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Zorn List Digest      Wednesday, October 14 1998      Volume 02 : Number 499



In this issue:
-
       Re: Another Zorn album...
       re: context
       Re: Anyone got a clue what happened to the movie
       Guitar / Robert Musso
       Re: Guitar / Robert Musso
       new york eye and ear control
       Re: Guitar / Robert Musso
       Re: Guitar / Robert Musso
       RE: God
       Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
       Re: context (was Re: Jewish) (Oops forgot the subject)
       European/Modern bankrupt
       Re:
       Re: European/Modern bankrupt
       cage question
       Re: Marc Ribot Interview
       re: European/Modern bankruptcy
       Re: Ayler
       Seeing Jazz

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 16:18:58 +0200 (MEST)
From: BJOERN <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Another Zorn album...

Frankco wrote:
> Contrary to MTV, however, the Dutch equivalent TMF is showing the video
> full-blown, any time of day. This quite illustrates the difference between
> the US and Europe as far as these things are concerned.
same with the Prodigy's video for "smack my bitch up" which was shown on
MTV only after midnight. on german music channels VIVA and VIVA II u could
see it all the time.

BJOERN


- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 10:11:41 -0400
From: Charles Jacobus <[e-mail]>
Subject: re: context

In response to:

> You make sense, William. This whole thing with
> context is a major *problem* I've had with Zorn's
> music from the beginning. Often times, I feel all
> Zorn's compositional basis is just new context
> for established ideas (ie his influences).

and:

> Speaking of that style and Zorn's context
> issue in particular what Pratt doesn't like
> about Zorn is precisely why I like him so
> much. As a visual artist who does more or
> less what Zorn does, I believe that the whole
> "postmodern" question is one of context. I
> think that collaging elements together does
> more to ask questions about "our" culture,
> than any "unified" work does, and that these
> are the questions that need to be asked at
> this point in history.

The idea that "poly-contextualism" is novel is the
scourge of our time.
Let's not forget that this kind of thing has been
going on forever in all of the arts (and other fields
too). History is full of examples of one (usually
dominant) culture borrowing or "appropriating" the
work/style of other cultures. There are a lot of
reasons for this. Perhaps most significantly, it
serves to validate the work of the newer dominant
culture. Denis, it might be helpful to ask exactly
what kinds of "questions" post-modernism
pretends to ask (or seek to answer).
This kind of activity can also be part of a natural,
creative process and is in this respect less about
validation than a way of paying homage. (I believe
someone mentioned Ives in this regard.) And I
believe this also helps explain some of what Zorn
(and others mentioned in this list) are doing.
Whether its good or not is something else. Some
of it is and some of it isn't.
Really don't mean to rant on and on...
Thanks.
Charles.



- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 10:22:15 -0500
From: James Hale <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Anyone got a clue what happened to the movie

Lang Thompson wrote:
>
> It was shown at the (Re)Soundings Festival in Atlanta last July, though it
> was rescheduled at the last moment so I wasn't able to see it.  As far as I
> know, none of Snow's films are available on video.  LT

Well, some were made under the auspices of the National Film Board of
Canada, which has released almost everything it made on video. Not sure
if they have a US distributor, but all NFB material is available in
Canada, either for rent or sale.

James Hale


- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 16:36:18 +0100
From: Stefan Verstraeten <[e-mail]>
Subject: Guitar / Robert Musso

Dear Listmembers,

As always, i saw some very interesting recommendations for guitar music.
But i wondered why nobody ever mentioned the guitarplayer Robert Musso.
Yes, he is the sound engineer for practically all the Laswell albums....
BUT he seems to be a very good guitar player as well.

Unfortunately, i have never heard one of his albums. Can someone give
some recommendations on this guy (perhaps Jeff Spirer)????? For example,
who is the Robert Musso All Star Band ???????

NP Divination (with Laraaji) (Thank you Jeff Spirer for the link where
to order this CD, it seems to be unobtainable here in Belgium, Europe)
- --
Stefan Verstraeten

- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 98 11:02:12 -0500
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Guitar / Robert Musso


     >Unfortunately, i have never heard one of his albums. Can someone give
     >some recommendations on this guy

     I enjoy his first (?) record, 'Absolute Music' on, as I recall, his
     own Mu Works label. Some of it is rather sing-songy ('Surakarta'), but
     in a catchy enough manner that you're likely to find yourself often
     whistling them. Guitar pyrotechnics are nicely subdued in favor of
     total sound. Not sure how easy it is to come by these days.

     His second release, 'Active Resonance', I found less interesting, more
     of a grab bag. Haven't heard anything under his own name since.

     Brian Olewnick





- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 12:34:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: Patrick Ivan Jenkins <[e-mail]>
Subject: new york eye and ear control

New York Eye and Ear Contro, a filml by Michael Snow is distributed in
Canada by the Canadian Filmmaker's Distribution Centre and is probably
distributed in the USA by either the Filmmaker's Cooperative in New York and/or
Canyon Cinema in San Francisco.

You can contact the Canadian Filmmaker's Distribution Centre at
[e-mail]. They have a website at http://www.cfmdc.org

Hope that this is useful.



- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 09:40:19 -0700
From: Jeff Spirer <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Guitar / Robert Musso

At 04:36 PM 10/12/98 +0100, Stefan Verstraeten wrote:

>As always, i saw some very interesting recommendations for guitar music.
>But i wondered why nobody ever mentioned the guitarplayer Robert Musso.
>Yes, he is the sound engineer for practically all the Laswell albums....
>BUT he seems to be a very good guitar player as well.
>
>Unfortunately, i have never heard one of his albums. Can someone give
>some recommendations on this guy (perhaps Jeff Spirer)????? For example,
>who is the Robert Musso All Star Band ???????

Bob put out three recordings under the name Transonic on the FAX label.
These are heavily processed, i.e., not a lot of distinct guitar.  He has
also appeared under the same name on at least one other CD that Bill
produced.  He has a new one on Wordsound and one coming out on an
undetermined label.

I would agree that _Absolute Music_ is the better of the earlier two under
his own name.  I believe that this was originally distributed by Bruce at
Downtown Music Gallery ([e-mail]) and it may be available there.
Maybe Mike from dmg can post on this.


Jeff Spirer
B&W Photos: http://www.pomegranates.com/frame/spirer/
Color and B&W Photos: http://www.hyperreal.org/~jeffs/gallery.html
Axiom/Material: http://www.hyperreal.org/axiom/

- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 14:39:37 -0500
From: Rich Williams <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Guitar / Robert Musso

Stefan Verstraeten wrote:
>
> Dear Listmembers,
>
> As always, i saw some very interesting recommendations for guitar music.
> But i wondered why nobody ever mentioned the guitarplayer Robert Musso.
> Yes, he is the sound engineer for practically all the Laswell albums....
> BUT he seems to be a very good guitar player as well.
>
> Unfortunately, i have never heard one of his albums. Can someone give
> some recommendations on this guy (perhaps Jeff Spirer)????? For example,
> who is the Robert Musso All Star Band ???????

    His 2 albums under his own name; Absolute Music and Active Resonance,
as well as the 3 recorded under the name Machine Gun, were on his
now-defunkt mu-works label. check the used bins, thats where you're most
likely to find them.
    The Machine Gun discs bear a conceptual resemblance to Last Exit, a bit
more rock influenced,  and the first 2 feature Sharrock on a couple of
cuts.
    Active Resonance is a fairly strait forward Rock/Funk disc. Its a
strange listen,  Musso plundered the vaults of Material drum tracks, and
then wrote new songs on top of them. I keep expecting to hear Memory
Serves.

RW


- -

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 03:58:31 GMT
From: [e-mail] (Al T)
Subject: RE: God

Nicholas of Cusanus. I've seen him quoted often but never read him. He's a
Christian mystic of, I believe, the early middles ages but I'm likely off a
number of centuries. He's also the guy who said, "God is a sphere whose center
is everywhere and circumference nowhere."

Al T

- ------------
re:
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 10:57:57 GMT0BST
From: DR S WILKIE <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: God

Al T mentioned:

God is simultaneous mutual implication of everything, quoted from
Nicholas of somewhere or other.  Any info on the author, or his
thought?  I like this in a Spinoza-Leibniz kind of way.

Sean Wilkie


- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 17:22:36 -0600
From: dennis summers <[e-mail]>
Subject: Message-Id: <[e-mail]>

>>... I think that collaging elements
>> together does more to ask questions about "our" culture, than any "unified"
>> work does, and that these are the questions that need to be asked  at this
>> point in history.

>Now I'm no expert on post-modernism but what questions are these?

In short, (because unfortunately I just don't have the time right now, and I
do apologize), the idea is that the "European/Modern" tradition in the arts
(across the boards) is bankrupt. That tradition supports a very specific
"white anglo-saxon" agenda that everything including the arts "improves" in
an evolutionary way, with the goal of being "superior" to that which came
before. This attitude even permeates "non-white" traditions such as jazz. Of
late many artists have suggested that by comparing other cultures or
subcultures to one another we can explore contrasts and commonalities.
Specifically in the case of Zorn, I see his work as more than simply
composing styles one after the other, that he asks us to see how they
interrelate in a range of musical _and_ especially cultural ways. I think
that many of us inadvertantly do this owing to our wide range of taste, i.e.
we'll play our Ornette disc and then our Hank Williams disk. But still after
many listens to the Naked City stuff, in particular the first disk, the
energy and the contrasts still get my blood boiling (in a good way). I think
this style is significantly different (not necessarily better) than what
composers like Dvorak (sp?) did when incorporating Hungarian folk tunes in
his symphonies. The actual "crash" of styles carries meaning above and
beyond all the other musical and technical issues. I hope this helps clarify
my opinion.

yours in zornocity --ds
***Quantum Dance Works***
****http://ic.net/~denniss****


- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 17:23:49 -0600
From: dennis summers <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: context (was Re: Jewish) (Oops forgot the subject)

>>... I think that collaging elements
>> together does more to ask questions about "our" culture, than any "unified"
>> work does, and that these are the questions that need to be asked  at this
>> point in history.

>Now I'm no expert on post-modernism but what questions are these?

In short, (because unfortunately I just don't have the time right now, and I
do apologize), the idea is that the "European/Modern" tradition in the arts
(across the boards) is bankrupt. That tradition supports a very specific
"white anglo-saxon" agenda that everything including the arts "improves" in
an evolutionary way, with the goal of being "superior" to that which came
before. This attitude even permeates "non-white" traditions such as jazz. Of
late many artists have suggested that by comparing other cultures or
subcultures to one another we can explore contrasts and commonalities.
Specifically in the case of Zorn, I see his work as more than simply
composing styles one after the other, that he asks us to see how they
interrelate in a range of musical _and_ especially cultural ways. I think
that many of us inadvertantly do this owing to our wide range of taste, i.e.
we'll play our Ornette disc and then our Hank Williams disk. But still after
many listens to the Naked City stuff, in particular the first disk, the
energy and the contrasts still get my blood boiling (in a good way). I think
this style is significantly different (not necessarily better) than what
composers like Dvorak (sp?) did when incorporating Hungarian folk tunes in
his symphonies. The actual "crash" of styles carries meaning above and
beyond all the other musical and technical issues. I hope this helps clarify
my opinion.

yours in zornocity --ds
***Quantum Dance Works***
****http://ic.net/~denniss****


- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 19:35:55 EDT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: European/Modern bankrupt

granted the outreach beyond European/Modern ideas is a good thing, but your
not really going to say that " 'European/Modern' tradition in the arts (across
the boards) is bankrupt." come on now, that's the stuff of lazy  grad students
trying to get their papers published by being "radical." the twentieth century
alone has produced so much 'European/Modern' theory that it has yet to be
digested, let alone discarded.

- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 19:34:38 -0400
From: Tom Pratt <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re:

> That tradition supports a very specific
> "white anglo-saxon" agenda that everything including the arts "improves" in
> an evolutionary way, with the goal of being "superior" to that which came
> before. This attitude even permeates "non-white" traditions such as jazz. Of
> late many artists have suggested that by comparing other cultures or
> subcultures to one another we can explore contrasts and commonalities.

Do these artists hold any regard for innovation? (You don't exactly make
this clear)

I think it is *very* important to compare and contrast other cultures
and subcultures but I believe these observations must be applied in a
way that produces a non-stagnant art. I nearly equate "innovative" with
"personal" (shit! Cage... *except* Cage) and I find this kind of
compare/contrast to be too objective.

> Specifically in the case of Zorn, I see his work as more than simply
> composing styles one after the other, that he asks us to see how they
> interrelate in a range of musical _and_ especially cultural ways. I
> think that many of us inadvertantly do this owing to our wide range of
> taste, i.e. we'll play our Ornette disc and then our Hank Williams
> disk.

I suppose I would prefer to do this myself.

        -Tom "just took out AMM for Xavier Cugat" Pratt

- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 17:28:46 -0700
From: "Patrice L. Roussel" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: European/Modern bankrupt

On Mon, 12 Oct 1998 19:35:55 EDT  [e-mail] wrote:
>
> granted the outreach beyond European/Modern ideas is a good thing, but your
> not really going to say that " 'European/Modern' tradition in the arts (across
> the boards) is bankrupt." come on now, that's the stuff of lazy  grad students
> trying to get their papers published by being "radical." the twentieth century
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

But when you notice that their teachers had to do the same thing with (pick
your favorite flavor of the month) phenomenology, structuralism, marxism, etc
(all with the success we all know...), it makes you feel a little bit more
indulgent with such attempts :-).

> alone has produced so much 'European/Modern' theory that it has yet to be
> digested, let alone discarded.

But it is always simpler to assume that the previous generation got it wrong
and start up with a new "revolutionary" system. With a little bit of luck,
you can even graduate before this system gets out of fashion.

    Patrice.

- -

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 22:51:17 -0400
From: Tom Pratt <[e-mail]>
Subject: cage question

I was reading something on Keith Rowe which said that he was very
inspired by a 1961 recording of Cage's 'Variations II For Amplified
Piano'. I was wondering if there are any recordings of this piece
available on CD. Anyone know?

                -Tom Pratt

- -

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 98 9:59:51 EDT
From: "M.Ho" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Marc Ribot Interview

>
> Could whoever originally posted the link to the interview please re-post
> it, I accidentily deleted the e-mail before I got a chance to bookmark
> the link.
>
> Thanks,
> Joe


the address is http://shamash.org/shmooze/jsps/index.html

It's a very entertaining article where he talks about the taboo of
Jewish people as sexual icons (and makes a comparison to the Marx
Brothers) and how he wanted to call the "Radical New Jewish Music
Festival" the "Loud and Pushy Festival"

Enjoy

- -

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 10:14:17 -0400
From: Charles Jacobus <[e-mail]>
Subject: re: European/Modern bankruptcy

Dennis Summers wrote:
> the idea is that the "European/Modern" tradition
> in the arts (across the boards) is bankrupt. That
> tradition supports a very specific "white anglo-
> saxon" agenda that everything including the arts
> "improves" in an evolutionary way, with the goal
> of being "superior" to that which came before.
> This attitude even permeates "non-white"
> traditions such as jazz.

You're opinion/explanation of post-modernism is so
misinformed that there is no credible way to respond
to it.
White? Improvement? Superiority? Who says these
things? Who? Give me actions. Give me examples.
Who is heading this agenda?
Cbwdeluxe1 and Patrice (with tongue in cheek) are
right. This reeks of academicism and opportunism.
To follow up on your example: I would suggest that
what people like Dvorak, Mahler, Ives, Ayler (and now
Zorn) did is fundamentally the same - they made music!

- -

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 11:47:18 EDT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Ayler

Weighing in on the Ayler Impulse stuff--I have most of this from earlier
incarnations, and I too am an Ayler fan of the trio (Peacock/Murray)
especially with the addition of Cherry. I have never found the Live Impulse
recordings (or the stuff like the live sessions Hat Art issued) to be as
powerful, and the "marching band" aspect of Ayler has always left me cold. So,
I myself will be taking a pass on the new reissue.

Dave Royko

- -

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 18:34:03 -0700 (PDT)
From: "m. rizzi" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Seeing Jazz

    While cruising the S.F. MOMA bookstore last
    week, I flipped through a book of photographs
    titled "Seeing Jazz"...low and behold on pp. 112
    there was Zorn.

    mike - providing lint balls of information
    to make the zorn-list collector nerd sweat.


[e-mail] -------------------------------------- www.browbeat.com
                   "Another nerd with a soulpatch"
- -------- browbeat magazine, po box 11124, oakland, ca 94611-1124 -------

- -

------------------------------

End of Zorn List Digest V2 #499
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