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LOL!
If anyone who remembers the big John
Cage & Philip Glass Fistfights of 2000 is waiting for me to say Nasty Things
about John Zorn, I regret I must disappoint. I think John Zorn kicks ass, I
think he's brilliant, I love to listen to his music or whatever that stuff he
records is, I've paid lots of money to buy it, and spent lots of time tracking
it down -- it's not exactly universally available wherever N Sync and Destiny's
Child are sold.
If you're unfamilar with JZ, I don't
really know how to describe his stuff. I guess you'd look for it in the Avant
Garde bin, but it's pretty much nearly all "organic" -- that is, he
isn't much or at all into electronic or computerized things.
I suspect if you mentioned Harry Partch
to him, you could have a very rich two-hour conversation. They both approach
music as if they were inventing it entirely from scratch while-u-wait.
He frequently employs women vocalists
of the Yoko Ono School. But usually with overall results better than Ms. Ono,
IMHO.
I first ran into Zorn with individual tracks on compilations.
The first thing I ever heard of his,
a cover of Iggy Pop's "TV Eye," sounded like men violently throwing
metal garbage cans around in a city alley. The next was a song on the Kurt Weill
compilation "Lost in the Stars," very startling, abrupt, with one of
his Yoko Ono sopranos. It took me many listenings to isolate and verify Weill's
original melody, more to recognize any of the words. And yet he was clearly
inspired by Weill's song, he was trying very hard, with heavy machinery and
explosives, to get at its soul.
His choices are as interesting as his
treatments. He has an entire CD devoted to the Spaghetti Western composer Sergio
Leone. When Zorn says "Listen to this, this is serious," he has the
force and the focus to make you sit and listen and
think.
Lately we've been asking and answering
lots of hypothetical and imaginary GG questions. Here's a hypothetical answer: I
think Gould and Zorn would have known and admired one another and been very
interested in one another's work. Both were/are pioneers, leaders, adventurers
in the Nutrition of the Ears and the Mind.
Bob
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