attitude to standard music business practices generally and the press in particular has become increasingly entrenched. (The Wire is not exempt from his scorn; he once claimed to keep a stack of this journal in his toilet, and it plainly wasn't there to be read.) He not only refuses to give interviews himself but Tzadik remain notoriously reluctant to promote its releases, and a recent rumour had it that Zorn refuses to let the musicians in his Masada group talk to the press while on tour with him.
In the end, though, Zorn's body of work makes him one of the most vital musical assets we have, and his reluctance to be more open only make his achievements more intriguing.
First Recordings
(Tzadik TZ7304 CD)
With increasing (and rather Zappa-like) sense of self-reliance Zorn has realised that you're better off performing archaeological reclamations of your own work than letting someone else do it. One of Tzadik's projects is the "Archival Series", and opportunity to release long-forgotten tapes, reissue crucial but now unavailable recordings or record previously unheard compositions. By definition First Recordings is barely among Zorn's genuinely most important work, but if you want to get a hold on where he came from it's pretty essential.
Recorded in 1973 and 74, when their creator was, as his own oddly moving sleevennotes make apparent, a 19 year old coming to terms with his "sad lonely life of self-imposed alienation and exile", the pieces both form a picture of a prodigiously experimental mind and somehow set a blueprint for many of the records to follow over the next 20-odd years.
The music certainly explores techniques which Zorn would go on to truly make his own. "Mikhail Zoetrope" is a jump-cutting collage of screaming vocals, bashed found objects and soprano saxophone; "Variations On a Theme By Albert Ayler" and "Automata Of Al-Jarzari" reveal an innate skill for arranging sampled sound; the brutally hamfisted guitar playing on "Wind Ko/la" hints at a kind of twisted love of the instrument later revealed in his choice of extraordinary guitar players as collaborators: Derek Bailey, Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell, Keiji Haino, Robert Quine, Fred Frith, Arto Lindsay...
What comes through most strongly here - in the music's influences and in the themes on which it is based (I mean, check those titles: this is a 19 year old, remember) - is a sense of wonder at the arcane, a need to explore something beyond the mundane. Zorn once described a youthful epiphany, watching the look of horror on his schoolfriends' faces as he played them a recording of Mauricio Kagel. These early recordings see him translating that impulse into his own art, and two decades on it continues to inform his work.