John Zorn - 50(8) and 50(9)

Tzadik 5008

Tzadik 5009

Zorn’s vaunted 50th birthday series continues with entries Eight and Nine. Both slim-line discs celebrate the same stylish linear graphics and font script as previous volumes. Eight documents the late September 03’ meeting between Zorn, drummer Susie Ibarra and trumpet tone scientist Wadada Leo Smith. The night’s two full sets constitute a generous program of music and the clarity of engineer Daniel Goldaracena’s recording simulates a stage-side seat front and center.

Zorn and Ibarra face off first, each playfully announcing the other before catapulting into a brisk exchange of register leaping squeals and frothing drum chatter. The shared sounds unfold fast and furious with Zorn scampering full bore and Ibarra playing agile catch-up, coloring and accentuating his florid exhortations. “Meridan” is over so swiftly that the audience even pauses in its applause to make sure the two have finished. On “Rising Sign” staccato reed pops and trilling stutters disperse over a cushion of malleted drums and kulintang accompaniment. The piece culminates with Zorn adopting his best simulacrum of a belfry-full of bats escaping through a broken-shutter window as Ibarra underscores with a scintillating cymbal wash.

The energy and wanton ebullience of “By the Mark, Eight” parallels Zorn’s previous conclave with drummer Milford Graves two weeks earlier. Once again he barrels ahead with a barrage of geysering renal screams, leaving Ibarra to flush and fill the gaps. Smith steps to the fray with “Visitation.” The tripartite improv unfolds like a Kabuki theater production staged by a buzzing hive of insects as flapping moth-wing brushes vie with reed and brass mouthpiece sputters that range from puckered squeaks to guttural breath expulsions.

Ibarra sheathes her sticks for the remaining numbers, leaving Zorn and Smith to resume the conversation as a tandem. “Ipsissimi” opens in a fanfare of fluctuating tones as the sparring horns try to out-soar each other across a suite-like assemblage of segments. Smith commands one of the most consistently clarion sonorities in creative music and as such quickly establishes the edge. Zorn doesn’t sound dissuaded by the differential, trundling out an artillery of reed effects and furnishings that keep the music moving despite the lean constituency. Warbling scales, crenellated metallic cascades, stentorian octave-hurdling blasts- all come into play and overlap during the dialogue at one juncture or another.

Ibarra resumes the kit for the piebald exchange of “Ghost Writing.” Her gongs and shakers assume an ancillary role alongside mallets and brushes in the atmospherically heavy performance. The interplay hinges on a sliding cadence that eventually segues into an agitated gallop. Zorn and Smith render the disc’s next piece as duo, once again trading in a lingua franca of ephemeral airborne noises. The press roll-fueled grand finale of “Full Fathom Five” reconvenes the trio with Ibarra engaging first Smith, then Zorn in a vigorous series of skirmishes.

Nine represents an event some might claim two decades overdue. Zorn’s first two volumes of The Classic Guide to Strategy, originally pressed in 1981 and 1985 and since reissued by Tzadik in a single package, set the cognoscenti of solo reed music on their collective ear. Evan Parker called it a treatise that “demands our attention” while others dismissed it as the work of a spotlight-soliciting charlatan. Wherever one falls in the debate, there’s no denying an evolution in Zorn’s solo art. Drawn from the second set on the aforementioned night with Graves this ostensible third volume subtitled The Fire Book, clocks at a mere forty or so minutes but it’s more than enough. Zorn still packs in phonebook-sized pasticcio of sounds and textures. He leaves the duck calls in the display case at home and straps on only his alto in the service of scripting a challenging omnibus of alien inflections and dialects.

If Zorn’s penchant for narcissistic displays of naked technique was held in check by Ibarra and Smith on the evening two weeks hence, here his id flourishes right alongside a prodigious intellect. He chews through fibercane reeds like a woodchuck masticating tree trunks into moist pulp. Speed limits seem a desultory distraction too as his rapid jump-cut diction races from one idea to the next. Piercing tea kettle whinnies, bugle-style blurts and vibrato-slicked tongue flutters all roll out in the first few minutes of the recital.

The consequent cumulative feel is a bit like that of a bean counter scratching off items on an inventory checklist. Experienced on headphones much of the action assaults like prickly pipe cleaners excoriating the ear canals. But Zorn tempers the accelerated stringency and dissonance on occasion with startling segments of lyricism and humor. Delicate strings of percussive reed pops serve as segue agents between the repeated bouts of onanistic excess. Capricious about-faces are regular part of the road-map.

There’s skill and sleight-of-horn aplenty on display, but at times Zorn’s gesticulations and manipulations come across more as empty exercises than cohesive pieces of an overarching whole. Many are headache-inducing in their intensity and obdurate attention to the upper register reaches of the alto. On “Part Four” finds him indulging in what sounds like his old trick of submerging mouthpiece sans horn in a bucket of water and birthing streams of mucid bubbles. The sections of relatively straight blowing such as the opening minute or so of “Part Three” arrive like restive and restorative eyes in a recurring storm. The set would probably have benefited from more of them. Consequently, I had a hard time digesting sections of the concert. Steadfast Zorn admirers are likely less prone to such difficulties. But from my vantage it might be a good plan to spike the soft-shelled crab in his next pre-performance Bento box with a duplicitous dose of Xanax™.

~ Derek Taylor