John Zorn (born September 2, 1953) is an American composer, conductor, producer, arranger and saxophonist who "deliberately resists category". Zorn's avant-garde compositions and experimental improvisations meld jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, contemporary, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, Jewish and world music performed by "often unexpected groups of players.. getting startling, unrepeatable results". Rolling Stone noted that Zorn has operated almost entirely outside the mainstream, he's gradually asserted himself as one of the most influential musicians of our time".
Zorn re-arranged and radically orchestrated Ennio Morricone's spaghetti Western, gangster and war movie themes for The Big Gundown, released on Nonesuch Records in 1986 to critical acclaim. His following albums, Spillane (1987) and Naked City (1990) continued to merge styles and challenge formats. His alternative hardcore influenced bands, Naked City and Painkiller gained him wider exposure in the early 1990s.
Zorn's extensive recordings have been released through his independent Tzadik Records since 1995. Zorn has composed concert music for classical ensembles and orchestras, for opera, sound installations, film and documentary. His live performances are often highlighted at festivals featuring different ensembles interpreting his diverse repertoire.
Early life and career
Early studies
John Zorn was raised in Utopia, Queens, and studied piano, guitar and flute at the United Nations International School. Zorn's 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 spent his teenage years "listening to The Doors and playing bass in a surf band" while also exploring the experimental and avant-garde music of György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel and Karlheinz Stockhausen and listening to cartoon soundtracks and film scores.
Zorn taught himself orchestration and counterpoint by transcribing scores and studied composition under Leonardo Balada before enrolling at Webster College where he attended lectures by Oliver Lake. While 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 and discovered Anthony Braxton's groundbreaking solo album For Alto which inspired him to take up the instrument. "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." Zorn immersed himself in the underground art scene, assisting filmmaker Jack Smith with his performances and attending plays by Richard Foreman.
Early compositions and recordings
In the mid-1970s Zorn was performing experimental downtown music in New York, collaborating with other artists to develop improvisational and compositional strategies he commenced recording by the end of the decade. The 1980s saw him touring internationally and led to further independent releases in Europe and Japan before Zorn established the Tzadik record label in 1995.
Zorn's early major compositions included many game pieces described as "complex systems harnessing improvisers in flexible compositional formats". These compositions "involved strict rules, role playing, prompters with flashcards, all in the name of melding structure and improvisation in a seamless fashion". His most enduring game piece is Cobra, composed in 1984 and first recorded 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 improvisation as both a solo performer and with other like-minded artists. 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 reissued these early recordings.
thumb|Zorn in 1990
Breakthrough recordings
Zorn's breakthrough came in 1986 with the acclaimed The Big Gundown released on Nonesuch Records. The album was endorsed by composer Ennio Morricone, 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 with Spillane in 1987, his second major-label release, featuring performances by Albert Collins, the Kronos Quartet, and the sprawling title track, an early "file-card" composition. 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:
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
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 who stated "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." and the News for Lulu trio featuring Zorn, Bill Frisell and George E. Lewis performing compositions by Clark, Kenny Dorham, Freddie Redd, and Hank Mobley. He recorded Spy vs Spy featuring hardcore punk versions of Ornette Coleman's compositions in 1989. According to Cook, "Zorn's admirers often consider him a masterful bebop alto player, but when he does perform in something approaching that style his playing has little of the tension and none of the relaxation of the great beboppers, often sounding more strangulated than anything". While interest from Hollywood was not forthcoming, eventually independent filmmakers like Sheila McLaughlin and Raúl Ruiz sought his talents. Filmmaker Walter Hill rejected his music for a film to be called Looters. Although Zorn's score did not make the final cut he used the money he received to establish the record label, Tzadik, on which he released Filmworks II: Music for an Untitled Film by Walter Hill in 1995. Zorn also produced a series of commercial soundtracks for the advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy, including one directed by Jean-Luc Godard, a long-term Zorn inspiration. Zorn used his film commissions to record new ensembles like Masada and the Masada String Trio. From the mid-1990s, Zorn composed film music for independent films dealing with BDSM and LGBT culture, documentaries exploring the Jewish experience, and films about outsider artists. In 2013, after releasing 25 volumes in his Filmworks Series, Zorn announced that he would no longer be releasing music for film.
Hardcore: Naked City, Painkiller and beyond
Zorn established Naked City in 1988 as a "compositional workshop" to test the limitations of a rock band format. Featuring Zorn (saxophone), Bill Frisell (guitars), Fred Frith (bass), Wayne Horvitz (keyboards), Joey Baron (drums), and vocalist Yamatsuka Eye (and later Mike Patton), Naked City blended Zorn's appreciation of hardcore punk and grindcore bands like Agnostic Front and Napalm Death with influences like film music, country or jazz often in a single composition. The band performed pieces by film composers Ennio Morricone, John Barry, Johnny Mandel and Henry Mancini and modern classicists Alexander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, Charles Ives, and Olivier Messiaen and recorded heavy metal and ambient albums.
In 1991, Zorn formed Painkiller with Bill Laswell on bass and Mick Harris on drums. Painkiller's first two releases, Guts of a Virgin (1991) and Buried Secrets (1992), also featured short grindcore and free jazz-inspired compositions. They released their first live album, Rituals: Live in Japan, in 1993, followed by the double CD Execution Ground (1994), which featured longer dub and ambient-styled pieces. A second live album, Talisman: Live in Nagoya, was released in 2002 and the band was featured on Zorn's 50th Birthday Celebration Volume 12 (2005) with Hamid Drake replacing Harris on drums and guest vocalist Mike Patton.
Both bands attracted worldwide interest, particularly in Japan, where Zorn had relocated following a three-month residency in Tokyo.
thumb|Moonchild at the [[Barbican Centre|Barbican: Mike Patton (facing away) and Trevor Dunn]]
In 2006, Zorn formed Moonchild with Mike Patton, Trevor Dunn, and Joey Baron as "a compositional challenge, as a song cycle, songs without words" as he decided "I want to work with Patton more; Patton was very hungry to do more work together. ‘OK, so let's start it with just bass, drums, and voice". Rolling Stone said that Moonchild was "a band that, much like Naked City, mutated radically across its lifespan as Zorn kept raising his compositional bar. While it touched on similar extremes as that group... its episodes are more sustained, its structures more conventionally songlike" noting "For the first five of Moonchild's seven albums, released from 2006 through 2014, Patton utilized his full whisper-to-scream range while operating entirely without lyrics". Zorn started working on compositions that drew on chamber music arrangements of strings, percussion and electronic instruments. Elegy, a suite dedicated to Jean Genet, was released in 1992.
The establishment of Tzadik allowed him to release many compositions which he had written over the previous two decades for classical ensembles. Zorn's earliest released classical composition, Christabel (1972) for five flutes, first appeared on Angelus Novus in 1998. He credits the composition of his 1988 string quartet Cat O' Nine Tails (commissioned and released by the Kronos Quartet on Short Stories) to awakening him to the possibilities of writing for classical musicians. This composition also appeared on The String Quartets (1999) and Cartoon S/M (2000) along with variations on "Kol Nidre", inspired by the Jewish prayer of atonement which was written at the same time as the first Masada Book.
Aporias: Requia for Piano and Orchestra (1998) was Zorn's first full-scale orchestral release featuring pianist Stephen Drury, the Hungarian Radio Children's Choir and the American Composers Orchestra conducted by Dennis Russell Davies.
Much of Zorn's classical work is dedicated or inspired by artists who have influenced him:
- Duras: Duchamp (1997) contains tributes to Marguerite Duras and Olivier Messiaen
- Songs from the Hermetic Theatre (2001) features compositions dedicated to Harry Smith, Joseph Beuys, and Maya Deren
- Madness, Love and Mysticism (2001) featured Le Mômo, inspired by Antonin Artaud, and Untitled, dedicated to Joseph Cornell
- Chimeras (2001) was based on Arnold Schoenberg's atonal composition, Pierrot Lunaire
Several of Zorn's later concert works drew inspiration from mysticism and the works of Aleister Crowley in particular; Magick (2004) featured a group called the Crowley Quartet. A 2009 performance of the album's centerpiece Necronomicon was described as "... frenetic vortexes of violent, abrasive motion, separated by eerily becalmed, suspenseful sections with moody, even prayerful melodies. The music is sensational and evocative, but never arbitrary; you always sense a guiding hand behind the mayhem".
Later works expanded to include vocal and operatic works; Mysterium released in 2005 featured Frammenti del Sappho for female chorus; Rituals (2005) featured Zorn's opera composed for the Bayreuth Opera Festival in 1998; and La Machine de l'Être composed in 2000, premiered at the New York City Opera in 2011, and recorded for the 2012 album Music and Its Double.
Zorn's concert works have been performed all over the world and he has received commissions from the New York Philharmonic, Brooklyn Philharmonic and BBC Radio 3.
Masada books
Conversations with Joey Baron led Zorn to explore and embrace Jewish culture. A further file-card composition Kristallnacht (1992) reflected on the Night of Broken Glass that violently and destructively targeted Jews in Germany and Austria in 1938.
Several movements used the Phrygian dominant and Ukrainian Dorian scales common to klezmer music. Zorn set himself the task of writing 100 compositions using the scale within a year.
Book One
thumb|[[Masada (band)|Masada: Joey Baron (drums), Greg Cohen (bass), Dave Douglas (trumpet), John Zorn (alto saxophone)]]
In 1993 Zorn engaged Baron along with Dave Douglas (trumpet) and Greg Cohen (double bass) to provide musical cues for Joe Chappelle's first film Thieves Quartet (later collected on Filmworks III: 1990–1995) and established the first Masada group to perform his recent compositions using the instrumental lineup and improvisational approach of Ornette Coleman's pioneering free jazz quartet.
Within three years, the number of compositions had grown to 205 and became known as the first Masada Book. Zorn explained:
In 1996, Zorn released Bar Kokhba featuring Masada compositions recorded by a rotating group of musicians. Two ensembles arose from this album: the Masada String Trio, composed of Greg Cohen (bass), Mark Feldman (violin), and Erik Friedlander (cello); and the Bar Kokhba Sextet which added Marc Ribot (guitar), Cyro Baptista (percussion), and Joey Baron (drums), both of which were featured on 1998's The Circle Maker. The Masada String Trio were also featured on Zorn's Filmworks series, as part of his 50th Birthday Celebration, and released two albums as part of the Book of Angels project, Azazal and Haborym. In 2003, Zorn formed Electric Masada, a band featuring Zorn, Baptista, Baron, and Ribot, along with Trevor Dunn (bass), Ikue Mori (electronics), Jamie Saft (keyboards), and Kenny Wollesen (drums) releasing their debut live album from Zorn's 50th Birthday Concert series and a double live CD recorded in 2004. In 2019, Zorn formed the New Masada Quartet with Julian Lage (guitar), Jorge Roeder (bass), and Kenny Wollesen (drums).
A Tenth Anniversary Series of Masada recordings was released by Zorn beginning in 2003. The series featured five albums of Masada themes including Masada Guitars by Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell, and Tim Sparks; Masada Recital by Mark Feldman and Sylvie Courvoisier; Masada Rock by Rashanim; and two albums featuring various artists, Voices in the Wilderness and The Unknown Masada. Zorn explained: