Redbird

recorded 1995
released 1995

The two tracks on this album are gentle and enigmatic, with some space between the notes. One of them is tuned low. The other is at a higher pitch. It feels like Zorn took a minimalist, repetitive instrumental and peeled it apart, allowing you to listen to the high and the low parts independently.

The first track, Dark River, is a nine-minute solo for bass drums. It's too low to hear without distorting my speakers. If I turn it up loud enough to hear it, my speakers crackle and pop with every note. I like the song, but I think it was recorded poorly. (Then again, maybe I just need better speakers.)

The title track sounds a lot like Morton Feldman's Piano and String Quartet. I'm not complaining. Anything that sounds like Morton Feldman's Piano and String Quartet is worth listening to. The difference is in the instruments (Zorn uses percussion, viola, cello and harp), and the feel of it — you can hear echoes of the more somber Masada songs in here, as well as a hint of Memento Mori (from String Quartets and Cartoon S/M).

Over all, this is a good album, but not something to buy right away if you're getting into Zorn. This is one of the few Zorn albums that expands on a single theme. Typically, his albums cover a dozen themes a minute. It's easy-listening, a little bit too repetitive, and not typical of his work.

[The album is] introduced by a nearly silent eight-minute percussion piece (played to zen perfection by James Pugliese). [The title track is inspired by] painter Agnes Martin, whose work's merciless calm is shared by the music. A chamber ensemble plays a single note or chord every few seconds, then lets it gradually decay; this process goes on for forty minutes. Depending on the amount of attention you pay to it, Redbird can be either soothing or maddening. In any case, when a composer who made his name with his short attention span pulls off something sustained this long and this well, it's a real achievement.

Duras, Duchamp

recorded April and May 1997
released 1997

The first tribute is divided into four sections — a long piece, a short piece, a long piece, and another short piece. Each of the long pieces builds up slowly and beautifully, making the most of a minimalist composition that creates a mood of concentrated tranquility. The shorter pieces have the same tone, but they are too short to develop. They feel like punctuation to the longer pieces.

It's played with violin, piano, organ, and percussion. Anthony Coleman's piano is particularly good here. This music has the same feel as Redbird and Filmworks X.

As a whole, the song works very well. Compared to other minimalist Zorn compositions, it's his most rewarding. It's hard to stop listening to Duras over and over all day long.

Etant Donnes (69 Paroxyms for Marcel Duchamp) is a collection of sounds created with household objects and tools, including blocks of wood, stones, a saw, and someone drinking and coughing. Cello and violin are weaved into the sound effects. It feels like dramatic background music for a drunken carpenter. It's not a song, really. You could hardly call it music. It's very weird, but also fun.

Aporias

recorded 1998 ?
released September 1998

On Aporias, John Zorn has employed a 75-piece orchestra and a boys' choir to perform half an hour of music in ten movements. Each movement is a collection of brief compositional blocks, with no obvious progression from one block to the next. At first, it feels like he took about 200 tiny chunks of music and strung them together randomly. But as you listen to the album over and over, you hear subtle themes repeated throughout the piece.

The musicians play alone or in pairs, taking turns. First you hear a piano, then strings. The piano stops as a flute comes in, the flute fades, then the strings stop and you hear a bell. Then there's a bit of percussion, clarinets play a few notes, the percussion ends, and the strings return for a moment. Etcetera. If more than three musicians play at once, the volume rises and the music starts to split apart.

Some of the movements have a vague theme. Drammatico, for example, uses the string section to play tension-filled music straight out of a Morricone soundtrack. Languendo is made up of low notes on drums, echoing piano, and bassoons. Risentito is composed of rapid handclaps and piano.

Although the music is made up of parts, it flows. Each musician comes in at the perfect moment, keeping the pace. Every time you hear it, you become more familiar with the blocks — you start to feel a pattern — but you always discover something new. By the tenth time you hear it, you feel a sense of familiarity and discovery at the same time.

Aporias is my favorite chamber music album by John Zorn. It was one of my earliest Zorn albums. At first, I hated it. But then I learned how he built the music and I found a lot of depth in each movement. He references a lot of his influences here, but in very subtle ways.

If you are frustrated by abstract music, this album isn't for you. But if you want a good example of Zorn's classical side, this is the best introduction.

The String Quartets

recorded December 1998 to May 1999
released July 1999

These four quartets are constructed from dozens of musical parts. Each block is blended into the next, creating a jump-cut style a lot like Naked City. But it's played in a classical vein, so it feels a little grim and academic.

Cat o' Nine Tails is a collection of cartoon themes. Zorn calls it "a piece with a lot of drama and humor and many musical games hidden in the web of its inner details."

The Dead Man is indexed in thirteen parts, each about a minute long. The parts seem to have no real connection except that they are abstract. You can think of them as anti-melodies of sound. "This set of thirteen miniatures contains perhaps the most overt S/M subtexts in all my work. Composed in the same year as Torture Garden, I have always imagined these two suites as soundtracks to necessarily short S/M scenes."

Memento Mori is . . . long. And hard to digest. Zorn describes it as a "hermetic work that continues to defy comprehension by most listeners. I feel that I have come upon something really new here and if you let it, it will take you by the hand on a unique and emotional journey." You have to listen to this song about ten times before you can even begin to get it. It's a real work of art, but it's almost completely inaccessible.

Kol Nidre "is sung to open the services on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. It has nothing in common with the traditional Jewish melody sung by cantors during this solemn ceremony. Late Beethoven and Arvo Part seem more like references here. It was written at one sitting in less than half an hour."

Cartoon S/M

recorded 1998, 1999, and 2000
released November 2000

The first disc is inspired by the work of Carl Stalling, the man who wrote music for Bugs Bunny cartoons. Cat o' Nine Tails is played by a string quartet, Carny is a song for solo piano, and For Your Eyes Only is played by a twenty-piece orchestra. All three are built from blocks of familiar cartoon themes, with a complex structure that might remind you of Zorn's game pieces. Each song is about fifteen minutes long, so you have to listen to them a lot before it all sinks in.

Zorn: When I was in college in St. Louis I was working on my thesis on the cartoon music of Carl W. Stalling, who wrote for Warner Bros. The guy is really a genius. When you listen to the music abstracted from the visuals of the cartoons, it's amazing. That's the prime period, the 1940s, for Warner Bros. I think they really did an incredible jump in film techniques.

The second disc has sixteen tracks, but only four songs. The first song, The Dead Man, is indexed on the CD into thirteen one-minute parts. This is the string quartet counterpart to Naked City's "hardcore miniatures" — each minute explores one or two styles, with an emphasis on sound instead of melody.

This is followed by two of his most complex songs, Music for Children and Memento Mori. Both songs are very difficult to describe — and to listen to.

Both discs end with a haunting and ceremonial song called Kol Nidre. It's presented here in two arrangements, string quartet (disc one) and clarinet quartet (disc two).

Madness, Love and Mysticism

composed 1999
recorded late 2000 and early 2001
released May 2001

In 2001, Zorn released this trio of minimalist chamber music pieces. The first, Le Momo, is a sixteen-minute "ritual of exorcism and possession inspired by the works of visionary 20th century shaman Antonin Artaud." It is played by Jennifer Choi (violin) and Stephen Drury (piano).

The second song (untitled) is a fifteen-minute solo cello piece played by Erik Friedlander. It is "dedicated to Joseph Cornell, the hermetic New York artist whose delirious box constructions mix innocent nostalgia with uncomfortable personal obsessions."

The third, Amour Fou, is twenty minutes long, played by piano, cello, and violin (using the musicians from the two previous songs). According to the liner notes, it "explores love — obsessive love, mad love, doomed love."

I couldn't get into this album until I imagined that each song is the soundtrack to a short film. I used the music as a narrator of the story, describing the actions (and maybe the thoughts) of the characters. There are also moments where the musicians create sound effects, like dripping water or a ringing phone.

Songs from the Hermetic Theater

recorded March 2001
released June 2001

This is the worst Zorn album I've ever heard. That title was once held by Lacrosse, but Lacrosse has an edge — it has a certain kind of depth to it, a complexity that makes you want to understand it.

Songs from the Hermetic Theater is different. It's all on the surface. It's an album of failed experiments and bad gimmicks. The first and third tracks are nothing but static. The first, American Magus, is listed as "electronic music." The other, The Nerve Key, is called "computer music." Both are a waste of time. I've heard plenty of abstract, this-isn't-going-anywhere music from Zorn before — and plenty of noise labeled as music, too — but this time it doesn't work. It isn't creative, unique, or interesting.

The second song, In the Very Eye of Night, begins with filmmaker Maya Deren talking about her work. That lasts for about a minute. When she stops, a low, windy drone comes up. It continues for 10 minutes, shifting a little bit as the sounds of water and a glass bowl are added.

In this case, you can say that something is happening, but the song is too simple. Maya Deren's monologue gets old after the second or third time. And the droning sound is too flat. Zorn has composed songs out of wind before (on Filmworks VI and Music for Children) but this time it's just filler.

The final track is described as "a bizarre meditation on the work of artist/shaman Joseph Beuys, scored for string orchestra and an incredible array of homemade sound devices." In other words, while violins play, Zorn makes sounds with metal pipes, an electric fan, bricks, a mason jar, vacuum tubes, a rubber ball, a power saw, etc.

Zorn already did this on Duras Duchamp. In the song Etant Donnes, Zorn made noises with household objects for 13 minutes while minimalist music played in the background. This time he's done the same thing for 16 minutes with a different set of objects. Both songs are sort of silly and pointless, but at least the first one was unique.

Chimeras

recorded January 3 and 4, 2003
released April 2003

In 2003, Zorn released this chamber piece "scored for a Pierrot Lunaire ensemble plus percussion." It is "divided into two books, six movements each." (He's added an interlude near the end.) Each movement is between one and five minutes long.

Like most of his chamber work, this piece is challenging and intricate. To get it, you have to listen over and over, looking for patterns, trying to become so familiar with it that it eventually comes together and makes some kind of sense.

Unfortunately, after hearing this album over ten times, I still don't get it. The vocals ruin it. The singer's voice rises and falls on seemingly random notes, distracting you from the music.

The music is good, but derivative. I can hear echoes of Aporias, Music for Children, and Kristallnacht throughout the piece. Zorn employs some of his most common themes for chamber music — a quick cartoon passage, a moment of silence, something violently loud, a brief repeated melody, sustained notes on flute and organ, and the use of percussion to accent it all.

Without the singing, this album would probably be as subtle and strange as Aporias. But I can't get past that voice. It sounds like an opera singer mimicking Morse code for half an hour.

In the CD booklet, Zorn says Chimeras "is realized here by some of the best musicians I have ever encountered and it is the musicians, as always, who have truly brought this music to life." That's true. Listening to this album, it's easy to imagine lesser musicians screwing up the intricate, carefully- balanced music. To make a 30-minute piece of musical blocks flow, the musicians have to be extremely talented. They all play beautifully.