John Zorn's Naked City

naked city

John Zorn's
Naked City

This is John Zorn's infamous turn-on-a-dime band. Although they can play any style of music, the majority of their songs are noisy and complex. At any moment, a beautiful melody can degenerate into a hurricane of white noise — and then suddenly switch to something else. They've taken everything aggressive about jazz and heavy metal, blended it together, and tightened it. They are disciplined players, but the music is a lot of fun.

They look like a rock band: drums, electric guitar, bass, keyboards, and saxophone. On four of the albums, Yamatsuka Eye adds his unique vocals. He howls and snorts like a maniac instead of singing. It's very entertaining. (He is sometimes credited as "Yamataka Eye.")

The band formed in 1989, playing live before they recorded their first album. They recorded their final album in December of 1992.

The series includes an album of ambient music (Absinthe), the soundtrack for an SM film (Heretic), an album that consists of a single 30-minute track (Leng Tch'e), a live album (Knitting Factory 1989), and four albums of hardcore/jazz/rock fusion (Radio, Naked City, Grand Guignol, Torture Garden).

Every member of the band has released a number of solo albums and played on other Zorn projects.

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Click on any album cover pictured above to read the review.

The band:

Wayne Horvitz (keyboards)
Bill Frisell (guitar)
Fred Frith (bass)
Joey Baron (drums)
John Zorn (saxophone)
Yamatsuka Eye (vocals)

Zorn: This band was basically a composi- tion workshop. When I stopped writing for the band, we broke up. Compositionally the challenge I set for myself was to see how much I could come up with given the limitations of the simple sax, guitar, keyboard, bass, drums format.

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Naked City

recorded 1989
released 1990

ONE DISC: twenty-six tracks, 55 minutes

This is the first Naked City album. I'd say it's the best one, but then I'm biased — this is the first Zorn album I bought, back in 1996.

If They Might Be Giants hired the best jazz players in New York to make a heavy metal album, it would sound like this. (The major difference is the sense of humor. Zorn's sense of humor is more subtle than TMBGs.)

From The Wire:

Zorn debuted Naked City on Nonesuch in 1989. He denied that it was a supergroup, citing The Golden Palominos as an example of why supergroups never really work. But as ad hoc groupings of musicians go this pretty much brought together the cream of the 80s NYC downtown set. Naked City marks out the group's territory: jump-cutting micro-collages of hardcore, Country, sleazy jazz, covers of John Barry and Ornette Coleman, brief abstract tussles — a whole city crammed into two or three minute bursts.

The album's poles are its finest moments and somehow sum up all that the group seemed to do best: a 'suite' of ultra-brief thrashes which still manage to jump genres two or three times in the space of a couple of bars, and a gorgeous rendering of Jerry Goldsmith's untouched theme from Chinatown, which emerges magically from a haze of free improvisation.

The cover is a famous photograph by Weegee. Some record stores carry the album with the back of the CD booklet as the cover: an illustration of a Japanese girl with a snake slithering through her face. Apparently, this is considered less disturbing than the photo of a man laying on the sidewalk with a bullet wound in his face.

Zorn: The music I wrote for Naked City is the kind of music that gets better the more it is played. I wanted to improve the quality of my live performances and using the same musicians served precisely this end.

The Naked City project (which, compared to the completely improvised ones, is based on composition) was to see how many kinds of music can be made with the same ensemble, to write very different things for the same group.

Nineteen of the 26 songs were written by Zorn. The others were written by John Barry, Ennio Morricone, Henry Mancini, Johnny Mandel, Ornette Colman, Georges Delerue, and Jerry Goldsmith.

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Naked City Live, Vol 1 The Knitting Factory 1989

recorded 1989
released 2002

ONE DISC: twenty tracks, 52 minutes

This album is essentially a live version of their debut album — 17 of the 20 songs come from Naked City, sometimes in the same sequence.

One of the other three, Skatekey, is on Radio. The remaining two are previously unavailable cover songs: Erotico and The Way I Feel. Erotico is on Zorn's Ennio Morricone tribute, The Big Gundown, played by a different group of musicians.

The band sounds like they're having fun as they work through their musical hairpin turns on stage. A few songs are stretched out. Inside Straight, for example, is twice as long as the studio version. And Chinatown begins with a beautiful bit of atmosphere from Wayne Horvitz.

Although this is a single disc, the track listing on the back of the CD case makes it seem like a two-sided album. (Remember two-sided albums? Those were the days!) Side one emphasizes their fast-paced rock and jazz songs. The most accessible music comes first.

Side two has a set of hardcore miniatures, bookended by two lengthy cover songs (Chinatown and The Way I Feel). The band plows through 9 hardcore miniatures in less than 5 minutes. Just as it gets too intense, they shift to the jazz/rock fusion finale.

I have two complaints about this album. The first is the lack of liner notes. I'd like to know more about getting the band together, composing, rehearsing, recording, and playing the show. Comments from all of the band members would have been nice. Instead, the booklet has a handful of black-and-white photographs.

The second complaint: No Yamatsuka Eye!

(Okay, he wasn't in the band yet. But still . . . I need more Eye!)

Zorn: Naked City has become too well-known, too popular for my liking. It had become something dangerous. I felt the audience was sucking my blood — they used to ask for their favorite piece. They just wanted the same things, they weren't looking for something new. And I can't keep going in a situation like that even if it would seem to be very attractive on the surface.

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Grand Guignol

probably recorded 1989
released 1992

ONE DISC: forty-one tracks, 62 minutes

Grand Guignol is less accessible than the debut, but more rewarding. Zorn sequenced the songs into three distinct parts, which gives you more options when you listen — you can treat each third as an EP, or hit the RANDOM button on your disc player and mix it all up.

The first third — a single, cinematic track — could work as a companion piece to Naked City's other long-form song, Leng Tch'e. Grand Guignol sounds like the soundtrack for a stylish suspense film. Leng Tch'e is its retarded, Texas Chainsaw brother.

The final third includes Speedfreaks, a 48-second song that quotes every country music and jazz style, with blasts of heavy metal and screaming punk in between. Each musical passage is so brief that the moment it registers in your brain, the band has already cut to something entirely different.

From The Wire:

Grand Guignol is something else again, essentially bringing together three entirely discreet works. The title piece recalls something of Absinthe's nightmare drones but is interrupted with violent outbursts and overall has an appropriately melodramatic horror-flick patina.

There follows a suite of remarkable interpretations of Debussy, Scriabin, Lassus, Ives and Messiaen. In all the several hours of recorded Naked City this has to be the most unexpected. The pieces are quite magic(k)al, rendered with sumptuous arrangements and details bordering on the kitsch.

The album closes with all 34 of the slash-and-burn vignettes partially premiered on Naked City and collected together previously on the largely impossible-to-find Torture Garden. Anyone who doesn't enjoy these pieces is simply thinking about it too much.

Oh my GOD! It's A SEVERED HEAD ON A PLATE!

From the ForcedExposure web site:

This is the controversial CD that sparked Zorn's break with Nonesuch records. Planned as the second Naked City album, its release was delayed for years over both musical and artistic issues.

Exploring the darker side of human creativity, Grand Guignol is divided into three parts. The title track is a long paean to the theatre of shock and horror that took Paris by storm at the turn of the century. Stark and intense, 'Grand Guignol' is one of Zorn's major long form compositions.

Also included are Zorn's sensual arrangements of classical music by Messiaen, Scriabin, Ives and Debussy.

The final third of the CD contains 33 of the seminal hardcore miniatures that made Naked City famous. Uncompromising cover art and and music from one of the most original and eclectic bands of the 1990s.

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Black Box

recorded 1989 and 1990
disc one originally released 1989
released as Black Box in 1996

DISC ONE: forty-two tracks, 26 minutes
DISC TWO: one track, 32 minutes

This is a package deal.

Black Box contains two albums: Torture Garden and Leng Tch'e.

Torture Garden is a collection of the "hardcore miniatures" from Naked City and Grand Guignol. Unlike those two albums, on Torture Garden there's no break from the relentless cuts from punk to speed metal to screaming and saxophone skronks.

Leng Tch'e is a single track. Over the course of thirty minutes, it builds from feedback and grumbling rhythm to a whirl of improvised heavy metal that would make the Melvins proud. By the time Yamataka Eye starts screaming, you'll either be in heaven or hell. It's perfect background music on Christmas morning.

From the CD booklet:

Research into the relationship between violence and the sacred led Zorn to the writings of Georges Bataille. The historical photographs used in Leng Tch'e (found in Tears of Eros) were taken circa 1905 in Beijing to document the last public execution utilizing Leng Tch'e (hundred pieces) which dates from the Manchu dynasty. Given opium to extend the victim's life during the arduous process, the look of ecstasy on the man's face haunted Bataille:

"This photograph had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at once ecstatic and intolerable. I wonder what the Marquis de sade would have thought of this image, Sade who dreamed of torture, (which was inaccessible to him) but who never witnessed an actual torture session. In one way or another this image was incessantly before his eyes. But Sade would have wanted to see it in solitude, at least in relative solitude, without which the ecstatic and voluptuous effect is inconceivable. What I suddenly saw, and what imprisoned me in anguish — but which at the same time delivered me from it — was the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror. AND THIS IS MY INEVITABLE CONCLUSION TO A HISTORY OF EROTICISM."—Georges Bataille

From the Zorn FAQ:

The CAAAV (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence) targeted Zorn because of the graphic design of 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".

(The offensive art is now inside the box.)

Thirty-three of the 42 songs on Torture Garden are on Grand Guignol. The other 9 are on Naked City.

Here's a breakdown of Leng Tch'e.

[0:00] isolated bursts of drumming and guitar feedback, with moments of silence between the notes [7:15] guitar and drums pick up, consistent pounding and unbroken guitar noise [15:50] Yamataka Eye starts howling and screaming [20:35] Zorn's saxophone added [30:00] screams and sax end, song fades down to guitar and drums again, similar to the beginning of the song [31:35]

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Heretic

recorded 1991
released 1992

ONE DISC: twenty-four tracks, 57 minutes

Heretic is an experiment in improvised noise. The band breaks into pairs and trios to create twenty-four chunks of dissonant sound. Sometimes I think this album is a fascinating exploration of atonal music. Other times I think it's a lot of noisy crap.

I've written a quick summary of every song on the notes page.

The high points are Wayne Horvitz's cinematic keyboard work (tracks 3, 9, 11, 18) and the three tracks in which John Zorn and Yamatsuka Eye go berserk (4, 16, 19). The Zorn/Eye tracks are either painfully noisy or hilarious, depending on your sensibilities. (I think they're great fun, but my girlfriend runs out of the room when they come on.)

From a posting to rec.music.bluenote and alt.asian-movies, 20 Aug 1993:

I went to the Cinema Village during the Hong Kong film festival a few months ago, and John Zorn sat down in the seat next to me for ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA and SWORDSMAN 2 (both excellent of course).

I took the opportunity to clear up a question that may be of interest to some of you folks: the Naked City album HERETIC JEUX DES DAMES CRUELLES (Avant 1) was not a sountrack to an actual film — not when it was recorded anyway. But subsequently a film was in fact made that used the album as its soundtrack. I think Zorn said that it was by some friend of his, a Japanese porn director. He also indicated that it would be virtually impossible for me to find it. Probably true.

This is the motion picture soundtrack for Jeux des Dames Cruelles.

And what is Jeux des Dames Cruelles? I have no idea.

Judging from the photos in the CD booklet of women in corsets holding riding crops, I bet it's a pretentious S/M flick.

The Zorn FAQ says:

Is Heretic by Naked City really a soundtrack?

The Knitting Factory page says "Heretic is an experimental narrative in the form of an extended trailer. A very funny take on psychotherapy starring Karen Finley."

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Radio

recorded April 1992
released 1993

ONE DISC: nineteen tracks, 58 minutes

Radio is all about combining different styles of music. In 19 tracks, the band references the musical styles of over 60 musicians, paying tribute to each one by blending them together.

The combinations come in three forms. The first is block form, where the music shifts from one style to another throughout the song. For example, the song begins with funk, changes to bluegrass, then to jazz, then to something else. Most of the styles are aggressive and loud. The moments of silence that pop up here and there make everything else seem even more noisy. The final track, American Psycho, covers over twelve styles in six minutes.

The second form is the blend: two or more styles played at the same time. On Metaltov, Jewish folk music is played as heavy metal. It's a funny song, something you've probably never heard before.

The third form is a single style for an entire song. In this case, the song is a block of music within the rest of the album. Without the context of the CD, it's just another song. Party Girl, for example, is played straight — removed from the rest of the album, it sounds like a Little Feat song.

Using the title Radio, you can imagine that you're turning the dial from one station to another, picking up all kinds of different styles of music, cutting songs off to get to another station, and starting up in the middle of a new song. If Zorn wanted to make the concept obvious, he could have put a little radio static between the cuts. But he didn't.

Zorn: That's the most important thing to me — abrupt changes, very cleanly executed. One world to the next, never staying on one thing for a long period of time. Always defining a certain thing and then moving onto something else very quickly.

Zorn: You could call it stealing, you could call it quoting, you could call it a lot of different things. I'd hear a sound element in a Bartok section and I'd say, "That's sounds neat," so I'd take that section out of the score and transcribe it into my own notation. Then I'd hear an Elliott Carter theme that I thought was neat, so I'd take that out of the score and put it someplace else. And then I'd have my transitions . . .

I write music with the TV on or with music playing, and I work things out. If I hear something on the TV, like in a commerical or something, I'll just stick it in. The same thing with records. In a lot of ways it's got a collage element to it, but it's not so much what you're taking as it is how you transform it into your own world.

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Absinthe

recorded December 1992
released December 1993

ONE DISC: nine tracks, 47 minutes

After six albums of noise, jazz, heavy metal, sound effects, and soundtrack themes, there was nothing left to do — except ambient music.

Half of the songs on Absinthe are very ambient. Fleurs Du Mal, for example, is nothing more than four minutes of low rumbling. On Val de Travers, Bill Frisell plays isolated guitar notes backed by wind chimes. And Notre Dame De L'Oubli is a series of simple, echoing tones on top of a heartbeat rhythm.

The other songs are more complex. You could call them "file-card ambient." They shift from one block to the next, alternating between sound effects and minimalist music. Une Correspondance begins with a droning sound backed by clattering metal. Chimes and sleigh bells come in, the sound shifts to a low hum, and it ends with gongs, flying saucer effects, and distant bell tolls.

La Fee Verte features footsteps, echoing guitar, thunder, bass guitar notes over a sinister keyboard sound, reversed voices, and sound effects that summon up images of ghosts and water.

The last track, Rend Fou, is the final moment of the final album. It's Naked City at its most abstract, challenging, and weird: six minutes of static.

Zorn: With the seven albums of Naked City we explored what we could and we made a great deal of progress. But it's like getting to the terminus, arriving at a place that cannot go beyond. I started listening to other kinds of music and I saw that there was no reason to go on working with these musicians.

How many years of working together were they? Six, seven, I don't know exactly, anyway years and years spent together. Now I feel the need to write music for other ensembles, in other contexts, with new ideas. So the Naked City project has come to an end, like all projects. They have a beginning and an end.

solo albums . masada . naked city . soundtracks . game pieces . chamber . painkiller . footnotes

all of this Zorn stuff is
© 2004 Scott Maykrantz
except the quotes and the artwork