John Zorn gave himself one solo night in his monthlong birthday bash,
and for it chose what he has described as some of his most demanding
material to perform.
He attacked the set of structures with confidence and sustained their
cohesion throughout. As on the 1981 and 1985 albums of The
Classic Guide to Strategy (volumes one and two), he set forth the
building blocks of his architecture: the overblowing, various mouthings
and tonguings of the reed, fragments of melody, repreated phrases
changing in tempo and dynamic and unbroken through circular
breathing, rhythms with interrupting interjections, all thrown against
one another in stark contrast, changing quickly and dramatically, as he
has asked many of ensembles to do. Whether it was, strictly speaking,
The Classic Guide is difficult to say; he didn't play from scores
and some of the approaches were definitely updated from the
recordings. Perhaps this was Volume Three of the proposed but never
completed five-part series. In any event, it didn't matter because Zorn was deconstructing his music
without a safety net, playing hard and only stopping, as he said from the
stage, "when the reed is dead."
"There are no writers here?" he added as an afterthought. "Because they'll
misunderstand what I mean." And I wasn't misunderstanding, but I was
interpreting, vamping with pen and paper on a theme he had suggested.
(Sorry, John, that's what we do, and in a sense it's not that different from
what jazz players do. And I know, I know, you're not a jazz player, or not
only one or don't want to be called one, but at any rate you're a hell of a
jazzman even if you don't want to be.)
So I was contemplating the murdering of reeds, I was misunderstanding
perhaps and maybe even preparing to slander the artist (the artist who,
let it be said, composed the pieces "Where Are My Victims?" "You Will Be
Shot," "Executioner," "I Die Screaming," and, notably, "Perfume Of A
Critic's Burning Flesh."), and why not? Why does John Zorn go through
five reeds in a 45-minute set? Because he plays hard, relentlessly hard.
He can play melodically, comically, evocatively, joyously, passionately and with
dexterity, but if it's not aggressive (or if he would rather such terms not
be used), it is unfailingly hard. While as a composer he covers more
ground, as an improviser that is his language. And during a month when
he's playing all but nightly, and when the very quiet saxophonists John Butcher
and Michel Doneda are in town, that dynamic becomes more than apparent.
But noting that he is a reed killer is an observation, not a
condemnation. It's what he does and it's what he did, and did so
impressively. He ran through the language of his playing, he took his
horn apart and played pieces of it individually. He played his mouthpiece
submerged into a glass of water (although somehow playing into a glass
of water seems to work better on record, even if it is the sort of thing
that delights patient patrons of experimentalism, always hungry for
something even more unusual, or at least more visual). And when he played into a glass of
water, you can bet he played hard.
He paused before the encore, looking slightly puzzled and said "I don't
know what to do - I've done it all." And within his personal vocabulary,
he more or less had. Which is remarkable. As he did 20 years ago, he
laid out his modus operandi all by his lonesome. And he played a hell of
a set.
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