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    (AND OTHER NYC DOWNTOWN MUSICIANS)

    posts: [e-mail]    sub/unsub: [e-mail]

    *** BACK ISSUES of this digest can be obtained in 3 ways:
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                 put:  send #, where # is the issue you want

    DIGEST #71, 7-5-95
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From [e-mail]  Wed Jun 28 07:06:22 1995

Hello there,
I have been on the list for month or so but this is my debut posting.
So greetings from Greece.
Some questions to start with:

1. which album of the Boredoms should i start with? i saw them live last
year in amsterdam, and liked them a lot.

2. which of the masada records should i start with? I cannot get the whole
lot at once, nomatter how much i'd like to do so...


I guess that some people out there are interested in trading live tapes
or something, so where is hat i can  offer:

NAKED CITY live in Athens may 7, 92  appr 125 mins
MASADA live in Athens (april or may?), 94 appr 60 mins
MATERIAL live in Athens july 92, appr 90 mins
DIAMANDA GALAS live in Thesaloniki dont remember date, 92 i think.

I also have 2 shows of THE LOUNGE LIZARDS, but not with me, so I dont
remember dates, one 91 and one 92 or 92 and 93?
Sound quality on the first tapes is pretty much adequate, esp if
you use headphones, the lizards are very good i think.

I would trade for anything, like copies of rare zorn stuff, copies
of live tapes, a couple of bucks, anything goes. I also have
some CDs that seem to be hard to get over there, like ELEGY and
THE ART OF MEMORY, so I could also copy these.

Well, thats enough for the first time. Oh I forgot, I neeeeed a
NAKED CITY tshirt, who can help?

bye
manolis
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From [e-mail]  Thu Jun 29 13:52:22 1995
Subject: Tenko

Sorry if this doesn't belong on this list buut I don't know where else to
ask.  Anyway I saw Tenko at the Victoriaville festival a while ago and was
absolutey blown away...one of the best shows I've ever seen.  I've been
looking for a while for some of her cd's but havn't been able to find
anything at all so I was wondering if anyone knew where I could find
something or is there anything by her you'd recommend?

Thanks
Andrew

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From [e-mail]  Thu Jun 29 18:00:19 1995
Subject: zorn article

Hi. This is an article which was printed in this week's NOW magazine -
Toronto's weekly news & entertainment paper. It was written by legendary
jazz critic/curmudgeon Harvey Pekar. Enjoy.

By HARVEY PEKAR >Saxophonist John Zorn - among the great innovators of
our era - performs with Masada as part of Ashkenaz:  Festival of New
Yiddish Culture, July 4 to 9. Zorn composes and performs "new music" that
he and others are creating by synthesizing elements of jazz, rock, modern
classical, world, pop and folk forms.  Zorn has cut improvised game-piece
albums in which his scores consist of hand signals given to a leader and
band members (Cobra). He's also made recordings that might be classified
as classical (Kristallnacht), rock (Naked City, Painkiller) or jazz
(Masada). Except that most of his music, which seems to fall into one
category or another, has been influenced by other genres - Masada, in
particular, bears a klezmer inspiration.  The group Masada was formed
partly as a vehicle for Zorn to play alto saxophone. Currently, he's
considered a composer. Yet few are aware that he's one of the great
contemporary jazz alto players because, until recently, he seldom
featured himself on the instrument.  "I'd been in Naked City for six
years and never really got a chance to play the horn," allows Zorn. "You
know, I play the themes, the arrangements, and once in a while, I scream
to sort of goose the rhythm section along.  Bill Frisell and Wayne
Horovitz did most of the soloing. I determined that a good format for me
to improvise in would be a small group setting."  Knowledgeable listeners
can't help being impressed with Zorn's improvisation.  He didn't practice
alto eight-hours-a-day over 10 years for nothing. He articulates cleanly
at incredible speed and his upper register work is amazing.  Zorn is an
original post-Ornette Coleman stylist with a patented set of vocal
effects, gurgles, quacks and shrieks which enable him to perform
Varese-like improvisations. Sometimes, he only plays the mouthpiece of
his instrument.  In order to concentrate more on solo jazz improvisation,
Zorn set about creating the context, Masada, the name of both a quartet
and the group of compositions it performs.  "I really think of myself as
a composer," explains Zorn over the phone from New York. "The Masada
project came out of my looking at the master jazz composers, Ornette
Coleman, Wayne Shorter, Thelonious Monk and asking myself if I could
create a body of work like them. I'd never done anything like that
before. I thought of my compositions in terms of orchestration and
melody.  But Ornette - he can write some little thing and you can play on
it for 10 minutes.  "So I set myself a challenge. I'd write 100 tunes in
one year. Each one had to deal with a different problem. And, you know,
they'd just be rhythms and pitches with some relationship to Jewish
music. Oh, one other thing. All of Masada's pieces were written in six
staves of music or less. When I got to the end of six staves, that was
it."  While Zorn feels the need to draw on his Jewish musical heritage
with Masada, there are many other elements present in his writing.
Besides Coleman's work, the floating, spacey quality of Wayne Shorter's
pieces have also marked Zorn.  And the mournful opening of Zorn's Kanah
has an undeniable Mingus-like quality.  Once the compositions were
completed, Zorn had to assemble a group capable of performing them,
namely, trumpeter Dave Douglas, bassist Greg Cohen and drummer Joey Baron
- a genuinely all-star outfit.  "My idea was to put together a `perfect'
band, like the Miles Davis group with Wayne Shorter or Ornette's band
with Don Cherry. These bands created their own musical worlds. There is a
real magic, a four-way conversation going on between us in Masada."
Although Dave Douglas has been an original trumpet stylist for a long
time, I think his antecedents need to be pointed out. Along with Woody
Shaw, Freddie Hubbard and Don Cherry, he also draws from the tradition of
Duke Ellington's cornet and trumpet players Bubber Miley, Rex Stewart and
Clark Terry, who produced vocal effects so skillfully.  Douglas uses an
impressive variety of tone colours and textures, employing muted work,
half-valve tones and klezmer-derived grace notes. Like Shaw, he
frequently leaps wide intervals.  When Zorn and Douglas improvise
simultaneously, which they frequently do, their interplay is damn near
telepathic. The length of their solos and duets are never worked out in
advance. If they solo, the decision is made spontaneously, yet the
transitions are smooth. And they don't sacrifice much by playing
together, either. Each has such a good feel for what the other is doing,
they're able to coherently improvise note-dense lines together.  There's
considerable mutual admiration and respect apparent when the members of
Masada speak of each other. "All three of those guys are incredible
musicians," Cohen insists. "You're able to develop pieces in a more
compositional manner. Everyone has a concern for the overall colours and
shapes. Because of Joey's control, I'm free to experiment and bring out
ideas that wouldn't come to the fore in other situations."  Masada's
drummer Joey Baron and bassist Greg Cohen previously played together as
the rhythm section of Teddy Edwards' band and Baron has collaborated with
Zorn for years now. "I really respect John's vision," says Baron.  "On
other projects we've done, he didn't improvise that much. But with
Masada, he's actually soloing a lot, so I can have a direct dialogue with
him as well as Greg and Dave. There's way more emphasis on group
interaction."  That Masada's live performances have been so highly
praised - more than any other Zorn project - has got to be good for the
morale of an experimental artist like Zorn whose work creates
controversy. He's pleased that the sound of Masada "speaks to a new
generation of Jews who aren't satisfied to hear klezmer standards all the
time. A lot of people are really enjoying this music.  I lucked out."
Harvey Pekar, besides frequently upstaging David Letterman, is reknowned
for his American Splendor comic book series. As well, Pekar's insightful
discourses on music have appeared in Down Beat, the Jazz Journal and the
Boston
Herald.

Copyright NOW magagine 1995

for more info, write NOW
150 Danforth Ave
Toronto ON
M4K 1N1

Also in this issue of NOW: Patti Smith (cover story), Franklin Kiermyer,
James Carter, Christian McBride
(jazz fest issue)

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From [e-mail]  Fri Jun 30 15:56:31 1995
Subject: Dalet (Masada bonus CD)

I was starting to think I might have missed out on the Masada bonus CD offer
from DIW (I'm impatient! :).  However, my copy of Dalet arrived in the mail
today.  I sent my request to them on June 3, so the turnaround time in my case
was a day under 4 weeks.

-Lynn ([e-mail])

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From [e-mail]  Fri Jun 30 16:05:33 1995
Subject: (fwd) a new group-OBLIQUE AH BLUE

This was posted by Elliot Sharp to rec.music.bluenote;  I didn't see it
in the most recent Zorn digest so I thought I would pass it on.

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

announcing the US debut of OBLIQUE AH BLUE, a cooperative group with:

    Ray Anderson-trombone
    Arthur Blythe-alto sax
    Santi DeBriano-bass
    Billy Hart-drums
    Elliott Sharp-guitar

Thursday  June 29  Midnight  Knitting Factory  74 Leonard  NYC 212.219.3055

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jonathan feldman        [e-mail]
                http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~jonathan/welcome.html

"Bebop was the black musician saying: okay, sucker, try stealing this."

    Richard Williams, author of "Miles Davis: The Man in the Green Shirt"

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From [e-mail]  Mon Jul  3 03:47:09 1995
Subject: translate?

Hello,
Could somebody please try to translate the japanese writing on the guys
head in the first Naked City album?????
I heard that the text got the cd banned in japan or something.....

Thanks,
Jonas V.

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From [e-mail]  Wed Jul  5 06:55:44 1995
Subject: Records produced by Zorn

Could somebody tell me what these Zorn produced records are like?:

RODAN by Sato Michihiro
LO FLUX TUBE by Old
CYCLOTRON by Blind Idiot God
SHOCK CORRIDOR by David Shea
KOROSHI NO BLUES by Makigami Koishi
ALLEGORICAL MISUNDERSTANDING by Fushitsusha

thanks,
Jonas V.

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