JOHN ZORN

Born: New York, New York, 2 September 1953

Genre: Avant-Garde Contemporary Composition, Jazz, Punk

Best-selling album since 1990: The Circle Maker (1998)

It is reductive and inaccurate to describe John Zorn as a jazz musician, although one of his major musical activities since 1992 has been improvising on alto saxophone with hard-swinging combos such as the quartet Masada, for which he has written more than 200 songs loosely based on traditional Jewish motifs and scales. Zorn also has recorded albums of music by such jazz figures as Ornette Coleman and Sonny Clark, and worked with indisputable jazzers including organist Big John Patton, drummer Milford Graves, and bassist William Parker.

Though Zorn draws from jazz, he goes beyond it, taking it further than it has generally been defined, and operates completely outside it. As a composing improviser, he is a prolific creator of unusually structured, improvisational "game" pieces in which musicians play by rules dictating the duration of their contributions and the specific instrumental makeup of episodes within the pieces, employing their personal vocabularies to fill in the blanks rather than playing notes preordained in scores.

Zorn also writes through-composed (completely notated) works for orchestras and chamber ensembles, some of which have been used as soundtracks for independent films. He radically reconceives music by composers such as Ennio Morricone, Serge Gainsborough, Carl Stalling, and Burt Bacharach. He encourages works by a circle including guitarists/composers Elliott Sharp and Marc Ribot, pianists/composers Anthony Coleman and Wayne Horvitz, and dramatizing vocalist Shelly Hirsch, and curates music performances at New York venues including the Knitting Factory and Tonic. Zorn promotes "radical Jewish culture," producing albums by artists who address that banner, and releases other provocative albums by musicians from Europe and Japan as well as New York's edgy Lower East Side, financed by his own commissions and fees.

Zorn had childhood lessons in piano, flute, guitar, and composition (from age ten), but he is essentially self-taught. He has turned himself into an extraordinarily broad musicologist by delving deeply into twentieth-century popular, folk, and concert genres, including doo-wop, music for cartoons, surf-rock, field recordings from preindustrial societies, and compositions by iconoclasts including Igor Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Harry Partch, John Cage, and Mauricio Kagel (his predecessor as a games composer). Attending Webster College in St. Louis, Missouri, Zorn was introduced to the avant-garde jazz collectives Black Artists Group and Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians by alto saxophonist Oliver Lake, one of his teachers, and took up saxophone at age twenty.

In 1974, after eighteen months of traveling on the U.S. West Coast staging solo saxophone concerts, Zorn returned to New York City and began collaborating with a coterie of renegade musicians in small, often informal venues. Although this circle was steeped in jazz and classical traditions, its members addressed conventional materials with shattering energy and deconstructionist approaches. Zorn developed solo concerts using his instruments disassembled, with duck calls, whistles, and other odd noisemakers. He recorded Lacrosse (1978), his first game piece, on his Parachute label, and followed it with others in the idiom, culminating in Cobra (1991), which in 1995 was performed once a month by various casts of players at the jazz locale, the Knitting Factory, a venue catering to new and experimental musics.

Since the 1980s Zorn has recorded in an impressive array of contexts, including solo (The Classic Guide to Strategy, 1985), in improvisational trios (News for Lulu) and quintets (Naked City), and in ensembles performing his pieces comprising separate fragments of music written on file cards, shuffled for a given rendition's sequence (Godard/Spillane, 1988). On annual sojourns to Japan, he helped spark punk rock and free improvisation scenes. Much of his music is characterized by quick juxtapositions of dynamically and timbrally diverse sounds, fracturing linear processes and typical narrative arcs. He has also explored sonic densities, extremely concise and expanded durations, musical comedy, and violence. Since the late 1990s he has embarked on a campaign to recover ownership of all his recordings, repurchasing his rights to masters first released by the Elektra and Nonesuch labels.

In 1992 Zorn was invited to stage an evening-length presentation at a weeklong international festival of innovators in Munich, Germany. After a series of sets by New York bands comprised overwhelmingly of Jewish musicians, Zorn performed "Krystallnacht," named after the Nazi hooligan rampage that initiated open warfare on Jews in Germany in 1938. The concert hall's lights were turned off and its doors locked for the duration of the piece, which included the taped sounds of cattle cars rolling on railroad tracks.

This event marked the initiation of Zorn's "radical Jewish culture" movement, which has resulted in more than 300 recordings by Jewish and non-Jewish musicians considering religious and ethnic topics from a variety of viewpoints. It is no slight to Zorn's own vast catalog of original compositions and recorded improvisations to suggest that his support of other peoples' music on his own label Tzadik ("charity" or "good works" in Hebrew) is his most significant contribution to music since 1990.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Naked City (Elektra/Nonesuch, 1990); More News for Lulu (Hat Hut, 1992); Masada: Alef (DIW/Disk Union, 1994); Kristallnacht (Tzadik, 1995); Naked City: Black Box (Tzadik, 1997); The Parachute Years, 1977–1980 (Tzadik, 1997); New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands (Tzadik, 1997); The Circle Maker (Tzadik, 1998); Godard/Spillane (Tzadik, 1999); The String Quartets (Tzadik, 1999); Masada: Live in Jerusalem 1994 (Tzadik, 1999); Cobra (Hatology re-release, 2002); Filmworks XI, 2002, Volume One: Secret Lives (Tzadik, 2002). With Big John Patton: Minor Swing (DIW/Disk Union, 1995).

howard mandel