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Zorn List Digest        Friday, October 8 1999        Volume 02 : Number 770



In this issue:
-
       Re: more on the times
       RE: Free Flutists?
       Re: some Zorn questions
       The "Inauthentic" Jew?
       Blomfield, Peaks and Troughs
       noise annoys
       Re: noise annoys
       Re: noise annoys
       more signs of the Times
       Re: contacting avant
       Re: more FMP news

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

Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 07:59:20 -0400
From: philz <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: more on the times

steve smith explained:

>philz wrote:
>
> > I must be incredibly thick, but I don't understand the reaction
>to this article. Not that I particularly like the article, it's as
>good or bad as any article that attempt to generalize two artists
>careers and motivations on one page, but where is the insult, the
>misrepresentation?
>
>Well, let's see.  Consider the following (with my points of emphasis
>set apart with asterisks):
>
>"The prime architects of the new sensibility are Mr. Zorn, *who now
>considers himself a Jewish composer*..."

But isn't he?  Why else would he do pieces like Kristalnacht, or make
a band like Masada?  He has emphasized his culture so that I can't
personally help but think of him in those terms, at least partially
(of course I think of bird calls when I think of Zorn as well, but
I've been following him for over 10 years now).  Zorn has brought
more pride to his culture (imho) than any other "Jewish composer"
that I can think of.  Is this really an insult?


>"It is unclear what led Mr. Zorn, a secular Jew from Queens, to his
>awakening.  In interviews, he has *spoken vaguely of getting hostile
>looks in Germany and of his father's death.*"
>
>"The titles of his compositions *often evoke Jewish victimhood*..."

Like Kristalnacht?  I stood packed in a dark room in the old Knitting
Factory assaulted by the sounds of that piece and understood a piece
of the Holocaust that I might not have otherwise understood... is
this comment really inaccurate?


>"*Until Mr. Zorn discovered klezmer,* the only jazz musician to show
>much interest in Eastern European soul was the black clarinetist Don
>Byron."

This sounds like usual bombastic inaccurate writing overgeneralizing...

>"Recently, Mr. Zorn has spoken *in almost hallucinatory tones* about
>what it means to be Jewish in America."

This sounds like the writer's attempt to add color and imagery to his
article... much of what I talk about my coworkers probably find
hallucinatory (but maybe that's 'cause I smoke too much :)

>"Mr. Zorn is *committed to the idea of Jews as an eternal pariah class*..."
>
>"It may be that for Mr. Zorn, Jewishness answers a deeply felt
>desire - a desire not to be a white jazz musician.  *By invoking his
>own history of oppression, he can assert his right to play the
>blues*, without the racial envy that often burdens white musicians."

OK, this unbased speculation is probably the most offensive thing in
the article, but I really don't think the writer was attempting to
misrepresent Zorn, just place him inside the growing emphasis on
Jewish culture that Zorn has cultivated.  Clearly it's only a piece
of the Zorn puzzle, which is the writer's major mistake, but it is
the most obvious attribute of Zorn to anyone who hasn't followed his
music closely.  The writer did start the article distancing Zorn from
jazz musicians, so this is only stupidly attempting to keep the tone
of the article, as dumb as the comment is.

But, can Zorn or anyone be that surprised that the media is picking
up on the Jewish angle?  Isn't that somewhat the idea, to draw
attention to the Jewish plight?  I get the impression that some are
upset that the media actually noticed some part of what Zorn is up
to.  So what if Zorn is identified with Jewish culture? - He's been
responsible for the Radical Jewish Culture series and has promoted
Jewish artists where possible.


>Is that enough to illustrate what Kurt was saying?  Those are my own
>major points of disturbance, as well as those of many others with
>whom I've spoken (and yes, the debate carries on today as lively as
>yesterday and the day before - this is probably the most
>talked-about music article in the Times in months if not years.
>Would that it were being talked about for positive reasons...).

Well, better leave me in the dark, I still find the article, even
with the comments illustrated above, generally positive and
inoffensive. It focuses attention on the artists involved and on some
of their personal interests.  It of course misses the mark, but
that's why I don't read much about music anymore in general, and why
I don't take anything written too literally.  I think the arguments
against it are over-sensitive and thin-skinned, but that's my
opinion.

philz



- -


- -

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

Date: Fri, 08 Oct 1999 09:30:23 CEST
From: "Andreas Dietz" <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: Free Flutists?

>Andreas Dietz  wrote:
>
> > I think before his premature death Thomas Chapin was the most amazing
> > flute player though he didn┤t use it as his major instrument.
> >

>Hugo Linares wrote:
> >
> > Seconded. He also played amazing tango-tinged music in Pablo Aslan's
> > Avantango.
> >

Hugo, can you give some recording details about Avantango?

Andreas

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

- -

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

Date: Fri, 08 Oct 1999 07:03:57 -0400
From: stephen drury <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: some Zorn questions

>Andy Miller wrote:
>> 2. In the liner notes to 'The String Quartets' Zorn makes some strong
>> claims for "Memento Mori"-- something about how the piece was a sort of
>> breakthrough for him, etc.  I've listened to this several times but always
>> mind myself getting bored with it.  Any ideas what Zorn is getting at with
>> this composition? (and in his remarks about it?)

Some music, even in the late 20th-century, really is meant to be listened to
the old-fashioned way -- performed live by musicians in the same room as the
listener.  Having heard Memento Mori several times on tour, I cannot imagine
getting anywhere near the full impact of the piece llistening to a CD, no
matter how carefully. So much is gained from that extreme accoustic
delicacy, the sense of community, the experience of seeing four musicians
living through and sustaining the entire stretch of time, and the knowledge
that you must listen to every moment because there is no repeat button.

- --steve
www.stephendrury.com


- -

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

Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 16:46:44 +0200
From: Stephen Fruitman <[e-mail]>
Subject: The "Inauthentic" Jew?

The "quality and authenticy...of his very Jewishness", as Steve Smith
pointed out, seems indeed to be the ill-chosen target of Adam Shatz=B4 NY
Times attack on John Zorn. Albeit that he appends a disclaimer that
ultimately, Zorn=B4s Jewishness will be "primarily of interests to scholars
of ethnicity". Well, here=B4s one chiming in, who also happens to be a music
lover with his own crotchety tastes and believes that the Radical Jewish
Culture being produced over there is both radical and very Jewish indeed.

The bee in Shatz=B4 bonnet I would loosely identify with the term
"essentialism". Essentialism prefers "authenticity" (and what in the world
is that, now?) - and which promises some sort of symmetry and completedness
- - over diversity, which leaves a lot of threads dangling and questions
unanswered. He claims for instance that Zorn=B4s compilation tributes to
musicians such as Marc Bolan and Serge Gainsbourg (wonder why he didn=B4t
mention Bacharach - is his oeuvre somehow more blatantly Jewish?) reek of
an "atavistic form of identity politics". However, as Zorn stated when I
queried him good-naturedly via fax about the
Bacharach-as-Great-Jewish-Musician postulate, he answered to the effect
that Bacharach=B4s music need not be played by a klezmer band with payes
a-flyin=B4 in order to be considered Jewish; in fact, he asked me, under the
circumstances, isn=B4t Irving Berlin=B4s "White Christmas" just about one of
the most Jewish cultural artefacts around?

There are many levels to this argument, in my estimation, all of them quite
fascinating. But foremost to the discussion at hand is the one which
refutes Shatz=B4 self-appointed position as arbiter of Jewishness. Despite
the fact that he dedicated the entire series of Masada studio CDs to Ahad
Ha=B4-am (ideologue of cultural Zionism), I would classify Zorn as more of a
follower of Micha Berdyczewski, a disciple of Ahad Ha=B4-am=B4s who took
Nietzschean exception to his master=B4s own "essentialism": For AH, a
radically new Jewish culture was to be based solely on _Jewish_ cultural
artefacts, to wit, the texts of the Bible and the Prophets. No foreign
influence was to be allowed, indeed, it was to be rooted out. MB on the
other hand said, in so many words, that as a Jewish author and Jew,
whatever I _do_ is Jewish. This allows for a more expansive, individualist
interpretation of what "Jewishness" (or anythingness) is in age of
fragmentation, creating community while effectively safeguarding against
the exclusionary "tribalism" Shatz tut-tuts over.

Yet despite all this ethnography and dabbling in the history of ideas,
there is of course a value judgement made by Shatz on the music, that the
result is "simply radical kitsch", which may well be the instigation for
these speculations about Zorn=B4s motives in the first place. So in the fina=
l
analysis, the reader is left with the impression that all this ink has been
spilled for no other reason than the fact that the writer likes Arto
Lindsay=B4s music and deems it "authentic", while he does not care for
Zorn=B4s, which he must wave off as "inauthentic" in order to lend his own
taste some form of "verifiable" credibility.

Stephen Fruitman





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

Bj=F6rn Olsson,
Inst. f=F6r id=E9historia,
Ume=E5 universitet
901 87 Ume=E5
tel. [phone] fax 143374
e-post: [e-mail]



- -


- -

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

Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 12:14:28 -0300
From: Linares Hugo <[e-mail]>
Subject: Blomfield, Peaks and Troughs



People from Verge (Canada) has sent the October update and among others
there is a Bomfield & Peaks cd.
Who are they? What line do they lead in jazz?

Thanks for any help.

Hugo




> ASC RECORDS England
>
> Blomfield, Jim  Peaks and Troughs: music for quartet and septet
> OI-ASC26-CD Jazz 5029716002226 ($28.00 CD)
> Jim Bloomfield, piano; Andy Sheppard, soprano & tenor sax; Ben Waghorn,
> tenor & soprano sax; Dave Goodier, bass;
> Sam Brown, drums; Andy Hague, trumpet, flugelhorn, drums; Ken Figes,
> alto sax; John Cornick, trombone.
>
>

- -

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

Date: Fri, 08 Oct 99 13:07:05 -0500
From: [e-mail]
Subject: noise annoys

pardon the crosspost, but i was listening to a merzbow disc i picked up last
night (on alien8, forget the title), and found myself thinking on a thread i
wanna start. see, i used to hate merzbow a couple years ago. i bought and
quickly sold a couple titles. but based on a recommendation, i picked up music
for bondage performance and really enjoyed it. been opening up to some other
noise too, while other things still leave me cold. like with any other music, i
understand -- some like it, some don't. but i was trying to put into words last
night what might have changed to make me able to listen to this stuff. what i'm
wondering is, can anyone out there put their noise aesthetic into words. i
can't, and i'm curious.

kg



- -

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

Date: Fri, 08 Oct 1999 10:29:41 -0700
From: s~Z <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: noise annoys

[e-mail] wrote:

>can anyone out there put their noise aesthetic into words.

It serves as a sonic Ritalin for the swirling madness in my fragmented,
tormented psyche.

- -

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

Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1999 12:56:15 -0700 (PDT)
From: Eric Martens <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: noise annoys

- --- [e-mail] wrote:
what i'm
> wondering is, can anyone out there put their noise
> aesthetic into words. i
> can't, and i'm curious.

This is probably going to come out sounding really
lame (ideas that sound good in yr head have a tendency
to do that once you try to articulate them, I've
noticed), but anyway . . . I've always regarded noise
as kind of a way to get outside of myself . . . With
most music you can devote a certain amount of
attention to other activities (e.g., answering mail,
clipping your toenails, cooking dinner, whatever) but
noise, if it's at all engaging, pretty much demands
full attention, or at least makes it hard to pay att'n
to anything else , so listening to it is almost like
some kind of meditation . . . For me, anyway, noise is
about the only way I've found to really just tune
everything out, almost like the only place I can get
real silence is in the middle of all-encompassing
noise. Did any of that make sense?

Eric

NP: Saint Etienne: "Places to Visit" (Does anyone know
exactly what Jim O'Rourke did on this record?)


=====
Disco Down: http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Plaza/8107
Music: http://www.mp3.com/discodown
undo add event: http://www.mp3.com/undo
"Reminds me of an art student who takes a pretty piece of pottery and smashes the hell out of it with a sledge hammer and says the pieces of pottery flying through the air have an artistic edge so it's art." Raw 42
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com

- -

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

Date: Wed, 06 Oct 99 10:40:42 -0500
From: [e-mail]
Subject: more signs of the Times

Day 3 of the post Times fracas... philz, I think you're kinda right. My
reactions at least are a little oversensitive and thinskinned. But when I read
the piece, I didn't feel like I was just reading a bad article. I felt like I'd
fallen for the bait-and-switch. I actually thought I was going to read a piece
about Arto, someone I'd trust the Times more to talk about (he's got that whole
multi-culti portrait of a scenic vista avant Buena Vista thing, plenty of what
the Times likes to do, and I thought I'd just learn a little about his anxiously
awaited new rekkerd). I turn to the jump, see a disarmingly huge photo of JZ's
mug, and start to descend downhill with the writer.

You're right again, philz (not trying to be facetious -- you really are). Much
of the article, especially the first half, focuses attention on the
accomplishments of deserving artists. But the writer is clearly setting us up
for a fall. In the end he wants to add oomph to his position, that Zorn has no
business feeling like an outcast Jew in New York City and that it's funny for
him to use Jewish iconography and wear Jewish clothes. Steve's excerpts help
show that, but the real probblem is in the overall construction of the piece,
devolving from describing the music as "an almost palpable feeling of intimacy
among strangers, of community, that goes beyond esthetic pleasure," to that last
line about "Jewish kitsch." If that's really all Zorn's doing, why devote so
much of the article to him. Why not run an enormous photo of someone who's work
is valid? Or why not write about something like Roy Nathanson and Anthony
Coleman's duet, which I like, but which I could see (at times) described as
"Jewish kitsch." Kitsch is something cute you put on a shelf, and if that's all
Masada is, then the author is in the end showing contempt for that group of
strangers who feel a sense of community because of the music. (That group, in
part being us. Like you, I was in that crowded room at the old Knit years ago,
realizing as I stood in the dark listening to the sounds of a train the depth of
the piece. But apparently what we shared, philz, was more like "Good Times" than
"Roots.")

Another odd statement here, as Steve clipped for us, is "By invoking his own
history of oppression, he can assert his right to play the blues, without the
racial envy that often burdens white musicians." This is freaked and stupid. Not
to diminish the accomplishments of many many many brilliant black musicians,
there is this odd idea in America that heartfelt, extemporaneous music is the
property of people of African descent. The terms we use, like "blues" or
"soulful," evoke African American traditions, and the popular conception is that
everything comes from slave songs. As has been said here before, who came first
decades or centuries ago has little to do with creative expression in the
present, but still, improvisation is not a single tradition. Beethoven, Chopin
and others used to improvise in concert. In fact, the improv segment that would
follow a composed work was often considered to be the highlight of a
performance. If you listen to European liturgical music (like Bach's violin
solos), it seems likely (though I don't know) that expanding upon the work while
playing could have been done. And I can't imagine that the klezmer tradition
hasn't always included improvisation. African Americans have no doubt added more
to the tradition of improvised music in America than any other cultural
grouping, and you (not necessarily philz, but anyone) can decide what value you
think that has as a race-based argument. But to say that anyone who picks up a
horn without having sheet music in front of them owes a debt to African slaves
is short-sighted. The tradition is far richer and more diverse than any one
continent.



- -


- -

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

Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 17:58:40 +0200
From: "Stefan Verstraeten" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: contacting avant

Hi (sorry for the late response)

The best thing to do is go to forced exposure www.forcedexposure.com and
then go to the option browse by label and go to the avant label.

The  site mentions every avant release that is for sale and even gives a
brief description.

As far as I know the label doesn't have an official website like tzadik
does... never understood why

best wishes

stefan verstraeten

np frisell...good dog happy man..... one of his best albums in my opinion

>From: "Bruno" <[e-mail]>
>Subject: Request - help in contacting AVANT recodrs
>
>Hallo Zorn-heads
>
> just a quick coupla questions - I've been a bit of a Zorn fan for a while
>now, and I'm looking to track down a few more of the Naked City albums.
From
>hitting the Zorn discog, it looks like the "Avant" label have a lot of the
>stuff I'm after - so the questions are:
>
>1. does anybody know how to contact Avant records (an e-mail or WWW would
be
>nice) - I've tried to get local record stores to track them down, but they
>have NO idea



- -


- -

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

Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 11:13:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ken Waxman <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: more FMP news

All very impressive new FMP stuff. But if the title Quartet is right for
the new(er) CT session, who of the five musicians named *doesn't* play?

Ken Waxman

- -


- -

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

End of Zorn List Digest V2 #770
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