THE FILMWORKS SERIES

It is possible to call John Zorn a jazz musician, but that would be much too limiting a description. While jazz feeling is present in a good deal of his work, and the idea of improvisation is vitally important to him, Zorn doesn't operate within any idiom's framework, drawing from just about any musical, cultural or noise source that a fellow who grew up in the TV and LP eras could experience.

This eclecticism gone haywire can result in such wildly jump-cutting works as Spillane, whose plethora of diverse and incompatible styles makes for a listening experience akin to constantly punching the station buttons on a car radio.

Zorn believes that the age of the composer as an "autonomous musical mind" had come to an end in the late 20th century; hence the collaborative nature of much of his work, both with active musicians and music and styles of the past. Like Mel Brooks, the zany film director, many of Zorn's works are tributes to certain musical touchstones of his — such as Ennio Morricone, Sonny Clark and Ornette Coleman — all filtered through his unpredictable hall of mirrors.

While it would be foolhardy to single out a handful of dominant influences, Zorn's music seems very close in spirit to that of Warner Bros. cartoon composer Carl Stalling, both in its transformation of found material and manic, antic moods.

The Second Zornfest
In September of 2003, a celebration of John Zorn's music took place at the club Tonic. The article below is from the New York Press (vol 16, issue 25). The first Zornfest took place ten years earlier.

Celebrating the 50th birthday of an unrelenting force of nonconformity, Tonic will present a massive 30-day tribute to John Zorn in September. Concerts dedicated to Zorn’s vast output of jazz compositions, classical concert works, film music, noise, free improv, game pieces, cartoon music, songs and Radical Jewish Music will mark every evening at Tonic throughout the month, filling the Labor Day calm between the end-of-summer festivals and the beginning of regular seasons. It makes sense that Zorn’s music would fall between the cracks of seasons, as he has always been a self-proclaimed outsider "looking out" instead of in.

The Tonic celebration is both a retrospective of some of his most significant and powerful musical inventions as well as a sneak peak at what’s in his brain now, including world premieres of two new concert works, Sortilege (Sept. 21) and Necronomicon (Sept. 28). Considering pretty much his entire life has been devoted to the three muses (music, literature, film) it’s not surprising that at age 50 (an age when a lot of classical composers and jazzers are just getting their due respect) he continues to produce a mind-boggling amount of work. To help the interested navigate their way through the abundant vegetation of his oeuvre, the celebration drops works into several different categories, each embracing a different limb.

Zorn opens the celebration on saxophone, engaging in two sets of improvisation with his good friends Ikue Mori, the first lady of drum machines, and Mike Patton, former lead singer of Faith No More. Four other improv concerts are scattered throughout the month featuring the likes of Susie Ibarra, Wadada Leo Smith, Milford Graves and Derek Bailey

On his actual birthday, Sept. 2, the festival presents two of Zorn’s compositions dedicated to French artists: Duras, inspired by writer Marguerite Duras (and flavored with Olivier Messiaen’s mystical language) and Duchamp, a noise trio dedicated to the conceptual artist and proponent of both Dada and the Surrealist movement. Other concert works worth noting in this festival are his complete string quartets (Sept. 7) and Kristallnacht (Sept. 23).

Day three introduces one of Zorn’s most beloved works, Cobra, a work for large ensemble improvisation, structured and manipulated by a set of "rules," which are basically instructions written out on cards that the prompter (Zorn) introduces as the piece unfolds. The chaotic results are the ultimate in post-modern glee, jumping gracefully between styles and resembling (in sound, though not in structure) John Cage’s Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 for 12 radios and 24 performers: The music jumps abruptly between different genres of popular music, jazz, and classical with interstitial noise and, of course, the added element of surprise. Other works that are part of Zorn’s "game pieces" lineage such as Lacrosse, Xu Feng and Locus Solus will be presented throughout the month.

Another major influence on Zorn’s art has been his connection to his Jewish heritage, which formed the impetus for the Masada project, during which Zorn mined ancient Hebrew melodies, jazz, rock and klezmer to create an instrumental songbook containing more than 200 pieces in about four years. For several of these events (the first is on Sept. 4), songs have been arranged for the String Trio.

The retrospective wouldn’t be complete without some wild performances by Zorn’s band Painkiller and a couple of nights dedicated to his film music. Having written for shorts, experimental films, narratives and pornos, Zorn’s film output is expectedly eclectic, often stunningly beautiful and other times just plain rockin’.

The Second Zornfest Albums
In 2004, Tzadik released a series of albums from the 2003 Zornfest. They are called the 50th Birthday series. These CDs have two things in common — they are all live and they all have bad cover art.

	Masada String Trio Live     50th Birthday 1	Released February 2004
	Milford Graves and John Zorn     50th Birthday 2	Released March 2004
	Locus Solus live     50th Birthday 3	Released April 2004
	Electric Masada live     50th Birthday 4	Released May 2004

Radical Jewish Culture
from The Essential Klezmer, pp. 146-152
by Seth Rogovoy (2000)

Some of Zorn's compositions, and those by others whose music he released on his Tzadik record label, evolve from the same Yiddish musical tradition on which klezmer is based. Other works bear a looser connection, musically speaking, to the klezmer tradition, having more obvious roots in Sephardic or Middle Eastern music, jazz, and the music of Jewish composers.

Zorn's name for the musical movement is Radical Jewish Culture. The term itself took on a life of its own by the late nineties, used somewhat promiscuously to describe a generic musical movement beyond John Zorn himself, even though it was the official name of several Zorn-curated festivals in New York and elsewhere, as well as the name he gave to a series of recordings on Tzadik.

To fully appreciate the significance of Zorn's Jewish work in its proper context, one needs to understand that when John Zorn declared his full-fledged allegiance to Jewish music in the mid nineties, he was at the apex of the avant-garde, a central figure of musical postmodernism. Whatever he touched had instant credibility and hip cachet, at least with those who embraced the idea of Zorn as king of the avant-garde. Thus, his decision to remodel himself as a Jewish composer suggested something about the creative potential of Jewish music.

One result of his newly raised Jewish consciousness was that he began noticing patterns where he had not seen them before.

Zorn: "I'm not sure why it is, but all of a sudden it was like some weird kind of revelation, suddenly realizing that most of the musicians that I've been really strongly associated with have been Jewish. It was like, wait a minute, how come all these cats are Jewish? That began to interest me. And I'm not quite sure if I have an answer as to what that's about."

Zorn: "There's all these people. That just doesn't happen overnight. They've been thinking about this shit for a long time — certainly as long if not longer than I've been thinking about it. The cliche word is renaissance. But it's an exciting time, there's a lot going on, and a lot of people are considering this. I think it's because there's this generation of post-Holocaust Jews who are now feeling well, hey, wait a minute, this is cool, this is hip, let's keep it going."

Zorn followed up on that impulse and began inviting his friends to explore their heritage through music as part of Tzadik's Radical Jewish Cultre series. With the series, Zorn set out to ask the question, "What is Jewish music?"

Zorn: "Each one has a personal answer to the question, but the answer cannot be articulated in words. The answer is in the music. Sometimes it's mixed with classical, sometimes it's mixed with jazz, sometimes it's tinged with a straighter, folk kind of approach, sometimes there's rock involved."

In just a few short years, this resulted in a body of work consisting of nearly three dozen CDs (not including Masada's dozen recordings) by two dozen different artists covering a vast array of styles. [By the end of 2002, there were over 70 Radical Jewish Culture albums released by Tzadik.]

Zorn: "Klezmer music is fantastic, it is one of the great popular traditions which has influenced several generations of musicians. Where Jewish music has come to, what direction Hebraism is taking, what being a Jew means today — these are issues that are important to me, that I am most concerned about.

"Being on stage I feel I have a responsibility and a duty, to act as the bearer of a message which says I am what I come from. I went through twelve difficult years and no one had the faintest idea I was Jewish, so up until now being a Jew made no difference to my career. We will see what happens later on. I think what I am doing is an excellent way of showing where I belong, of displaying a cultural identity."

Burt Bacharach is one of the great geniuses of American popular music — and he's a Jew. This should come as no surprise since many of America's greatest songwriters have been Jewish — Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Leiber & Stoller, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Richard Hell, Beck.

The Jews are a tribe who continue to believe that if they devote themselves to a place they love and contribute to the society selflessly that they will be embraced and accepted into it. In many cases this has proved to be a fatal error, yet there they go again, stubbornly believing in their own ability and vision.

It is arguable that the history of the Jews in this century has produced one of the most richly rewarding periods of culture in Jewish history. Yet, this fact is somehow kept neatly hidden. WHAT? Compare Philip Roth to Sholem Aleichem? Kafka to Moses de leon? Walty Benjamin to Rashi? Wittegenstein to Spinoza? Steve Reich to Felix Mendelssohn? Allen Ginsberg to Yehuda Helevi? Einstein to Nostradamus? Lenny Bruce to Hillel?

Burt Bacharach is such a name. A traiblazer. A questioner. An unbridled genius. More than a great tunesmith he's a conduction, a pianist and a singer, a bold arranger with an original vision and sharp ear for detail, a brilliant producer and a sensitive collabrator.

Bacharach's songs explode the expectations of what a popular song is supposed to be. Advanced harmonies and chord changes with unexpected turnarounds and modulations, unusual changing time signatures and rhythmic twists, often in uneven numbers of bars. But he makes it all sound so natural you can't get it out of your head of stop whistling it. Maddeningly complex, sometimes deceptively simple, these are more than just great pop songs: these are deep explorations of the materials of music and should be studied and treasured with as much care and dilligence we accord any great works of art.

The approaches in this collection are as varied as the contributors who participated. Some will delight you, some will confuse you, some may even annoy you — but the intention in all cases has been to pay tribute to one of the world's greatest songwriters. I hope this set can in some small way repay Burt for the inspiration he has provided for generations of musicians in their battle to be creative and keep producing in the face of what often seems like insurmountable odds. Thank you, Burt. Thank you for not changing your name. We will always love you.

CAUTION: NEVER AGAIN contains high frequency extremes at the limits of human hearing & beyond, which may cause nausea, headaches & ringing in the ears. Prolonged or repeated listening is not advisable as it may result in temporary or permanent ear damage.

Here's a breakdown:

[0:00] very high-pitched squealing and sounds of breaking glass, layered to create a wall of oscillating white noise [3:00] white noise ends, replaced by the sound of footsteps and a bell [3:30] back to high pitched white noise, plus backward voices and an undercurrent of pounding drums [5:00] buzzsaw guitars are added, under the shattering and squealing [6:20] quiets down to voices saying "ree-ree-ree" and what can only be described as Nazi shouts [6:50] sound of Jewish singing coming over the radio, a little bell, ominous bass throbbing [7:25] violin comes in on top of this [8:00] the footsteps and bell return, accompanied by sound of plucked cello and violin strings [8:20] shattering glass begins, this time it sounds like real glass. It builds in layers until around [9:35] it becomes the white noise at the start of the track [10:00] pause for silence and a single note from a bell, then back to squealing white noise and layers of shattering sounds [10:50] drums added, continues until the end [11:40]

Part One   (2 minutes)
Heavy metal chaos, gives way to guitar feedback, singing, and strings [0:30] bell, percussion, and violin [0:50] the cartoon klezmer theme played on clarinet [1:10] strings scraping, backward feedback, tortured trumpet [1:40] back to cartoon klezmer theme, with added strings and knocking sounds

Part Two   (1.5 minutes)
[2:00] ominous notes on piano, accompanied by feedback [2:30] noise, grinding guitar [2:35] violin solo, keyboards making a breathing sound in background

Part Three   (1.5 minutes)
[3:35] quiet, then voices begin over static [3:55] the quick footsteps theme [4:15] back to voices [4:30] quick footsteps theme [4:45] crumpled paper, low notes on bass clarinet, voices come up

Part Four   (1 minute)
[5:15] kettle whistle [5:25] guitar noise and heavy metal thunder [5:45] angry mob comes in [6:00] quick cut to silence, then sawing strings and clarinet

Part Five   (2.5 minutes)
[6:20] the klezmer coda, sounds like soundtrack music, with sustained notes rising up as trumpet dives in and violin rides on top [8:30] brief reprise of cartoon klezmer theme until end [8:45]

Composing Game Pieces
from Future Jazz, pp. 171-173
by Howard Mandel (1999)

Zorn: When I started working to structure pieces with improvisers, my first thought was: Here is a series of individuals, each has his own personal music. All worked on their instruments, on their own, to develop a highly personal language, that's often not notatable. So my problem was: How can I involve these musicians in a composition that's valid and stands on its own without being performed, and yet inspires these musicians to play their best, and at the same time realizes the musical vision that I have in my head?

My first decision, which I think was the most important, was never to talk about language or sound at all. I left that completely up to the performers. What I was left with was structure.

I can talk about when things happen and when they stop, but not what they are. I can talk about who and in what combinations, but I can't say what goes on. I can say, "A change will happen here," but I can't say what kind of change it will be.

I began creating very simple structures — combinations, for example, of all the possible duets in a twelve-piece group, all the possible trios. Then I'd work them all out, order them, and the players would go through this ordering, along with another set of rules that made it a little more complicated than just going through one after another — first these two people, then these two people.

Then I began devising different game rules that the improvisers would play that would make it a little more fun, a little more exciting and challenging than just reading something off a page. That's no challenge at all for an improviser.

What I came up with is a series of rules, like a trading system — one person plays, then the next person plays, then the next person plays — and event systems, where people independently perform events. Everybody can perform one event each, for example, but nobody can time it at the same time with anybody else. There might be a series of downbeats where at a downbeat a change will happen — if you're playing, maybe you must stop. If you're not playing, you may come in. That's just one example.

With each new piece, I made up new sets of rules, sometimes incorporating similar ideas and systems from old pieces but changing the sequences, or the overall way it was put together. I would perhaps get a series of fifteen systems, each one able to spark a different set of relationships among players, then figure out a way that these different system could be used by them.

What orders can they be performed in? Can several be performed at the same time? Can some be called by certain players and others not? Are there certain powers that certain players can have that other players can't have? The pieces got more and more complicated. Cobra and Xu Feng and Hu Die are the most complicated in terms of structure and game that I've come to yet.

When Cobra is performed, Zorn, as the prompter (sort of a conductor) stands in front of a table which has rows of cards with different symbols on each. The 10 to 13 players sit in a circle in front of him, flashing hand signals to their mouth, nose, eye, ear, head and palm. The prompter can accept their signals or not.

A segment of the game begins once the prompter brings the card(s) down to the table, giving the players a certain direction to follow, which can be changed mid-segment with different types of tactics. The players chosen for each performance of Cobra are just as important as the rules they must play by. The best versions of Cobra are those where the players really comprehend what's happening, they are both challenged and have fun and some wonderful music is made in the process. If you a chance to see/hear a version of Cobra performed live, I urge you to do so. It begins to make more sense by watching.

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.

Xu Feng is indeed fast paced, using a card system to direct the action, although with plenty of interaction between the musicians. The color- coded cards signify three major conditions.

Condition 1 deals with downbeats and qualifiers (pool; runner; substitute; etc. and rhythm: arythmic; loud; quiet; etc). Condition 2 sets up "trio battle positions" (war) such as spy or renegade soloist or challenge duo. Condition 3 (Concerto) involves soloists, duos and "base." Hats and headbands are used in the guerrilla systems, and hand gestures between players and prompters also control the flow of the improvisation.

If this seems confusing, it is, as the players referred to rule sheets frequently during the set, and at times laughed at their own (or each others') befuddlements.

Zorn has never formally published the rules to the game, preferring an oral tradition of explaining how the game works to the players, and the mystery of the interactions between and amongst the prompter and the musicians is part of the show.

Ultimately if the game lives up to its intentions of making interesting music, the listener need not know how the piece is developed. But as part of a group of listeners trying to make sense of the action, we know differently, and many in the audience were craning their neck to try to figure out just how it was all being done.

Zorn: Sometimes I'll buy a record and on first listening I'll say, "Well, I just threw seven bucks down the drain." But then I'll come back to it a few months later and listen to it again and go, "Well, now wait a minute, there's got to be something here because three people have told me this is an incredible record. I've got to check it out." So I'll listen to it again and again.

That's how I got into hard core and thrash. I just went into a store and said to some skinhead who was working there, "Pick out five or six of your favorite hard-core records that never left your turntable for three months." And he picked out five records and I took them home, but I didn't really get it. All the cuts were like a minute and a half. And I thought, "Well, it all sounds the same to me. There's nothing going on." But I went back and back and back. Ultimately, you have to trust somebody, you know. That's how you get into something.

Yeah, working with Bill and John was fantastic! You gotta remember that Painkiller was a four-member affair: me (drums, vocals), John Zorn (sax, vocals), Bill Laswell (bass). We must never forget Oz Fritz was really the fourth member. As sound engineer, he made the sound. No Oz Fritz, no Painkiller. Yes, Painkiller created the music, but Fritz added that impact, he amplified it. He amped it in such a way live, that’s where you had to see Painkiller.

I met Zorn in 1989 in Japan touring with Napalm Death. It was my first time in Japan, Napalm’s first time in Japan. He was a very big Napalm Death fan. Not long before that, it was only about 2-3 months prior, I had picked up a copy of Naked City’s Torture Garden. Someone had said: Mick you should check this out, it’s pretty crazy. And also John Zorn plays Ornette Coleman which is a fantastic CD: you’ve got the 2 drummers, Joey Barron on the right side, I can’t think whose on the left side, sorry, but you’ve got the 2 drummers the left and the right and you’ve also got 2 saxophone players on the left and the right. It’s a crazy recording! It’s just John Zorn playing the songs of Ornette Coleman, but anyway.

I’d only heard of Zorn 2 months prior to that. I haven’t even heard of Bill Laswell in 1989. So I meet John Zorn in Tokyo backstage. He was really happy to meet me. We had a little talk, he loved my drumming, he really wanted to work with me one day in the studio, maybe to do some improv. It was all new to me, I just said : yeah, let’s keep in touch. For 2 years I used to send him postcards when I was touring saying : one day... maybe... one day...

Finally, just before the Gulf War in January 1991, I was in New York. I used to go to NY 2-3 times a year to see some friends. I called him up and said: look, I’m here. Why don’t we do it? Yeah, he said, Sick, let’s do it ! I met up with him. He said: what do you want to do? I said : what do you want to do? He said: get some sticks and we’ll go in, we’ll run the tapes and just play. I told him about this bass player, Bill Laswell. Kev Martin from Techno Animal spoke to me of Bill sometime in 1990, toward the end of Napalm. Big Napalm fan. Kev knew I was starting to like a lot of free jazz, Miles etc. He said: you should check out Bill Laswell’s Low Life, Laswell and Brötzmann. This was the first thing that I had bought by him. It had a big impact, heavy record, very heavy record.

So, January 1991, I told Zorn: Bill Laswell and he said: great! Bill has his own studio in Brooklin, I haven’t seen Bill in a year. Let me give him a phone and the three of us will get together and do something. He called Bill up, Bill said: yeah, I’ve got three hours spare. Three hours! So we went in. My stomach was churning, it was doing some turns, I’m telling you! (laughs) We went up to Brooklin around Midnight ‘cause Bill was mixing Pharaoh Sanders. We arrived, I was so shy, I’m definitely a shy person. Bill’s a very quiet shy person. Zorn and Laswell were talking, the system engineer asked me which drum kit Mick? There were three drumkits. I just said: Uhm, I’ll play that one there. They set the mike up and I had a little go and within 30 minutes we’ve got the phones on and the tapes running. Three hours later we record Guts of a Virgin. All live takes! I came back to England the day the fucking war started, shitting myself. There were maybe 12 people on the airplane. I was rather nervous that day.

Yeah, Painkiller continued. Zorn has just recently released a new live CD called Talisman in Dub. It’s three long pieces, one 35-minute, two 10-15 minute pieces. It’s from Nagoya 1994. It was Scorn supporting Painkiller, quite bizarre. It was a good tour in Japan and Zorn just released this CD. The last concerts we did were in 1998 and I think we all knew back then that it had gone as far, that we had done probably as much as we could do as a unit. Zorn still wants to work with me, I still want to work with Zorn. I was meant to return to NY before summer next year to record a record with Zorn and an organ player, new improv record. Something that I ‘ve been wanting to make for nearly 5 years.

I haven’t spoken to Zorn in five years. The last time I spoke to him, I had some problems and he said: Look Mick, when you’re feeling good again, I’m going to get you a ticket, come to NY and we’ll do some more music, end of story. I’m not going to call him up. I’m going to NY to do some mixing for a friend in the studio and while I’m there, I’m just going to knock on his door, just to see his face. Do some records with him because Zorn is great. He’s a big influence in the studio.

John Zorn, Bill Laswell and Oz Fritz taught me that there are really no limits in your performance, what you put to tape and what you master. There are no limits. That’s something that I learned from jazz, it’s something that I learned from raggae music. There are no limits. You can push as much as you like. It was a good bit of education. Seeing Bill in the studio was like: shit! Looking at the way he did things. I’ve been in studios before and I was told NO! But Bill said fuck what they say at the BBC! You do what YOU say. I had no confidence. This was before I started really mixing my own records. Scorn was still go into studios, working the material at home, sequencing, sampling, go into studio and doing it professionally, whatever ‘professionally’ is, and really not having as much input as we’d like. Laswell taught me a lot and Zorn has taught me a lot as far as really getting maximum performance from what you do. That’s what he strives for, that’s what he gets up for : to get maximum performance. Zorn’s 48 and he’s not stopping.

Review of the First Naked City Album
from the Cornell Daily Sun web site
by Ed Howard (Jan 30, 2003)

For the infamous band Naked City, John Zorn assembled a decidedly unusual group, choosing some of jazz's most versatile and creative players to bring to life this genre-destroying melee of jazz, metal, country, ambient, blues, film soundtracks, kitschy funk, and just about everything else these warped minds could think to throw in there. And topping it all off, as if it needed it, was Yamatsuka Eye of the Japanese noise-punk outfit Boredoms, screaming and gibbering and seemingly doing irreparable harm to his vocal cords.

The result, Naked City, was the start of an incredible project which would quickly go down in jazz history as legendary. The line-up's subsequent albums — all of which would be released under Naked City's moniker, rather than Zorn's — rightfullly added to the legend, but this is where it all began. This album leads off with a rather odd mission statement, a funky cover of the Batman theme that provides a wild introduction to this group's warped mentality.

From there on out, it only gets weirder. Zorn and company intersperse a handful of "straight" jazz pieces — including Morricone's lovely The Sicilian Clan and Ornette Coleman's Lonely Woman — with trashy, technically precise rawk that cuts and slices with razor-sharp virtuosity while still sounding completely chaotic and off-kilter. The raw energy of Punk China Doll melds into a low-key guitar jam towards the end of the song, then into mock-country on the 45-second N.Y. Flat Top Box, and then into the crazed mish-mash of Saigon Pickup (one moment it's propulsive car chase music, the next a tinkly piano ballad, the next a ragged dub, the next a . . .).

The whole album is like this. Stylistically, the band can't stay still for more than 20 seconds at a time, skipping between genres relentlessly, often continuously within the same song. This restlessness makes Naked City constantly surprising and exciting, one of the most unpredictable listens imaginable.

The Easy-Listening Albums
Most of Zorn's stuff is loud and complex, jumping from one idea to another. And he likes to experiment with sound, sometimes using an entire album to play with a strange musical idea that doesn't quite work out.

But every once in a while, he puts out a CD that everyone will enjoy. These albums have no noisy tracks and no quick jump-cuts. The songs are beautiful and creative (and sometimes a little dull). In other words, these are the Zorn CDs my Mom likes.

And you will, too.

Click on any of the album covers above to read a review.

What Is Tzadik?
From the Bomb interview with Michael Goldberg

Zorn: It's a letter in the Hebrew alphabet. Or it could be justice, or righteousness, the concept of right. Or a rabbi or holy man in a small community.

One of the reasons I started Tzadik, which is my own label, is to keep things in print. I got tired of labels dropping things out of print when they don't sell. Tzadik is driven by the need to keep important work in print forever, as a catalogue.

We have a staff of about two or three people, we don't have an office, we don't even have a dedicated phone line. We do it out of our own homes, and we make it work.

It breaks even. We lose ten, twenty grand every year. But then the people who are working say, Look, I'll kick this back in, I don't need to take this profit share. It's very cooperative.

Using extremes of contrast, dissonance, and variety in sound, Varèse's pieces had power in the way he attacked and shaped the sound he imagined. From Ionisation (1929), scored almost entirely for unpitched percussion, to the electronic-only, three-dimensionally produced Poeme Electronique (1958), he's provided a foundation that many genres, musicians, and composers were to build from not only for the next 40 years, but inevitably beyond.
  —Robin Edgerton

He was born in 1883 and died in 1965. There are two essential Varese recordings: The Sony Classical single disc conducted by Pierre Boulez, and the Complete Works double disc conducted by Riccardo Chailly. The first is better, but the second has it all. Listen to Ionisation and Arcana and you'll understand why Zorn (and Zappa) were inspired by Varese.

Zorn's song, Cycles du Nord, is dedicated to Varese. It's on the Music for Children album.





Who Is Carl Stalling?
From the Carl Stalling Project page on the Barnes & Noble web site...

Listeners will be familiar with the archival recordings contained on this beautifully packaged CD even if they have never heard of the composer. Carl Stalling was the genius principally responsible for the manic music behind the great Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. While Stalling's scores — with their quotations of popular period music, folk tunes, and classical pieces — went unheralded at the time, the composer has achieved a cult stardom due to this recording. Fans of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the Road Runner cartoons will instantly recognize familiar themes and motifs in this lengthy and varied album, which includes plenty of background information on Stalling's methods and legacy.
  —Andy Dursin

Musical Tributes
Sometimes Zorn composes an album or song to pay tribute to an artist who has inspired him. He tries to reflect the artist's work in music.

Artist	Album or Song
Jean-Luc Godard	Godard on Godard, Spillane
Mickey Spillane	Spillane on Godard, Spillane
Agnes Martin	title song on Redbird
Marguerite Duras	Duras on Duras, Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp	Etant Donnes on Duras, Duchamp
Jean Genet	the album Elegy
Antonin Artaud	Le Momo on Madness, Love and Mysticism
Maya Deren	In the Very Eye of Night on Songs from the Hermetic Theater
Joseph Beuys	BeuysBlock on Songs from the Hermetic Theater
Edgard Varese	Cycles du Nord on Music for Children

To pay tribute to Ennio Morricone and Ornette Coleman, he recorded new arrangements of their music on The Big Gundown and Spy vs. Spy.







My Top Ten Favorites
I picked twelve. I couldn't narrow it down to ten.

Invitation to a Suicide (2002)

I.A.O. (2002)

Grand Guignol (1992)

Naked City (1989)

Electric Masada (2004)

The Bribe (1998)

The Circle Maker (1998)

The Gift (2001)

Filmworks X (2001)

Xu Feng (2000)

Masada Guitars (2003)

Black Box (1996)

Playing With Blocks
from Future Jazz, p. 170
by Howard Mandel (1999)

Zorn: The way I work is linear. I work in blocks. That's something I learned from Stravinsky's early music — really all of his music — exists in block form. One thing happens, then it stops, and something else happens, then it stops, and something else happens. This happens in different degrees in everybody's music. Some people are more interested in slow development, and the blocks become very similar to one another. Some people are more interested in sharp changing, contrasting things, where the development is more oblique.

I try to put my music on the furthest extreme of that side, where things don't add up at all. The development seems not to be happening. One thing follows another in such a crazy and illogical fashion that people at first can't make sense of it. But of course in time . . . It's just a matter of what you're used to hearing. Now I think people can hear my music and the way it changes from thing to thing, and they don't say, 'Oh it's so crazy, it doesn't make sense,' they just follow it and say, 'Well it's like reading a book or following a travelogue.' They make some kind of comparison they can deal with. And in another ten, twenty, fifty years I think that sort of development will be seen as a narrative form in itself, and will make sense to people. It won't be so outrageous. But even for me, at first it was pretty crazy.

[The most extreme examples are the song Memento Mori and the album Aporias.]

Stravinsky's whole thing is blocks, working with blocks and reordering them, which is also very, very important to me. He would have a block of instruments working in a certain pattern and then — boom! He would change to another.

The Rite of Spring is a typical example of this. Throughout the whole piece that's basically all that's happening — boom, boom, change, change, change, one thing to another.

Soundtrack Music at an Early Age
from Talking Music, p. 446
by William Duckworth (1995)

Duckworth: Who did you listen to when you were growing up?

Zorn: I think it really came from the movies, pretty much. I'm a complete media freak, a TV baby. When I was less than a year old, my mother used to put me in a laundry basket in front of test patterns to keep me quiet.

The first record I actually remember buying was The Sorcerer's Apprentice. I saw Fantasia, you know, and I liked Mickey Mouse running around in that. And I thought the music was great. I must have been six or seven then, maybe eight. After that, I got into monster movies, you know, The Werewolf and The Hunchback. And the Phantom of the Opera played the organ, so I got into organ music. I bought every Bach organ record I could get my hands on. I've still got them.

Cyro Baptista and the Filmworks Series
Percussionist Cyro Baptista has played on many of Zorn's albums, including ten of his soundtracks. This is an except from an interview with Cyro in The Wire magazine, December 1997.

It was witnessing Arto Lindsay's seminal skullfuckery in DNA that blew a few cerebral fuses for Cyro, irrevocably piquing his fascination with the wilder fringes of contemporary music.

He was hired to play in some of John Zorn's earliest game pieces, and their association has continued up to Cyro's current involvement in the "chamber" version of John Zorn's Masada group. Their longest running and most prolific collaboration, however, has been on John Zorn's ever growing body of film scores.

"I have this little machine that cranks out soundtracks," says Zorn, referring to his close-knit cadre of Filmworks players.

"He's a total blast in the studio and he can do anything. I really miss him when he's not on a session," [Baptista says]. Which is rare. Whether Zorn is scoring obscure S+M flicks, or spots for avant-garde ad agency Weiden and Kennedy, Cyro routinely provides the tumbling rhythms that ground the fractured, spaghetti-noir symphonettes that have become Zorn's film music trademark.

"We can go into a studio at noon and by 7 PM we've recorded and mixed 40 cues," says Cyro, "Zorn wants us to get in front of a mike and really take chances. He creates a very emotional environment in there, most musicians would just leave the session, but we're there because we love him. We have a telepathic communication."

After his schizophrenic ensemble Naked City began to dissolve, New York composer/improviser John Zorn needed another outlet for his love of thrash-jazz and grindcore. That outlet was Painkiller, a brutal power trio formed with fellow downtown pal Bill Laswell (who once played in Massacre, another revolutionary trio) on bass and Napalm Death's supersonic drummer Mick Harris.

Until now, much of Painkiller's discography was out of print, but Zorn has just reissued the band's entire studio output as a four-disc collection. Disc zero contains the rapid-fire Guts Of A Virgin and dirge-like Buried Secrets albums, plus the shorter Marianne. Discs one and two contain the music of Execution Ground in its entirety, complete with songs of epic length, as well as even longer ambient remixes reminiscent of Harris' work in Scorn. Disc three contains the caustic Live In Osaka release.

The gruesome, graphic cover art, which faithfully reproduces that of the original albums, gives a clear indication of the type of music Painkiller plays: This stuff is extreme, with blasts of shrieking sax and rumbling bass atop Harris' unforgiving percussion, and it's not anywhere near as fun as the pop-culture-savvy Naked City, Zorn's most similar project. But for those masochists and Zorn fanatics who possess the mettle needed to endure this abusive racket, Complete Studio Recordings is essential.

In Aviva Slesin's affecting documentary Secret Lives: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers During World War II, people who missed the Holocaust because of the unconventional generosity of their Gentile friends and neighbors confess that they've rarely wanted to share their stories, because it would entail acknowledging that the war years were among the best of their lives.

Secret Lives assembles still photographs, archival film, video interviews, and present-day location footage into a conventional documentary package, with narration, on-screen titles, and linear storytelling. The lack of a splashy style puts the tales of the rescued and their rescuers properly at the center, but whether viewers connect will depend in part on how saturated they are with Holocaust lore.

Secret Lives offers a renewed chance to contemplate the dichotomy of cruelty and compassion in the human character, but those who've been through this particular narrative grinder before may wish that Slesin had asked her subjects more about the specifics of daily life, and gotten more responses along the lines of one interviewee's admission about how much he enjoyed celebrating Christmas.

Regardless, the alert and the exhausted alike should be moved by the final third of Secret Lives, which deals with the aftermath of the war, when "the rescued" returned to parents or other relatives permanently scarred by life in concentration camps. Not only were the children taken from the arms of the guardians they had known for most of their lives, but they also grew up tormented by memories of long-gone, ideal-in-retrospect families.

Even the heroes of the story — the ordinary citizens who did the right thing when it counted — recall the awkward limbo of the postwar years. One woman, who didn't have to say goodbye because she saw her former charge on a regular basis after his mother returned, still expresses embarrassment about the imbalance in their relationship. "It's awful," she says about the mother's feelings of indebtedness, "to have to be so thankful."

I don't know what the titles mean. If you know, send me e-mail. (They seem to refer to geometry or mathematics.)

14 Percussion Songs (16.5 minutes)
Lituus
Curl
Ergodicity
Factor   and   Addition
Folium
Gradients
Interpolation
Octal
Region
Tensor
Net   and   Witch of Agnesi
Trisectrix of Maclaurin

16 Jazzy Songs (19.5 minutes)
Probable Error
Cissoid of Diocles   and   Prism
Martingale
Random Walk
Concordance   and   Ruled Surface
Lie Group
Root
Involute   and   Cluster
Lemma
Likelihood
Tantochrome   and   Block
Youdon Square

6 Noisy Songs (7 minutes)
Cusp
Discriminant
Slope
Spiral
Reduction   and   Limit

5 High-Pitched/Squealing Songs (7 minutes)
Arc
Catearies
Rose Curve
Mean Difference
Quadrature

7 Abstract/Drone Songs (8 minutes)
Deviation
Edge Train
Intercept
Modulus
Pole
Prediction
Rank

Radio, by Naked City
In the CD booklet for Radio, you'll find a list "inspirations/references." These are the musicians and artists whose work inspired each song. You're supposed to read the list as you listen to the music and see (or hear) how Zorn combined them. For example, as you listen to I Die Screaming, you should hear Conway Twitty's inoffensive country music, Santana's Latino art-rock, and Extreme Noise Terror's wall of heavy metal thunder.

The spirit and style of the artists are used, not their specific songs. All of the compositions are originals.

The list of inspirations/references is long and diverse. I can't imagine that anyone but John Zorn knows who all of these people are. Sure, you've heard of Led Zeppelin, Frank Sinatra, and Liberace. And you've probably heard of Ennio Morricone and Eric Dolphy. But who is Naftule Brandwein? How about Orchestra Baobab, or Terauchi Takeshi?

For those artists whose work I know, I've written a few sentences (in the small font). If you know more, send me e-mail and I'll add to the list.

Lilith wrote to me in May 2003 with helpful information about several bands. See below.

1-Asylum:
Charles Mingus on Candid, Eric Dolphy, Paul Bley

2-Sunset Surfer:
Bob Demmon + The Astronauts

3-Party Girl:
Little Feat

4-The Outsider:
Ruins, Booker T. and the MGs, Colin Wilson

Ruins is a two-man Japanese band that sounds like Primus (sort of).

5-Triggerfingers:
Ennio Morricone, Albert King, Chuck Brown

Ennio Morricone is the Italian composer who scored films such as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

6-Terkmani Teepee:
Orchestra Baobab, Terauchi Takeshi, EM Elanka

7-Sex Fiend:
The Accused, The Meters, Yakuza Zankoku Hiroku

Lilith: The Accused were a Seattle-based "splattercore" band that relied on an insane mix of speed metal and hardcore played at the edge of total cacophony, with a cartoonish, morbid sense of humor. After The Accused broke up various members went on to play in Gruntruck and The Hot Rod Lunatics.

8-Razorwire:
Tony Williams' Lifetime, Old

Lilith: Old was a humorous and strange grindcore band from New Jersey that featured James Plotkin on guitar and Jason Everman (Nirvana) on bass. They were the first grindcore band to use a drum machine and introduced the concept of the grindcore mix album — both of which were largely anathema to metal and punk fans of the time. Plotkin later began creating ambient music independently and with Mick Harris.

9-The Bitter and the Sweet:
Anthony Braxton, Anton Webern's Six Bagatelles, Sammy Cahn's "Guess I'll hang my tears out to dry," Frank Sinatra, Morton Feldman

Frank Sinatra . . . You've heard of him, right? He's the original Elvis — famous crooning playboy, star of shitty movies, substance abuser, got fat and then died after his best years were over.

Morton Feldman composed very long, beautiful, minimalist songs. His album Rothko Chapel isn't very good, but his Piano and String Quartet is great.

10-Krazy Kat:
Carl Stalling, Igor Stravinsky

Carl Stalling composed the music for Warner Bros. cartoons. See above.

11-The Vault:
The Melvins, Beatmasters, Spetic Death, Hellfire, Leather Folk (the book)

The Melvins are the GREATEST HEAVY METAL BAND OF ALL TIME. Based somewhere around Seattle originally, creators of timeless classics such as Stoner Witch, Hostile Ambient Takeover, Houdini, and The Maggot.

Lilith: Spetic Death played ferociously paced thrash influenced hardcore. Their vocalist, Pushead, is better known for his broken-skull art motifs, which are popular among skaters and which have been used by Metallica.

12-Metaltov:
Abe Schwarz, Ivo Papasov, Naftule Brandwein

13-Poisonhead:
Repulsion

Lilith: Repulsion was one of the early pioneers of grindcore — hardcore at its most extreme and violent, with an emphasis on very short songs. Repulsion was the first to infuse grindcore with thrash metal.

14-Bone Orchard:
Led Zeppelin, Akemi and Jagatara, Bernard Herrmann

Led Zeppelin is a four-piece rock band from England who started out ripping off black blues musicians. Then they developed into one of the seminal rock bands, cranking out art-rock albums, playing very loud and long concerts, and eventually breaking up after about 10 years when the drummer died. Best album: Physical Graffiti.

Bernard Herrmann is a soundtrack composer who worked with Alfred Hitchcock. His last score was Taxi Driver.

15-I Die Screaming:
Santana, Extreme Noise Terror, Conway Twitty

Lilith: Extreme Noise Terror is another grindcore pioneer. Mick Harris was the drummer from 1985 to 1987.

16-Pistol Whipping:
Agnostic Front, Siege

Lilith: Agnostic Front is considered by many to be the first hardcore punk band, and it is one of the few bands of the time that are still recording today.

Seige is considered by some to be the first grindcore band, back when grindcore was still principally punk flavored.

17-Skatekey:
Ornette Coleman, Corrosion of Conformity, Massacre, Quincy Jones

Lilith: Corrosion Of Conformity, based out of North Carolina, originally played hardcore punk but quickly became one of the foremost "crossover" bands as they added more thrash metal elements to their music. After a hiatus and lineup changes they changed styles again, preferring Black Sabbath inspired hard rock with Southern rock touches but maintaining their political views through lyrics. They were nominated for a Grammy award in 1998.

18-Shock Corridor:
Sam Fuller, Funkadelic, Carcass

Sam Fuller was a maverick American director who made many films, including Shock Corridor and The Big Red One. He wrote a great autobiography called A Third Face.

Funkadelic (also known as Parliament) is one of the world's best funk bands. It's a supergroup led by George Clinton, with a revolving lineup of musicians (like Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrel). They play infectious disco music while dressed up as superheroes and starship troopers.

Lilith: Carcass infused grindcore with the technical death metal which arose from the Florida death metal scene. Originally their song titles and imagery was inspired by medical textbooks. Near the end of their career they abandoned grindcore in favor of melodic death metal, at which they excelled. Guitarist Mike Amott is now a member of Arch Enemy.

19-American Psycho:
Liberace, Jan Hammer, Napalm Death, Eddie Blackwell, Charlie Haden, Mick Harris, Carole King, Red Garland, The Boredoms, Jerry Reed, SPK, Roger Williams

Lilith: Napalm Death started as a parody of grindcore bands but quickly evolved into a very political death metal band that is still performing. Members of Carcass, Godflesh, Cathedral, and Scorn have been members of Napalm Death through its career. Mick Harris (see below) was the drummer from 1987 until 1991.

(The member of Godflesh was Justin Broadrick, who played with fellow Godflesh member C.G. Green on the Painkiller tracks "Buried Secrets" and "The Toll")

Mick Harris was originally one of the finest drummers in the grindcore and death metal scenes, and made his mark playing for Extreme Noise Terror and Napalm Death. After leaving Napalm Death he formed the ambient dub band Scorn with fellow Napalm Death alum Nick Bullen. At about the same time he joined John Zorn and Bill Laswell to form Painkiller. Mick Harris is a very productive musician and has worked on literally dozens of projects.

SPK was an early industrial project bent on giving voice to deviants, in particular the insane. Their first incarnation in Australia had a punk sound, but by 1980 founding member Graeme Revell was associating more with Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, and Brian Lustmord, the latter of whom would become a SPK member. After a decade of producing provocative music, SPK dissolved; Revell switched to writing film scores, such as for the movie Dead Calm.

Thank you, Lilith.

"Neither not too out nor too in"
This is a review by Alan Lankin of Masada's Live in Sevilla album. I found it on the jazzmatazz web site. I'm reproducing it here because it has a lot of background on Zorn. (Many reviewers try to sum up an artist's career in the opening paragraphs of an album review. Usually, this is a bad idea. But Alan Lankin has done a good job.)

Live in Sevilla is a new concert recording of Masada, one of the most exciting jazz groups performing today. John Zorn's group features Zorn on alto sax with trumpeter Dave Douglas, bassist Greg Cohen and drummer Joey Baron. This well recorded concert might be their best recorded performance yet. Zorn plays some of his best alto to date, Dave Douglas is superb and the rhythm section's playing is very tight.

This group seems a long way from Zorn's early game pieces and use of bird calls, but Masada reflects the journey Zorn has been making to connect to earlier music.

In the late 1980s, Zorn explored hardbop with "Voodoo" (Black Saint/1985), which explored the music of pianist/composer Sonny Clark. On hatART's "News for Lulu" (1987) and "More News for Lulu" (1989) a trio of Zorn, Bill Frisell and George Lewis gave their interpretations of lessor-known bop classics from the late 1950s by Sonny Clark, Hank Mobley, Freddy Redd and Kenny Dorham. Zorn didn't just try to recreate the original recordings, but attempted to keep the composers' legacies alive by bringing these hardbop tunes into the present, using the tunes as a basis for improvisation.

In the 1990s, Zorn, along with some other downtown NY jazz musicians, began exploring his Jewish roots. Zorn composed his Holocaust-related piece "Kristallnacht" in 1992 and starting Masada on 1993 (around the time of his 40th birthday). He wrote over 200 Masada tunes — Klezmer influenced, Jewish-sounding, minor-key, modal, Sephardic-tinged melodies. The compositions have also been influenced by Ornette Coleman's Atlantic Records period. Like Ornette, Zorn has written memorable miniature melodies that serve as a jumping off point for improvisation. He uses the same instrumental makeup as Ornette Coleman's classic quartet of Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billie Higgins or Ed Blackwell, with a similar telepathic interplay. Like Ornette and Cherry, Zorn and Douglas also play with a beautiful polyphonic intensity, straying inside and outside during a song.

This newest in a steady stream of Masada releases was recorded in March 2000 in Sevilla. (A stream or a river? — Masada has recorded prolifically — ten studio quartet albums on DIW recorded from 1994 to 1997; live CDs issued on Tzadik last year from earlier concerts in Jerusalem (1994), Taipei (1995) and Middelheim (1999); plus two double-CDs of chamber music on Tzadik.)

On this release, which consists of tunes previously released on Masada's studio albums, Zorn and Douglas (who's gotten a higher profile since his RCA Victor signing) vie for the most intense solo, playing both inside and outside, playing melodically, yet interspersing occasional over-the-top, impassioned squeaks and squonks. Joey Baron displays his imaginative and responsive percussion, keeping time while emitting an explosive variety of textures. And Greg Cohen's keeps solid time on bass while playing counter-melodies with a round tone. An exciting performance; neither not too out nor too in.

This is an excellent sound recording with the usual beautiful, understated Tzadik packaging. If you like the group, I recommend this recording. If you've never heard Masada before, I recommend you give this one a spin.

The Big Gundown remains one of the 80s' most crucial albums, and of all Zorn's massive output it's this and his other Elektra collage work, Spillane, for which he remains best known outside the circle of ardent followers. It's easy to see why: The Big Gundown is in every sense a totally accessible work.

A whole bunch of Zorn's contemporaries from New York's downtown avant garde community, as well as such notables as Toots Thielmans, Diamanda Galas and Big John Patton, crash through arrangements of the compositions of Ennio Morricone. Morricone has, of course, become the name to drop when any discussion of cult film composers arises. Zorn illustrates why. His arrangements seek out the real weirdness at the core of Morricone's music — the bizarre juxtapositions, the unique melodies, the absolute melodrama — and then heighten it.

1-Main Titles. Yamatsuka Eye overpowers the drums and keyboards by yelping and snorting like the Tasmanian Devil.

2-Sex Games. Sounds like the Melvins warming up.

3-The Brood. Tense soundtrack music. Perfect for a horror movie.

4-Sweat, Sperm and Blood. Eye imitates Zorn's saxophone squeals. Very funny.

5-Vliet. Frisell and Frith make a racket for a minute on guitar and bass. Cool improvised rock noise.

6-Heretic #1. After twenty seconds of galloping sounds on guitar, Zorn plays bleeps, skronks, and other sound effects over a whirl of white noise. Very complex and annoying.

7-Submission. Percussion and feedback rise and fall while Frisell plays weird guitar licks all over the place.

8-Heretic #2. More Zorn saxophone squeals. In the final twenty seconds, Baron and Frith add some spazz-rock.

9-Catacombs. Stormy electronic sounds and distorted electric guitar. Weird, aggressive ambient music.

10-Heretic #3. Three minutes of bleeps, shrieks, and disjointed drums.

11-My Master, My Slave. Creepy-cool sound effects. Horvitz is great.

12-Saint Jude. Sounds like Tool warming up.

13-The Conqueror Worm. Minimalist piano and distant cries from Zorn's saxophone.

14-Dominatrix 5B. A mess of pointless drumming, weird guitar effects, and burps of static.

15-Back Through the Looking Glass Two guitars playing backward and forward over each other. Unique.

16-Here Come the 7,000 Frogs. Zorn and Yamatsuka Eye go back and forth, babbling and howling for two minutes. Eye seems to be in his own world.

17-Slaughterhouse/Chase Sequence. Frith and Baron play high speed chase music while Frisell plays a grinding solo. Great song.

18-Castle Keep. Horvitz plays dark tones with Fred Frith.

19-Mantra of Resurrected Shit. Zorn and Eye again, doing what they do best. Eye can sing while breathing in. Take that, Mariah Carey!

20-Trypsicore. The sound of giant robot insects devouring a dead moose.

21-Fire and Ice (Club Scene). A demented funk song. Can you dance to feedback and sirens? Probably not.

22-Crosstalk. Theme for a mad scientist: static, flying saucer sounds, and a little guitar noise.

23-Copraphagist Rituals. A tribute to shit-eaters. Lots of howling.

24-Labyrinth. Frisell and Baron end the album with six minutes of ambient improvisation on guitar and drums. This sounds like a track from the final Naked City album, Absinthe.

The Filmworks Series
From 1986 to 2006, Zorn released soundtracks for two mainstream movies, ten independent films, thirteen documentaries, five erotic films, and one animated TV show. He also released the songs he composed for dozens of TV commercials.

Two other albums have been used for soundtracks (Heretic and Bar Kokhba), but they are not part of the Filmworks series.

The earliest Filmworks CDs are the most mainstream projects. The middle period is full of erotic films and short, avant-garde pieces. These soundtracks have a lot of highs and lows, ranging from failed experiments to sublime gems. By 2000, Zorn was concentrating on documentaries. Some of the documentaries have Jewish themes, allowing him to use the Masada Book of songs.

Check out Zorn's page on the Internet Movie Database.

1: Three independent films: "White and Lazy," "The Golden Boat" and "She Must Be Seeing Things"

2: Movie: untitled Hollywood movie for director Walter Hill. (Trespass?)

3: Independent film: "Thieves' Quartet", brief track for animated TV show Documentary: "Hollywood Hotel," music for TV commercials

4: Three independent films: "Waste," "Credits Included," "Maogai" Two erotic videos: "Elegant Spanking," "A Lot of Fun for the Evil One"

5: Erotic film: "Tears of Ecstasy"

6: Two independent films: "Anton, Mailman" and "Mechanics of the Brain" Erotic film: "The Black Glove"

7: Animated TV show: "Cynical Hysterie Hour"

8: Documentary: "Port of Last Resort" Erotic film: "Latin Boys Go to Hell"

9: Documentary: "Trembling Before G-d"

10: Documentary: "In the Mirror of Maya Deren"

11: Documentary: "Secret Lives"

12: Three documentaries: "Homecoming," "Shaolin Ulysses" and "Family Found"

13: Independent film: "Invitation to a Suicide"

14: Documentary: "Hiding & Seeking"

15: Documentary: "The Protocols of Zion"

16: Documentary: "Working Man's Death"

17: Two documentaries: "Notes on Marie Menken" and "Life with Skulls"

18: Feature film: "The Treatment"