|
Zorn again! >> Avant-improviser and agent provocateur John Zorn returns to this year's Victoriaville Festival to prove himself a legit composer. Can his new, neoclassical chops finally get him the props? by CHRIS YURKIW
It's not unusual to find John Zorn a little difficult to understand. Twenty years after he began what would become a leading role in the famed "downtown" avant-garde music scene of New York, and some 10 years after he broke into the world's wider consciousness with major-label releases like The Big Gundown, Spy Vs Spy and Naked City, seasoned music writers are still forced to do things like review three of his projects at a time to keep up with his ultra-prolific output, and to begin such endeavours with lines like, "Whatever it is that John Zorn does." (The Wire, April 1996). What is unusual is that John Zorn is making such a statement at all--not because he's given to uncharacteristic understatement but because he's making it to a seasoned music writer. Ten years ago, when the media anointed him poster boy for the avant-set, Zorn stopped doing interviews. The poster boy was often portrayed as the bad boy; good for magazine sales but no fun at all for a subject who truly cares about the music. "It seems like every time I open my big mouth I get misunderstood, I get misrepresented, I get misquoted, and the information I give [the media] is sensationalized," says Zorn. "Many times they've made me into an asshole because I have strong opinions about things. And I just got tired of shooting myself in the foot, in a sense, and getting in the way of people's appreciation of what I'm doing by talking to people who refuse to understand. So I just stopped talking completely. But once in a while it's fun." >>>
John Zorn has granted this interview because h
But this year Zorn is especially appreciative of Victoriaville artistic director Michel Levasseur's efforts to get him out of the Lower East Side and into the Bois-Francs, because Zorn is mounting a new, eight- to 12-member ensemble these days to perform material he's dubbed Modern Chamber Music--something that's expensive to tour and features Zorn not as a performer but director/conductor of the group. On the surface, it's an about-face from the rock format of Naked City and the frantic free jazz of Masada, but Zorn always has multiple projects on the go. (His jazz-hardcore trio Painkiller is still active, for example, with bassist Bill Laswell, former Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris and himself on alto sax scheduled to play the Jazz Fest in July.) There are just as many influences going on in what Zorn calls an "all-inclusive piece" on the Victoriaville program like "Duras: Duchamp" as the blender-mix of Naked City. Also, Zorn delights in giving something the genteel title of Modern Chamber Music only to fill it with live electroacoustics and structured improvisation. And by dedicating less time to touring and more to staying in New York and writing "more classically oriented compositions," Zorn has come full circle, back to the traditions of the formal training of his youth when he was first inspired by "American maverick composers" such as Charles Ives, Harry Partch and John Cage. "Sometimes I get the feeling that people just don't see me as a composer," says Zorn, "but it's what I've always been since I was eight years old. Maybe because I play the saxophone it's easy for people to just think of me as a performer. I've always thought of myself as a composer, but the world has had a hard time looking at me as a composer because a lot of what I compose is controversial." >>> When John Zorn was a restless, teenage student of neoclassical composition at Webster College in St. Louis during the early '70s, he took refuge in his discovery of free jazz. From that point on, Zorn has grappled with the relationship between formal composition and controlled improvisation from various angles. In the late '70s and early '80s he wrote "game pieces"--sets of rules and cues with titles like Lacrosse, Hockey and Archery which gave a structure but no limits on content for the players. He calls the now-defunct Naked City a "compositional workshop" that explored the instrumentation of sax, guitar, keyboard, bass, drums. And Masada, his sax/trumpet/bass/drums group that has morphed, these days, into the Masada String Trio, was a challenge for him to "write great melodies" within the classic jazz improv structure of head-solos-trade-fours-head, and based on traditional Yiddish scales. "Restricting yourself like that, I think, is the secret of longevity as a composer," says Zorn. But the vital, wild card is always improvisation, and Zorn says that even within the more formal structure of his latest, classically oriented pieces, the contribution of his players is crucial. "I think improvisation is actually in every kind of music to different degrees, and that's kind of what I'm getting at here... I think there's always that kind of interaction in good performance. There's always improvisation if it's alive." For those who still crave the crazed and totally improvised Zorn, Victoriaville proffers a second concert that finds Zorn the performer back on stage with sax in mouth, accompanied by Faith No More and Mr. Bungle buddy Mike Patton on vocals and longtime collaborator Ikue Mori on electronic percussion. But despite the superficial differences between that trio and the Modern Chamber Music octet, between the John Zorn who's been infamously influenced by Carl Stalling's cartoon music and the John Zorn who writes a memorial piece for Leonard Bernstein, there's always a continuity of purpose--of blissful musical impurity that angers as many as it pleases. "The rock music that I've created is not really rock music," says Zorn, "it's a weird freak. The punk music that I've created isn't really punk music. Even my music that is related to jazz doesn't belong in the jazz lexicon. Masada is not a great jazz band--those pieces are not going to be performed by jazz players in the future. They're going to be played by Jewish bands for weddings! And I think that's a product of bringing all these different influences into what I do, and just the weird brain that I have where I just can't do anything that's entirely straight. I have to twist it a little bit. "But the fact of the matter is I have been derided a lot, and I'm really not surprised. In a sense I expected it, and in a certain sense I'm very proud of it--that I've created things that have upset people, or things that people have misunderstood. But I'll tell you--between you and me, bottom line--of course I want people to like what I'm doing, I want people to appreciate it. I mean, the music is out there to be enjoyed, but it's not always enjoyed! Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh! "I enjoy it! Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh!" John Zorn directs an octet through his Modern Chamber Music at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville next Saturday, May 16 ($26). Zorn performs on Sunday, May 17, in trio with Mike Patton and Ikue Mori ($24). Tickets at Admission, Festival info at (819) 752-7912
|
"Sometimes you get the feeling like you're misunderstood," John Zorn tells me, "especially when you do things that are difficult to understand--a little unusual."
e cares deeply about the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, which has made the native New Yorker a kind of centrepiece this year by including two different Zorn performances for its 15th anniversary edition. In the past, Zorn has brought early performances of his two key groups to Victoriaville--Naked City in 1988 and Masada in 1995--and it's been fitting for the stature of both the Festival and the man himself.