IIMA - International Improvised Music Archive         To  Front Page...     This review is part of the Musings Collection - see the index here.

This review first appeared in Avant Magazine, published by FMR.

JOHN ZORN -- The Classic Guide to Strategy Volumes 1 & 2    (Tzadik TZ7305) John Zorn (reeds, game calls etc.) Who but the outrageously wealthy can keep up with the slew of work which pours out of Zorn’s Tzadik label? Yet the aesthetic value of each offering is in no way diminished by this hyper-supply. A beautiful fetish-object it certainly is, with its cartridge-paper insert and smart pictures and fiddly gold lettering -- if Tzadik ever start pressing vinyl a lot of us are going to have to renegotiate our overdrafts -- but easy-to-love packaging is something we’ve come to expect from Zorn, right alongside hard-to-like music. The Classic Guide to Strategy has the feel of a manifesto. It is Zorn solo -- sort of -- playing, after a fashion, a selection of (sort of) reed instruments. Inspired by Musashi’s military treatise The Book of Five Rings, the back cover has Zorn’s hands hovering over a table covered with mouthpieces, game calls and dismembered horns, as if about to play a move in a very convoluted game of musical Go. The first two tracks, which account for over half of the album’s nigh-on eighty minutes’ duration, have the same feel as those vocabulary statements made by the great figures of British Improv during the early seventies. Juxtaposing and overlapping Zorn’s mutant articulations with little concern for form, each is a twenty-minute stream of consciousness. He vocalises, bubbles, screams, whispers, unafraid of any sound at all which might be coaxed from anything laid out on his table. This, at a guess, is volume one. The remainder is a good deal more appealing, presenting six tracks of varying length, each characterised by a gestural language possibly derived from Japanese art. The playing here is far more controlled and logical, although it remains excoriating throughout. The front cover, a calligraphic ideogram, might seem to imply that this anti-formalist abstraction is connected with the Bushido tradition which is supposed to have inspired it. This, however, is a recording which does not want to be connected with anything else. Buried in his uproariously self-aggrandising sleeve notes, we find a reference to this music, "a language that only one person spoke and no one understood", and that just about hits the nail on the head. Difficult? Certainly. Uncompromising? Oh yes. But a worthy addition to Zorn’s catalogue? It’s something of a curate’s egg, and volume one is the more ambitious but also the less refined -- it comes from a gut desire for sound, while volume two is already pulling these incredible textures together into pieces of music which explore them in virtuosic detail. Indeed, the second half of this recording is quite phenomenal. Disastrous for the uninitiated, but a remarkable piece of work, and die-hards will love it. Zorn, John: Masada Het  (DIW: DIW-195) John Zorn (alto sax), Dave Douglas (trumpet), Greg Cohen (bass), Joey Baron (drums) John Zorn (gig: 29/10/98) UK performance from the lesser-sighted genius. Richard Cochrane