Edit] Early life

Edit] Rundown

Zorn's recorded output is prolific with hundreds of album credits as a performer, composer, or producer. His work of avant-garde and experimental music expertly draws from a wide range of musical genres and traditions, often within a single composition, including jazz, rock, hardcore punk, classical, contemporary classical music, klezmer, film, cartoon, popular, and improvised music.^[1][2] Zorn has led the punk jazz band Naked City, the klezmer-influenced quartet Masada and composed the associated 'Masada Songbooks', written concert music for classical ensembles, and produced music for film and documentary. Zorn has stated that "I've got an incredibly short attention span. My music is jam-packed with information that is changing very fast... All the various styles are organically connected to one another. I'm an additive person - the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can't see the connections, but they are there."^[3]

After releasing albums on several independent US and European labels, Zorn signed with Elektra Nonesuch and attracted wide acclaim in 1985 when he released The Big Gundown with his interpretations of music composed by Ennio Morricone.^[4] This was followed by the album Spillane in 1987, and the first album by Naked City in 1989 which all attracted further worldwide attention.^[2][5][6][7] Zorn then recorded on the Japanese DIW label and curated the Avant subsidiary label before forming Tzadik in 1995, where he has been prolific, issuing several new recordings each year and releasing works by many other musicians.

Zorn established himself within the New York City downtown music movement in the early 1980s but has since composed and performed with a wide range of musicians working in diverse musical areas. By the early 1990s Zorn was working extensively in Japan, attracted by that culture's openness about borrowing and remixing ingredients from elsewhere, where he performed and recorded under the name Dekoboko Hajime, before returning to New York as a permanent base in the mid-1990s.^[8][9][10] Zorn has undertaken many tours of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, often performing at festivals with varying ensembles to display his diverse output.^[11][12]

Edit] Biography

edit] Early life

John Zorn was born in New York City and learned piano, guitar and flute as a child.^[13] His family possessed broad musical tastes and he gained an appreciation of classical and world music from his mother, a professor of education, through his father, a hairdresser, was exposed to jazz, French chansons, and country music, and listened to his older brother's collection of doo-wop, and 1950s rock and roll.^[14] Zorn recalled an episode of his life, after buying a record by Mauricio Kagel in 1968 at the age of fifteen, that influenced his subsequent taste for experimental and avant-garde music:^[15][16]

Here we are: Kagel, "Improvisation Ajoutée." I bought this when I was about 15. Still marked: got it at Sam Goody in September, for 98 cents. And it's a really crazy piece, with the guys screaming and hooting, something that attracted me. I was over at my friend's house, and he really liked the Rolling Stones. And I just got this record, and I put it on and he looked at me like... who the hell are you? Are you out of your mind? And his mother was there, and she was like [puts palm on cheek] my God, take this off... and right then and there, I decided: this was the music.

As a teenager, Zorn played bass in a surf band. He studied music under Leonardo Balada. During these years, he taught himself about orchestration and counterpoint, by transcribing scores and using in his own compositions, a procedure of "plagiarizing, stealing, quoting, or whatever you can call it", of collage and transposition into his own world, that he has been using throughout his career.^[17]

Zorn picked up the saxophone after discovering Anthony Braxton's album For Alto (1969) while studying composition at Webster College (now Webster University) in St. Louis, Missouri, where he attended classes taught by Oliver Lake.^[18][19] While still at Webster, Zorn incorporated elements of free jazz, avant-garde and experimental music, film scores, performance art and the cartoon scores of Carl Stalling into his first recordings which were later released as First Recordings 1973 (1995).^[20]

After dropping out of college, and following a stint on the West Coast, Zorn moved to Manhattan and gave concerts in his apartment and other small NY venues playing saxophone and a variety of reeds, duck calls, tapes, and other instruments.^[21] He founded the Theatre of Musical Optics, a performance art project, in 1975 and became a major participant in the fertile, avant-garde downtown music scene as a composer, performer and producer of music that challenges the confines of any single musical genre.^[22] Zorn later used the term 'Theatre of Musical Optics' as the publishing company for his compositions.

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