ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ OOOOOOOOOOO RRRRRRRRRRRRR NNN NNN Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ooooooooooooo r rr nnnn nnn zz o o r rr nnnnn nnn zzz o o r rr nnnnnn nnn zzz o o r rr nnn nnn nnn zzz o o r rr nnn nnn nnn zzz o o r rr nnn nnn nnn zzz o o rrrrrrrrrrrrr nnn nnn nnn zzz o o rr rr nnn nnn nnn zzz ooooooooooooo rr rr nnn nnnnnn zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZ OOOOOOOOOOO rr rr nnn nnnnn ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ rr rr nnn nnnn rr rr NNN NNN RR RR (AND OTHER NYC DOWNTOWN MUSICIANS) posts: zorn@unh.edu sub/unsub: zorn-request@unh.edu *** BACK ISSUES of this digest can be obtained in 3 ways: *** 1) anonymous FTP at cs.uwp.edu *** 2) via my homepage: http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mpj1 *** 3) send mail to mpj1@kepler.unh.edu, on the subject line, put: send #, where # is the issue you want DIGEST #71, 7-5-95 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- From papagian@iesl.forth.gr 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From awood@igs.net 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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From mattg@io.org 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) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From RARDIN%ORION@BINAH.CC.BRANDEIS.EDU 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 (rardin@auriga.rose.brandeis.edu) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From jonathan@CS.McGill.CA 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 ----------------------------------------------------------- jonathan feldman jonathan@cs.mcgill.ca 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" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From zoopsi@inet.uni-c.dk 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. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- From zoopsi@inet.uni-c.dk 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. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------