(musings) John Zorn live review

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

John Zorn Ensemble
Barbican Hall, London, 29 November 1998

The last time John Zorn came to Britain was nearly ten years ago, when he played a little arts centre in Liverpool where the bar only served cans of Jamaican lager and the Naked City band played so hard that the next day the woodwork needed re-finishing. There is a story doing the rounds that Zorn ran into some problems at customs during that trip -- something to do with the album cover for Grand Guinol, perhaps -- but whatever the truth of the matter it’s been a long time and expectations were running high. There were at least a few of us who remembered the last time, too, and were uncertain what to expect in the grandiose surroundings of the Barbican Hall.

This was billed as "modern chamber music", and we were to be treated to some of Zorn’s through-composed works, which are not well-known on this side of the Atlantic. He kicked off proceedings with "Carny", a piano solo given an immaculate reading by Steve Drury. The notes often came so fast as to form a blur, creating Ligeti-like clouds of dissonance, and structurally it was all we have come to expect from Zorn -- the wild leaps of imagination, the notorious jump-cuts and genre pastiches, but also that impulse to develop musical themes almost in spite of his better intentions.

This was followed by "Memento Mori", his elegy to collaborator and friend Ikue Mori for string quartet, and it was here that Zorn took us by the hand and showed us something different something quite unlike the sneering collage for which he is best-known here. It’s a long piece -- half an hour -- and is much more conventionally modernist than one might expect. At a mostly quiet dynamic, the sytrings slide and gather around dissonant clusters, frequently pausing for a few seconds of silence before moving on. His string writing is extremely accomplished, and the effect, moment to moment, was quite ravishing. The problem was the duration; Zorn’s go-nowhere aesthetic wasn’t going anywhere, but it can let him down over longer pieces. This diffuse study in predominanty very high pitches, beautiful as it is at first, does rather sag by two-thirds of the way in.

The second half was better, beginning with the very enjoyable "Music for Children". It is a trio for violin, piano and percussion but, contrary to expectations, the violin has much the least prominent role, and the close interaction between piano and percussion is to the fore. The writing is also gentler than one has come to expect -- episodic rather than cut-n-paste -- and Willie Winant’s percussion required such antics as snapping lengths of wood and swatting at a sports bag (big laughs all round). There were some people in the audience with children, but unfortunately I did not have an opportunity to ask them exactly what they made of it.

Then, the moment we had all been waiting for -- no, we had been perched on the edges of our seats, praying that the programme would be wrong. Zorn stepped onto the platform with his alto around his neck: he was going to play. The piece was "Rugby", one of his "game pieces" for improvisors which works by a system of rules incomprehensible to the audience, and the great Anthony Coleman joined the group for a rowdy but extremely musical workout. These players are clearly well-drilled, and they interacted with impressive speed and agility, Zorn joining them with the kinds of ear-splitting squeals not heard from his horn since the Painkiller days. The audience loved it, and it was pretty clear that they could have listened to this kind of material all night.

The programme closed with the unassuming "Kolnidre", a string quartet reminiscent of Arvo Part which was perfectly nice but hardly something he was going to be allowed to end on. The encore -- and if you only come to London once a decade, you play an encore, mister, and you’d better like it -- was "Cat o’ Nine Tails", Zorn’s homage to Tex Avery and probably his best-known work thanks to the Kronos Quartet. It was given a full-throttle performance, and remains one of his most successful and exciting pieces.

Then he was gone: one of the most important musicians on the planet working in any field. His compositions are enjoyable and distinctive, and we need to hear more of them more often if we are going to judge him on them. What his fan base here wants is to hear him play -- to hear him with the Masada quartet, or Cobra, or even solo -- because that is the material which we know him for. A Zorn gig should not be a once-a-decade experience; his interests and his output are too wide-ranging to get a picture of him that way. It should be an annual institution. Only that way will we stand a chance of keeping up with him.

See also... Zorn, John: Masada Het (DIW: DIW-195) John Zorn (alto sax), Dave Douglas (trumpet), Greg Cohen (bass), Joey Baron (drums)
Zorn, John: The Classic Guide to Strategy John Zorn (reed instruments, game calls etc.)
Richard Cochrane