About
John Zorn (born September 2, 1953) is an American composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist, and multi-instrumentalist with hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, and producer across a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and improvised music. He incorporates diverse styles in his compositions, which he identifies as avant-garde or experimental. Zorn was described by Down Beat as "one of our most important composers".
Zorn established himself within the New York City downtown music movement in the mid-1970s, performing with musicians across the sonic spectrum and developing experimental methods of composing new music. After releasing albums on several independent US and European labels, Zorn signed with Elektra Nonesuch and received wide acclaim with the release of The Big Gundown, an album reworking the compositions of Ennio Morricone. He attracted further attention worldwide with the release of Spillane in 1987 and Naked City in 1990. After spending almost a decade travelling between Japan and the US, he made New York his permanent base and established his own record label, Tzadik, in the mid-1990s.
Tzadik enabled Zorn to maintain independence from the mainstream music industry and ensured the continued availability of his growing catalog of recordings, allowing him to prolifically record and release new material, issuing several new albums each year, as well as promoting the work of many other musicians. Zorn has led the hardcore bands Naked City and Painkiller, the Jewish music-inspired jazz quartet Masada, composed 613 pieces as part of the three Masada songbooks that have been performed by an array of groups, composed concert music for classical ensembles and orchestras, and produced music for opera, sound installations, film and documentary. Zorn has undertaken many tours of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, often performing at festivals with many other musicians and ensembles that perform his diverse output.
Early life and career
Early life
John Zorn was born in New York City and learned piano, guitar and flute as a child. His family had diverse musical tastes: his mother, Vera (née Studenski; 1918–1999), listened to classical and world music, his father, Henry Zorn (1913–1992), was interested in jazz, French chansons, and country music, and his older brother collected doo-wop, and 1950s rock and roll records.
Zorn attended the United Nations International School from kindergarten to high school associating with school friends from many different cultures. He spent his teenage years exploring classical music, film music, and, "listening to The Doors and playing bass in a . He also acquired an interest in experimental and avant-garde music after buying a record by Mauricio Kagel in 1968 at the age of fifteen. He taught himself orchestration and counterpoint by transcribing scores and studied composition under Leonardo Balada.
Zorn started playing the saxophone after discovering Anthony Braxton's album For Alto (1969) when he was studying composition at Webster College (now Webster University) in St. Louis, Missouri, where he attended classes taught by Oliver Lake. While still at Webster, he incorporated elements of free jazz, avant-garde and experimental music, film scores, performance art and the cartoon scores of Carl Stalling into his first recordings which were later released as First Recordings 1973(1995).
Zorn dropped out of college and, following a stint on the West Coast, moved to Manhattan where he gave concerts in his apartment and other small NY venues, playing saxophone and a variety of reeds, duck calls, tapes, and other instruments. Zorn immersed himself in the underground art scene, assisting Jack Smith with his performances and attending plays by Richard Foreman. He founded a performance art project called the Theatre of Musical Optics in 1975 and became a major participant in the downtown music scene as a composer, performer, and producer of music that challenged the confines of any single musical genre.
Early composition
Zorn's early major compositions included several game pieces described as "complex systems harnessing improvisers in flexible compositional formats". [28] These compositions "involved strict rules, role playing, prompters with flashcards, all in the name of melding structure and improvisation in a seamless fashion". Zorn's game pieces were often titled after sports, and include Track & Field (1974), Baseball (1976), Lacrosse (1976), Dominoes (1977), Curling (1977), Golf (1977), Hockey (1978), Cricket (1978), Fencing (1978), Pool (1979), and Archery (1979), several of which were recorded and originally released on Eugene Chadbourne's Parachute label, becoming the first albums under Zorn's leadership.
His most enduring game piece is Cobra, composed in 1984 and first released on album in 1987 and in subsequent versions in 1992 , 1994 and 2002 , and revisited in performance many times. In the early 1980s, Zorn was heavily engaged in improvised performance which included "blowing duck calls in buckets of water at fringe venues" as both a solo performer and with other like-minded artists. Zorn's first solo saxophone (and duck call) recordings were originally released in two volumes as The Classic Guide to Strategy in 1983 and 1986 on the Lumina label. Zorn's early small group improvisations are documented on Locus Solus (1983) which featured Zorn with various combinations of other improvisers including Christian Marclay, Arto Lindsay, Wayne Horvitz, Ikue Mori, and Anton Fier. Ganryu Island featured a series of duets by Zorn with Michihiro Sato on shamisen, which received limited release on the Yukon label in 1984. Zorn has subsequently released these recordings as CDs on Tzadik making them more widely available than the original vinyl pressings.
Breakthrough recordings
Zorn's breakthrough recording was 1985's widely acclaimed The Big Gundown: John Zorn Plays the Music of Ennio Morricone, where Zorn offered radical arrangements of music from Ennio Morricone soundtracks, that incorporated elements of traditional Japanese music, soul jazz, and other genres. The Big Gundown was endorsed by Morricone himself, who said: "This is a record that has fresh, good and intelligent ideas. It is realization on a high level, a work done by a maestro with great science-fantasy and creativity ... Many people have done versions of my pieces, but no one has done them like this".
Zorn followed this with his second major-label release Spillane in 1987, which included performances by Albert Collins and the Kronos Quartet, and the extended title track, one of Zorn's file-card compositions, which featured text by Arto Lindsay set to an array of sonic film noir references. This method of combining composition and improvisation involved Zorn writing descriptions or ideas on file-cards and arranging them to form the piece. Zorn described the process in 2003:
I write in moments, in disparate sound blocks, so I find it convenient to store these events on filing cards so they can be sorted and ordered with minimum effort. Pacing is essential. If you move too fast, people tend to stop hearing the individual moments as complete in themselves and more as elements of a sort of cloud effect ... I worked 10 to 12 hours a day for a week, just orchestrating these file cards. It was an intense process.
Zorn's file-card method of organizing sound blocks into an overall structure largely depended on the musicians he chose, the way they interpreted what was written on the file cards, and their relationship with Zorn. "I'm not going to sit in some ivory tower and pass my scores down to the players." said Zorn,
I have to be there with them, and that's why I started playing saxophone, so that I could meet musicians. I still feel that I have to earn a player's trust before they can play my music. At the end of the day, I want players to say: this was fun—it was a lot of fucking work, and it's one of the hardest things I've ever done, but it was worth the effort.
Two other critically acclaimed releases on Nonesuch followed; Spy vs Spy in 1989, and Naked City in 1990, before Zorn left the label.