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Zorn List Digest        Tuesday, July 13 1999        Volume 02 : Number 712



In this issue:
-
       Kim Gordon solo releases made with help from downtowners
       merzbox release news
       Zorn article
       RE: Zorn's Q & A
       oPtion
       Re: kirk

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

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 18:23:29 +0200
From: "Stefan Verstraeten" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Kim Gordon solo releases made with help from downtowners

Hi

Today I read in a belgian magazine called HUMO (Hi Yves, my belgian man...
everything OK) that Kim Gordon.... you know, sonic youth.... you know, the
guys with the stolen gear.... this reminds me of a solo cd by thurston moore
called 'Please take everything from me, except my paul desmond'..... i guess
a fan took his words for real...

anyway, the article stated that kim gordon is going to release two solo cds
wich are co-made with DJ Olive, Ikue Mori and Yuka Honda..

this sounds interesting.... so does anybody knows here anything about those
releases...

Best wishes

stefan verstraeten


- -

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

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 18:16:34 +0200
From: "Stefan Verstraeten" <[e-mail]>
Subject: merzbox release news

An interesting news for the noiseheads  among us:

I got an answer back from roger richards (the label boss for the extreme
label) saying the good news.....

the merzbox will be released in september.....

can't believe this.....50 cds merzbow in one time.... yehaaaaaaaa


- -

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

Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1999 17:29:03 -0500
From: Diego Gruber <[e-mail]>
Subject: Zorn article

Hi people,

This is an interview which appeared on an Argentinian magazine,
"Escvlpiendo Milagros" (anyone know something about this magazine?) a
couple of years ago. Of course, written in Spanish. A friend of mine
asked me to translate it for him and so I kept it for some months
already, now I thought it might be interesting for some of you to read.
The content of the interview is kind of dense, some parts are hard to
understand but believe me it doesn't have to do with the translation, it
was as difficult in Spanish. Parts were especially unclear for me as I
was not familiar with Zorn's game pieces. PLease excuse the giant post,
especially those of you on digest.

- ----------

Success and economical factors usually condition the attitude of certain
musicians whose
weak convictions can only admit creative freedom on extraordinary
circumstances. They take
music as a good for popular consumption and therefore ease its digestion
in order to obtain
generous rewards. Such apocryphal music which floods radio stations,
record stores, and
ears does not accomplish to neutralize an irreverent beat from
Manhattan's heart. There,
experimentation has not ceased. Zorn and friends come against form
sclerosis and creative
cheapness of today's music with  prodigious imagination.

- -----JOHN ZORN- music with no govern ------

"There's good music, great music and false music on each genre and every
genre is the
fucking same! People grew up on the 60s listening to blues, rock,
classical, avant-garde,
ethnic music; i believe all of us share one belief in common: all of
that music is the same
deep inside; there's no such thing as a 'higher art' and a 'lower art'"
- - John Zorn, 1988, on 'American Composers' by Edward Strickland.

Officialist dinosaurs, stinking sounds merchants, musical
segregationists, they can no longer
prevent thousands of attentive ears from detecting the unusual,
dazzling, astounding
jugglings of Zorn on his struggle for the abolition of aesthetics'
hierarchies and the
imposition of equality on musical society. Fucking bullshit!, will Zorn
say every time someone
pretends to differentiate the classical from the popular as the sublime
and the mundane. His
artistic testimonies are clearly exemplifying of his way of thinking.
One battle won after
another right on the heart of the merchant's empire, suggesting there
are no weapons that
could possibly stop the rebellion of art or limits to brake the
corrosion in front of new
ideas. Jazz, rock, pop, klezmer, classical, electronic, concrete,
improvised cannot be taken
as stagnant compartments, but as materials for possible interaction,
democratically
disposable in the mind of the creator. A game for free people,
particularly pleasant for
those who have come to dominate the traditional tools and are no longer
afraid of liberty.


"Masterpieces of western music exemplify monarchies and dictatorships.
Composer and
director: king and prime minister. Establishing analogies between the
musical situations we
have and the desirable social circumstances of which we still lack, we
make music important
and suggestive, with the serious problems humanity is facing. Some
composers do not portray
on their work the social changes desired, since they utilize their music
as propaganda for
such changes or as criticism of a society insufficiently modified."
- - John Cage, 'Empty words', 1973-78

>From the random experiences of the 50s improvisation has occupied an
outstanding place on
music of the 20th century. All the same, graphical scripture has become
an adequate medium
to transmit one undetermined music, set free to the imagination or
intuition of the performer. When jazz got into the anarchic tides of
collective
improvisation some similarities with the "cultured" friends were
glimpsed.
Differences could be noticed on the bonds: the one the musician creates
and the idea which
originates a work (a drawing, a popular melody, isolated notes with
brief instructions, an
image). The bond which relates a group of instrumentalists  playing at
the same time (a
dialogue with the others or the inner way). The bond with the own
instrument and the
culture.
The implicit problematical in the work of John Zorn has equally the
inheritance of the
literature of the 50s and the 60s. His music promotes a rather
unconventional approach
from the performers to their instruments, impressing as much tempo
switches as variations
of tone. With expressive gestures he commands this games of
improvisation and allows for
unusual relations and behaviors, which result on music of great frantic
spontaneity of
everlasting unpredictability. Cage and his followers preferred their
musicians wouldn't
relate themselves but let the sounds mix randomly. The improvisational
collectives of new
jazz urged to the celebration of a collective ritual which would unite
their cries on the
maximum level possible. To randomness and communion of souls was added
the unconformist
individualism of the practitioners of improvisation.
Zorn's generation takes the discoveries of the masters to search for new
relationships, new
bonds.
On the amazingly open structure presented by the Cobra (recreated each
month on Knitting
Factory, New York, edited a couple of years ago at Hat Art and now live
by Knitting Factory
Works), musicians are forced to undress their personalities in public
and incorporate their
more immediate feelings to the construction of an unstable and nervous
architecture. A game
in which those who need to express themselves with verbosity appear, and
others interrupt
with violence to impose their ideas. A vast gamma of gesture codes
enables the different
musical ideas with absolute freedom.

- --------->>"The music written is the story of a trip of exploration,
which might have been important, but
that has concluded before we had any news from it, meanwhile
improvisation is the trip itself"
- - Christopher Small, 'Music. Society. Education'.

Cobra  isn't just a musical deed, it's also theater. An instrumental
theater which exposes
behavior and gestures of the musicians' world in the moment of creation
[sort of like seeing
them mate with their instruments, right? crude analogy, perhaps
inappropriate]. The actors,
stimulated by the wit of
the orders given, play the game of music with unusual excitement. Zorn
picks the
instrumental colors and marks the entrances with signs that shoot off
creativity.
Aggressiveness, humor, anxiety, search for power, tenderness, the need
of cohabitation:
each state or attitude is reflected in Cobra through the musicians'
expressiveness. Something
from a childish world lives on Zorn's games, somewhat lost in the
traumatic steps towards
adulthood. For him, music can give us back the best we once had and show
us at the time what
we could be.
Zorn acknowledged once one work of the Argentinean Mauricio Kagel
changed his life: 'Match'
, from 1964. A duel of gestures and sounds between two double-bass
players, with the
intervention of a percussive referee who interrupts and launches the
match. Kagel's idea, as
every masterpiece, opened new doors for musical organization. Zorn
accepted the challenge
and submerged in the unexplored space he had before him. Today Cobra is
recreated on
different versions, with vocals, instrumentals, with the coordination of
different musicians
on every occasion and always on the free setting spirit which inspired
its creation.

"The best government is the one that doesn't govern at all. And when men
are prepared for it,
this is the kind of government they will have."
- - Henry D. Thoreau, 'Civil Disobedience'

"Many musicians are already prepared. We have now many musical examples
of practical
anarchy. Music with undetermined parts, without a fixed relationship
between them. Music
without notation. Our rehearsals don't have directors anymore. Musicians
can make it without
a government"
- - John Cage, 'Empty words'


ZORN 93-94

While 'Buried Secrets' and 'Radio' have managed to calm the appetite of
fans of hardcore and
jazz, Zorn's other novelties advance through previously unexplored
paths. Almost nobody
doubts anymore that Painkiller and Naked City widen the margins of the
most dense rock and a
jazz open to eclecticism. Like a purifying tumor, Zorn accomplishes here
a healthy job:
changing the rusty costumes, injecting them his revitalizing sap which
turns false into truth.
Also the jewish tradition of Klezmer found in John Zorn's MASADA a
modernizing medicine. He
began to expose there his vision of hebrew music which found in
Kristallnacht a moment of
splendor. The moving memory of nazism uses some of its emblematic
sounds: the fuehrer's
voice,  noise of crystals braking, hebrew voices praying. Delicate
litanies of jewish music
involve with their melancholy voices of genocide transforming beauty
into perplexity. Zorn
puts himself in the drama and exposes his symbols: and unending sequence
of crystals braking
rattles our eardrums till saturation. Without words or instruments he
creates a frightening
allegation against intolerance. The music of Kristallnacht changes the
usual zornian
fragmentation for a more extensive development that the new ideas seem
to ask for, an
extensive serenity which doesn't seem to resign to emotion. A group of
new-yorkers are in
charge of the representation: Anthony Coleman, Mark Feldmann, Mark
Dresser, Marc Ribot,
Joey Baron and Frank London, select members of the Lower East Side of
Manhattan guild.
'Elegy', another of Zorn's recent adventures, appears as a tribute to
the writer-martyr Jean
Genet. A paragraph from one of his novels, a symbolic rose, an explicit
pair of nude torsos
and a distorted photograph of his face form the dedicatory. As in the
anti-nazi novel, the
music of 'Elegy' opposes several aesthetical languages which follow each
other and then mix
proposing a multiplicity of images and senses. Sections of rigorously
written music alternate
with melodies of far-away ethnics. Flutes and strings incarnate the
purity and stillness in a
context of latent aggressiveness where distorted discs, abrupt hits,
weapons that shoot
displace subtlety and set discontrol. Doors that close, cries which
superimpose themselves,
exhausted voices interweave with Mid Eastern chants. Zorn defies the
conventions connecting
the uneven as if it were familiar and formulates a unique integrating
musical language. A dry
path without complacencies. Sounds that hurt the body and disturb the
mind.
Zorn's new ideas rest in mystery and symbolism. Close were then the
poets who inaugurated
the vanguard movements of literature history: Baudelaire and Verlaine
also had Zorn's
tribute. ABSINTHE, a plant which ingested in excess may drive you to
madness. The calmest
work of his artistic career, a strange peace full of density. The
instrumental voices of
Naked City transform their recognizable tones in unusual sounds
produced by non-traditional
techniques of execution. The dawn of the 19th century, so well portrayed
by the symbolist
poets, is reminded on our own twilight by frightening acoustic images
which retain the tension
on static spider webs.
If Absinthe supposed a symbolist atmospheric immersion, one could
suggest that Leng T'che is
a bath of hyperrealism among the most striking that Zorn has ever made.
The naked city on the
season of apocalypse: a guitar bleeding to death on the long agony of
accoplation and
distortion, a frightening bass involving in time a space of tension,
frantic drum punches on
the sores of sensitivity, and the unbearable cry of a voice which
appears to immolate itself
obscenely in public. And almost in the shadows of this hi-pitched cry it
is obvious that Zorn's
game lies on the edge of tolerance, between the sensation of panic and
the vision of death. A
fresco about contemporary horror and millenary), with no anesthesia.
Zorn needs to establish new channels of communication and this starts to
be evident among
the musicians as well as on the link with the listener. It looks for the
encounter with the
new, the unknown. A space of experimental search through which he
reencounters himself
with the old masters and finds already the sounds of tomorrow.
John Zorn is the paradigm of this century's end's avant garde. His music
is the spiritual
refugee for the saturated contemporary ears.
- -----------






- -

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

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 13:21:57 -0400
From: "Vanheumen, Robert" <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: Zorn's Q & A

it's funny how everybody experiences the same event different.
that's why I was hesitant to write too much about this zorn workshop. one of
his main points (as i see it) during that workshop was that he wants to get
information out as direct as possible, because, as he experienced recently
with the new yorker, people might interpret his words in the 'wrong' way,
write it down, and get stories into the world which are not 'true'.  some of
marcus's 'quotes' i remember differently...

robert

> -----Original Message-----
> From:    [e-mail] [SMTP:[e-mail]]
> Sent:    Monday, July 12, 1999 6:44 PM
> To:    [e-mail]
> Subject:    Zorn's Q & A
>
> Subjects & Quotes
>
> *He never did drugs except for the occasional toast of champagne
>
> *The solution to writer's block according to Zorn: "Don't worry about it."
>
> *"Shut that video camera off!"
>
> *He still wears his camoflause pants to express his part in the Hardcore
> culture.
>
> *He hates traveling ("You go fly on an airplane about fifty times, then
> tell
> me how you like it.")
>
> *He wants to eventually get more involved with The Theater of Musical
> Optics
> visuals again.
>
> *He highly encouraged musicians to start their own scene rather than dwell
>
> into one.
>
> *He owns much less amount of records than The New Yorker stated.
>
> *The death of his father was one of the many parts that helped build
> Masada.
>
> *He hates the Knitting Factory, "They're a bunch of fuck-shits!"
>
> *He called his parents "those people."
>
> *"Frank Zappa's Uncle Meat; best album."
>
> *Downtown Music Gallery's Bruce Lee was a reference guide for Zorn
> whenever
> he needed a question about himself that he didn't know.
>
> *He said that since the New Yorker article he was been constantly thinking
>
> about how people perceive his music, and it makes him really mad.
>
>
> -

- -

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

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 13:48:46 -0400
From: Bob Kowalski <[e-mail]>
Subject: oPtion

Whatever happened to the wonderful publication Option?  Did it slide into the sea (was CA based I believe.)  Did it survive somehow in the virtual (www) realm?  So sad.  Complimented my New Yorker and Adbuster subscriptions nicely!
; )
Bob


- -

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

Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 07:36:48 -0700
From: [e-mail] (Michael J. Williams)
Subject: Re: kirk

>Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 17:40:31 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Ken Waxman <[e-mail]>
>Subject: Re: Kirk
>
>Introducing was (is) on Argo, but wasn't really his first record. He made
>an earlier one for King Records, the Cincinatti label best known for
>James Brown in 1956. It disappeared without a trace and was only reissued
>on vinyl in the late 1970s.
>
>Also, Kirk didn't "work with Qunicy Jones band for a while". Q didn't
>have a band after 1960. Kirk was a sideman on some Jones' LPs and he may
>have used Jones to arrange big band sessions for him the way he used
>Benny Golson.

Kirk is on Quincy Jones' "Walking in Space" LP on A&M records. I believe it
won a Grammy award around 1969, 70, something like that. As far as I can
remember (I haven't played that album in a few years), he plays only one
solo and man it just shreds, sandwiched among Freddie Hubbard, Hubert Laws,
etc. on "My Body," vocals compliments of Valerie Simpson. It was a
commercially-oriented studio record, kind of funky, and had some nice
blowing on it.

It doesn't surprise me that Kirk recorded for King and I would love to hear
that album. He was from Columbus, Ohio, and during his younger days before
he developed national and international repute, he spent a lot of time in
Cincinnati playing at a club called Babe Baker's on Reading Road in Avondale.
I was told that at one time, he played with a group featuring blind
musicians called something like the Blind Apostles.

Naturally, tales of Kirk's exploits abound in that area. My favorite is one
I heard from the late tenor saxophonist Jimmy McGary, a marvelous player and
a local legend in his own right. After finishing his last set at the Blue
Wisp, McGary was reminiscing with bass player Bob Bodley and a couple
customers.  McGary, who at one time had a band with Kirk, said one time Kirk
came into the club where he was playing and McGary naturally invited him to
sit in. Kirk didn't have his horn with him, so McGary offered his alto.
Either McGary didn't have a reed for it, or Kirk spurned his offer of one.
He picked up the horn WITH NO MOUTHPIECE, and played "Stella by Starlight."
McGary said something like, "Oh, it was just beautiful, man. That was
Roland. An amazing cat."


- -

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

End of Zorn List Digest V2 #712
*******************************


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