The King of Musical Diversity: John Zorn

During the creation of this blog, I was not planning to publish any posts dedicated to a single jazz figure. I do not wish to write biographical pieces, as you might most probably find much more informative and well written articles elsewhere. However there are certain musicians whom I have a great deal of admiration because of their works, their ideas, their approach and contributions to the music world.

I can already hear you grumbling about the choice of this post's jazz figure. And it is exactly this dissatisfaction of yours that motivated me to write about John Zorn.

I promise to publish posts also on more conventional (according to what?) jazz artists in the future but today please bear with me and John Zorn. I am sure you will appreciate him enormously once you understand and feel his genius.

John ZORN:

"My music is ideal for impatient people, 

because it is packed full of information 

that changes very rapidly"

A young and restless soul from New York aged 64 who has made more than 400 ground breaking albums either as a composer, arranger, producer and performer. His main instrument is the saxophone but he is a true multi-instrumentalist playing guitar, flute, clarinet, keyboards, bass, percussion along with many unconventional sound producing instruments like duck calls and horn mouthpieces.
He is the founder of Tzadik Records (Tzadik), the label specializes in avant-garde and experimental music. He also runs a club called The Stone (The Stone) in New York.

I find him so very different than all the jazz musicians, maybe not only jazz, but different than all musicians. He is way above styles and genres. You can hear him playing pure jazz, rock, modern classical, heavy metal, noise music, klezmer, film music and ambient. He is constantly experimenting in a highly prolific way and his versatility changed the perception of the listeners about the musical diversity.
"What I completely reject," says John Zorn "is the idea that music is a hierarchy: the so-called more complex forms, such as classical music, are higher than jazz, which in turn is more complex and therefore higher than the blues, which is higher than rock music or whatever. All of them are on the same level! And all of them deserve the same respect."
Thanks to his point of view, we can feel and hear "Looney Tunes"(Bugs Bunny) music next to Ornette Coleman, surf music next to 12 tone music, trash metal next to Stravinsky and Beatles next to Beethoven while listening to his music...
It is extremely difficult to catch John Zorn's ideas both in his performances and his compositions. Don't get me wrong, I definitely do not mean that one needs to be trained or be highly familiar with all the avant-garde styles of the 20th century to grasp his music. I think we can somewhat start to grasp his music just by being open-minded and letting go off our harmonic, melodic and rhythmic cliches.
So how come John Zorn's music evolved in the way it did? He was born into a music loving family, he learned how to play the piano, guitar and flute when he was a kid. He attended the United Nations International School and met a lot of friends from different cultures, he even played bass guitar in the school band. This might be one reason explaining his multi-cultural approach. He was a keen listener of classical music and film music. I must highlight here that he is also an avid record collector which he was poisoned with the passion during his high school years. He began to acquire a taste in avant-garde and experimental music with Mauricio Kagel recording in 1968 when he was only 15. He thought himself counterpoint and orchestration and studied composition during those years. He was a musical genius after all...
One other and maybe a more important thing that influenced his musical development was his admiration in the cartoon music, especially Bugs Bunny's and Tom & Jerry's music. He speaks about this music being hectic and somewhat anarchic without any direction and slow build-up. He says he always wanted to make music in the same manner where there is a discontinuity and lacking a linear relation with time.

In one interview he said he always watched the cartoons with eyes closed so he could disassociate the music with the pictures. Most probably this enabled him to develop his unique style where he mentions being "fast evolving, cinematic, contradictory just like zapping from one channel to another"...
He started to play alto saxophone during his college years after listening to the "For Alto" record by Anthony Braxton. After dropping out of college he returned to New York and immersed himself in the underground experimental art scene where he began performing, producing and composing.

John Zorn Documentary Part I

John Zorn Documentary Part II

In order to get acquainted with John Zorn, it might be wiser to divide his musical journey into certain categories (not to be treated chronologically but more overlapping in a stylistic fashion);

• Early Compositions: Zorn as a creator of "game pieces" where he was influenced by new classical music composers like Boulez, Xenakis and Stockhausen. He made these compositions in which the musicians, using a predefined symbolic language, play according to the rules taken from various sports and/or games. The main element of these compositions were improvisation but with the help of signals or written signs, musicians had the opportunity to intervene in the development of the music. His compositions like the one below, called Cobra and it is one of his most complex pieces. Others are Lacrosse, Hockey, Baseball, Curling and Track & Field.

"Cobra" composed by John Zorn performed by NEC Cobra Ensemble

• Free Improvisation: This category includes his first albums. "Classic Guide to Strategy Volume 1 and Volume 2". He played alto and soprano saxophones, clarinet and game calls (whistles hunters use to attract the game) and various saxophone mouthpieces in these 2 recordings. 

"Part 2 (Cartoon Music)" a.k.a. "The Moon In The Cold Stream Like A Mirror" by John Zorn

• Card File Compositions: Within this category, Zorn's compositional approach was rather enigmatic. He composed his pieces on file cards as opposed to conventional scoring on sheet paper. These cards included vague instructions leaving the progress of the music to the imagination of the musician. The cards mostly contained verbal instructions such as "noise of a car accident while someone plays a flute" and "try to avoid the paths with energy units until you are ready to attack the monster"... His two greatest recordings of this category are "Spillane" and "Godard". On "Spillane" the inspiration is Mike Hammer (Mickey Spillane's private detective character) and on "Godard" the French director Jean-Luc Godard.

"Spillane" by John Zorn

• Naked City: In 1988 John Zorn decided to form a band as a compositional workshop featuring Bill Frisell (electric guitar), Fred Frith (bass guitar), Wayne Horvitz (keyboards), Joey Baron (drums) and Yamatsuka Eye (vocal). The music was close to thrash metal and hardcore punk with fast changes and jumps from one genre to another even between a couple of measures. These recordings are still being used for cinematic purposes.

"A Shot In the Dark" by Naked City

• Painkiller: This is another Zorn band featuring Bill Laswell on bass and Mick Harris on drums (Napalm Death drummer). This was probably the noisiest band of John Zorn. The band's involvement with hardcore, punk, noise and trash metal, Zorn's t-shirt's print " Die, Yuppie Scum" and the usage of shocking pictures gave us clues how controversial Zorn could get.

"Live in NY" - Painkiller

• Jazz Interpretation: Surprisingly John Zorn made a couple of albums that are relatively closer to the jazz tradition. These works were mostly project based and brought together key jazz musicians such as Bill Frisell, George Lewis and Big John Patton.  Two main recordings under this category are "News for Lulu" that honored the hard-boppers Hank Mobley, Kenny Dorham and Freddy Redd, and the other being Voodoo, dedicated to Sonny Clark. Obviously as you can imagine Zorn did not play in a traditional bebop sound in these albums. This was the period that Zorn had criticized the Wynton Marsalis approach in which he was trying to sound as close as possible to the traditional bebop. 

"Funk in Deep Freeze" from the album News for Lulu

• Film Music: Zorn has written music for documentaries, underground films, television advertisements and cartoons which were released in his Filmworks series. As can be imagined, he mostly worked with indie filmmakers.

"Shaolin Bossa" by John Zorn

• New Music Compositions: John Zorn created a series of classical works especially in the chamber music arena. He made several compositions based on influences from Messiaen and Schoenberg.

"Eleven" from the Chimeras album

• Masada Books: Following his composition of "Kristallnacht" (his work regarding the infamous "Night of Broken Glass", a pogrom against Jews in Nazi Germany of 1938), Zorn started to concentrate on his Jewish roots throughout music. He formed the band Masada with a klezmer and jazz sound. The band members other than Zorn were Dave Douglas on trumpet, Greg Cohen on bass and Joey Baron on drums. The project Masada initiated with John Zorn's idea of composing 100 short tunes in order to create something positive for the Jewish musical tradition. However the tunes dramatically increased and the number of Masada books went up to three. The original Masada albums were named after the first ten letters of the Hebrew alphabet and contained compositions with Hebrew titles.

"Tahah" from the 1st Masada album Alef

The music of John Zorn is so versatile and diverse that even nine categories are not enough to explain him. There are 2 additional albums that I would like to mention in this post but could not place them in above mentioned categories.

First one is "The Big Gundown" recorded in 1985 that comprises the covers of Ennio Morricone. I think it is one of the best albums of Zorn.

"Once Upon a Time in the West"

The other recording is "Spy vs Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman" from 1989 featuring the compositions of Ornette Coleman performed in the brief intense style of Zorn's hardcore miniatures.

"Mob Job" from the album Spy vs. Spy

John Zorn is an important composer and performer, because he is the living proof of the fact that everything in this world whether be it sound or style or culture is available to composers today to use as musical material. 

I find him and his music extremely inspiring and structurally deep. When I reviewed the post before publishing I must confess that I found it a bit shallowly written compared to Zorn’s genius, but that's Zorn, no one knows a great deal about his musical mind and yet he never ceases to surprise us...