http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/29/PKGG5CS1SG1.DTL&type=music
MUSIC ON THE EDGE [font=geneva,arial] - Andrew Gilbert
[/font] [font=geneva,arial][size=-2] Sunday, May 29, 2005
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John Zorn worries about being misunderstood. And well he should: Over the past quarter century, the visionary composer and alto saxophonist has created an almost unfathomably vast and varied body of work, attracting a legion of passionate fans eager to experience his latest sonic thrill ride, as well as detractors who distrust his knack for drawing media attention.
Not that he seeks out the press. Zorn mostly avoids interviews, after repeatedly finding himself caricatured in profiles that focus on his unconventional living quarters, his notions of Jewish identity and his habit of keeping movies running throughout his waking hours.
When the focus shifts to his music, Zorn is sometimes pegged as a "borrower" who delights in juxtaposing disparate musical elements. It's no wonder that his voice takes on an aggrieved tone when his sincerity is called into question.
"I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages," says Zorn, 51, during a rare phone interview from his apartment in Greenwich Village. "People for the most part see me as a pastiche artist, as an ironist, as this sort of postmodern poster boy. This is not at all what I'm about, and it never has been. I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way. I'm not interested in pastiche. I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together. Great musicians accept everything that they hear and find something good. They take what they like and they throw away what they don't like."
It's hard to keep up with his output, which includes more than 250 CDs, many on his own Tzadik label, documenting his film scores and opera, string quartets and game pieces, experimental projects and various incarnations of his Masada project, his celebrated body of compositions melding avant-garde jazz and Ashkenazi musical scales.
One thread running through Zorn's work is his continuing fascination with dark, fetishistic and extreme human behavior and history, including some of the many tragic chapters of the Jewish experience.
"He's one of those larger-than-life people who do a million different things," says British guitarist Fred Frith, a professor of music at Mills College, frequent Zorn collaborator and improvisational trailblazer since his days with the avant-rock band Henry Cow in the late 1960s.
The extent to which Zorn has come to symbolize New York's experimental music scene can be seen in Cal Performances' second Berkeley Edge Fest, which runs Friday through next Sunday in Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley. Consisting of four concerts, three of which feature Zorn, and a series of discussions with the participating composers and musicians, the Edge Fest is a biennial event alternating with the Early Music Festival. Cal Performances initiated the new- music showcase in 2003 with an impressive roster of California composers, including John Adams, Terry Riley and Lou Harrison.
"I thought next time I'd like to do something equally connected to a specific place," says Cal Performances Director Robert Cole. "I was thinking of the downtown New York scene. A number of names came to mind, and John's was the No. 1."
For the Edge Fest, which is produced in association with UC Berkeley's department of music and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, Zorn is presenting mostly recent works for strings played by a cast of stellar musicians. Friday's program celebrates the 70th birthday of pioneering minimalist composer and pianist Riley and features cellist Joan Jeanrenaud and tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, among others. It's the only program on which Zorn will be playing alto sax, in his first onstage collaboration with Riley, whom he describes as "one of my great musical mentors, a hero, someone who blew my mind as a teenager."
"I picked up those records, 'Rainbow in Curved Air,' 'In C,' 'Persian Surgery Dervishes,' back when they were being made in 1968-69. It was just a very open-minded approach to making music, where influences were accepted rather than pushed away. I've admired and loved his work for decades, and this is the first time we're going to stand up together. I don't know what we're going to do. We'll just improvise, and it should be interesting."
Saturday's program includes Zorn's "Walpurgisnacht," featuring violinist Jennifer Choi, violist Richard O'Neill and cellist Fred Sherry; and his "Le Momo," a minimalist chamber piece inspired by Antonin Artaud and featuring Choi and pianist Stephen Drury. Selections from "Masada Book Two -- the Book of Angels" will be played by the Masada String Trio (violinist Mark Feldman, cellist Erik Fried- lander and bassist Greg Cohen) and conducted by Zorn.
"Everyone is playing off the same lead sheet with a melody and chord symbols that can be interpreted the same way a jazz standard or a bebop tune would be," Feldman says of the Masada String Trio. "They're John's arrangements, in some cases created on the spot using various hand signals that we've come to know. Some pieces are just verbally arranged, usually on the day of the concert."
"It's a matter of keeping people on a spontaneous edge," Zorn says. "They're never sure who's going to take the first solo, or how long they're going to play. That gives the music itself a fresh, exciting quality."
Sunday afternoon's program opens with more pieces from "The Book of Angels," which consists of 300 compositions Zorn wrote in three months, played by Feldman and pianist Sylvie Courvoisier. After an intermission, the Crowley Quartet performs Zorn's arresting five-movement string quartet "Necronomicon."
Zorn has played a singular role in fostering a wide-ranging conversation about the nature of the Jewish experience in America through the Tzadik label's Radical Jewish Culture series, including projects by some of the Bay Area's most vivid artists, such as clarinetist Ben Goldberg and his New Klezmer Trio, violinist Daniel Hoffman's Davka, former Berkeley violinist Jenny Scheinman, guitarist John Schott, the late saxophonist Glenn Spearman and vocalist Jewlia Eisenberg.
"All I really wanted to do with that series was to give good musicians a chance to explore what Jewish music is and could be for them," Zorn says, noting that klezmer music -- the secular, celebratory music of Eastern European Jewry -- was an amalgam of influences drawn from surrounding peoples.
"In that same way, here we are surrounded by all kinds of music. Why are we being so restrictive and slavishly re-creating music from the 18th and 19th centuries? I think there's a place for that, but I also think there's a place for a treasure hunt within the tradition. That's where I began to ask questions that maybe don't have one specific answer. And the more people you get answers from, the richer the environment becomes."
Berkeley Edge Fest: John Zorn plays at 8 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 3 p.m. next Sun. at Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley. $32. (510) 642- 9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu. Andrew Gilbert is a freelance writer.
MUSIC ON THE EDGE [font=geneva,arial] - Andrew Gilbert
[/font] [font=geneva,arial][size=-2] Sunday, May 29, 2005
[/size][/font]
John Zorn worries about being misunderstood. And well he should: Over the past quarter century, the visionary composer and alto saxophonist has created an almost unfathomably vast and varied body of work, attracting a legion of passionate fans eager to experience his latest sonic thrill ride, as well as detractors who distrust his knack for drawing media attention.
Not that he seeks out the press. Zorn mostly avoids interviews, after repeatedly finding himself caricatured in profiles that focus on his unconventional living quarters, his notions of Jewish identity and his habit of keeping movies running throughout his waking hours.
When the focus shifts to his music, Zorn is sometimes pegged as a "borrower" who delights in juxtaposing disparate musical elements. It's no wonder that his voice takes on an aggrieved tone when his sincerity is called into question.
"I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages," says Zorn, 51, during a rare phone interview from his apartment in Greenwich Village. "People for the most part see me as a pastiche artist, as an ironist, as this sort of postmodern poster boy. This is not at all what I'm about, and it never has been. I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way. I'm not interested in pastiche. I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together. Great musicians accept everything that they hear and find something good. They take what they like and they throw away what they don't like."
It's hard to keep up with his output, which includes more than 250 CDs, many on his own Tzadik label, documenting his film scores and opera, string quartets and game pieces, experimental projects and various incarnations of his Masada project, his celebrated body of compositions melding avant-garde jazz and Ashkenazi musical scales.
One thread running through Zorn's work is his continuing fascination with dark, fetishistic and extreme human behavior and history, including some of the many tragic chapters of the Jewish experience.
"He's one of those larger-than-life people who do a million different things," says British guitarist Fred Frith, a professor of music at Mills College, frequent Zorn collaborator and improvisational trailblazer since his days with the avant-rock band Henry Cow in the late 1960s.
The extent to which Zorn has come to symbolize New York's experimental music scene can be seen in Cal Performances' second Berkeley Edge Fest, which runs Friday through next Sunday in Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley. Consisting of four concerts, three of which feature Zorn, and a series of discussions with the participating composers and musicians, the Edge Fest is a biennial event alternating with the Early Music Festival. Cal Performances initiated the new- music showcase in 2003 with an impressive roster of California composers, including John Adams, Terry Riley and Lou Harrison.
"I thought next time I'd like to do something equally connected to a specific place," says Cal Performances Director Robert Cole. "I was thinking of the downtown New York scene. A number of names came to mind, and John's was the No. 1."
For the Edge Fest, which is produced in association with UC Berkeley's department of music and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, Zorn is presenting mostly recent works for strings played by a cast of stellar musicians. Friday's program celebrates the 70th birthday of pioneering minimalist composer and pianist Riley and features cellist Joan Jeanrenaud and tabla maestro Zakir Hussain, among others. It's the only program on which Zorn will be playing alto sax, in his first onstage collaboration with Riley, whom he describes as "one of my great musical mentors, a hero, someone who blew my mind as a teenager."
"I picked up those records, 'Rainbow in Curved Air,' 'In C,' 'Persian Surgery Dervishes,' back when they were being made in 1968-69. It was just a very open-minded approach to making music, where influences were accepted rather than pushed away. I've admired and loved his work for decades, and this is the first time we're going to stand up together. I don't know what we're going to do. We'll just improvise, and it should be interesting."
Saturday's program includes Zorn's "Walpurgisnacht," featuring violinist Jennifer Choi, violist Richard O'Neill and cellist Fred Sherry; and his "Le Momo," a minimalist chamber piece inspired by Antonin Artaud and featuring Choi and pianist Stephen Drury. Selections from "Masada Book Two -- the Book of Angels" will be played by the Masada String Trio (violinist Mark Feldman, cellist Erik Fried- lander and bassist Greg Cohen) and conducted by Zorn.
"Everyone is playing off the same lead sheet with a melody and chord symbols that can be interpreted the same way a jazz standard or a bebop tune would be," Feldman says of the Masada String Trio. "They're John's arrangements, in some cases created on the spot using various hand signals that we've come to know. Some pieces are just verbally arranged, usually on the day of the concert."
"It's a matter of keeping people on a spontaneous edge," Zorn says. "They're never sure who's going to take the first solo, or how long they're going to play. That gives the music itself a fresh, exciting quality."
Sunday afternoon's program opens with more pieces from "The Book of Angels," which consists of 300 compositions Zorn wrote in three months, played by Feldman and pianist Sylvie Courvoisier. After an intermission, the Crowley Quartet performs Zorn's arresting five-movement string quartet "Necronomicon."
Zorn has played a singular role in fostering a wide-ranging conversation about the nature of the Jewish experience in America through the Tzadik label's Radical Jewish Culture series, including projects by some of the Bay Area's most vivid artists, such as clarinetist Ben Goldberg and his New Klezmer Trio, violinist Daniel Hoffman's Davka, former Berkeley violinist Jenny Scheinman, guitarist John Schott, the late saxophonist Glenn Spearman and vocalist Jewlia Eisenberg.
"All I really wanted to do with that series was to give good musicians a chance to explore what Jewish music is and could be for them," Zorn says, noting that klezmer music -- the secular, celebratory music of Eastern European Jewry -- was an amalgam of influences drawn from surrounding peoples.
"In that same way, here we are surrounded by all kinds of music. Why are we being so restrictive and slavishly re-creating music from the 18th and 19th centuries? I think there's a place for that, but I also think there's a place for a treasure hunt within the tradition. That's where I began to ask questions that maybe don't have one specific answer. And the more people you get answers from, the richer the environment becomes."
Berkeley Edge Fest: John Zorn plays at 8 p.m. Fri.-Sat., 3 p.m. next Sun. at Hertz Hall, UC Berkeley. $32. (510) 642- 9988, www.calperfs.berkeley.edu. Andrew Gilbert is a freelance writer.
