Masada String Trio - 50th Birthday Celebration

Tzadik 5001

Hard to believe John Zorn has hit the half-century mark. With disheveled locks and a penchant for camouflage britches he still clings fast to a punk pedagogy- one that points directly to the implausibility of “over-the-hill” as possible pigeonhole. Then there’s his pesky personality tic that propels a production quota in no danger of ebbing as the years advance. The big 5-0 was as good a reason as any for Zorn to tilt the looking glass at once backward and then forward on his work of the past decade, and thanks to Tzadik, those who weren’t present at New York's Tonic last summer for the month’s worth of celebratory gigs can still bask in sounds of what went down.

The Masada String Trio performance from September 4, 2003 is first in what will be a year’s worth of monthly releases. Future discs will include sets from the Zorn/Milford Graves duo, Painkiller, and Cobra, among others. Here Zorn conducts while Mark Feldman, Erik Friedlander and Greg Cohen respond and improvise over ten numbers, an hour-plus recital all told. A somber air saturates some of pieces, like the loping “Moshav,” shot through with Feldman’s whorl-shaped violin arcs, but the results are rarely dour. The wry humor underscoring Zorn’s conduction style accentuates the players’ own piebald emotional leanings. It’s a gamut that also informs the Shepardic mold from which the compositions are cast. That the continuum translates so well through Zorn’s pieces reflects both his compositional skills and the emblematic acumen of the players he picks to interpret them.

The music is beautifully recorded and – true to the marketing blurb on the disc’s obi strip -- done so in such a way that it feels like the stage is only feet away. Zorn draws mostly on The Circle Maker songbook, and some from Bar Kohkba. Though there is not much in the way of new material, there’s still plenty of dive-bombing, criss-crossing arco runs mixed with pitter-patter pizzicato to go around. “Tahah” appears perfect in execution, as the strings dance and cavort through its dark theme, while “Lachish” crams a prickly thicket of string cacti into a mere three minutes, leaving the temporal seams punctured with shivering harmonic spines. Cohen is the marathon runner on his bass, setting a febrile pace with his fingers that no doubt left his calluses chaffed and split by set’s conclusion. And Friedlander’s cello sits as fulcrum between his colleagues’ opposing registers, siring populous string plucks in some places, slicing with rosin-chalked bow in others.

The melodies will be familiar to Masada aficionados, but the renderings are still fresh and invigorating. Applause and tune-ups between pieces are included and add to the overall impression of being there. While not an essential entry in isolation, it’s still an auspicious debut for a series that will likely shape up to be a seminal chapter in the Book of Zorn.