As if he hasn't flooded the market enough with new recordings over the last couple of years or so (gotta spend that Macarthur Fellowship money somehow, I suppose), John Zorn announced at the start of this year that he would bring out a new CD on the fourth Tuesday of each month of 2010. Is it even possible to do that? Will there be any cheating involved? Will the best-laid plans of mice and men do whatever it is that they do?
Time will reveal all. But, in the meantime, we have had five fourth Tuesdays and five new Zorn records. (Six actually -- or maybe even seven -- but we'll get to that.) First out of the box was "Mycale", the thirteenth installment of the ongoing Book of Angels series, otherwise known as the Masada songbook, book two. The Book of Angels is starting to build into something substantial, in terms of quality as well as quantity. I found it difficult to get a handle on what he was up to early on -- the fact that each release was by a different artist, with little or no overlap of individual songs between them, made it hard for the music to develop an identity of its own, particularly when the shadow in which it sat was the extraordinary body of work known as Masada, with its large number of very memorable and excellent individual songs, all of which were first sent off into the world by Zorn's very own Masada quartet, which allowed them to develop a strong and recognisable template before Zorn introduced the many and varied reworkings, and live recordings, that followed.
The original quartet seems to have been put to bed (although a variant of it came together for volume 12), so book two inevitably comes across more as variation than as theme. But repeated listening, and in particular shuffling between them at length, reveals, perhaps unsurprisingly, a uniformly high standard amongst the releases. If Zorn knows one thing, it's what he is doing. "Mycale" is a quartet of female voices, putting words, or things that sound like words, to Zorn's music. It is necessarily of shorter duration than most of the other releases. It would be too intense, too draining, if it went much beyond the allotted 33 minutes. It might not be the one I come back to the most often, but there is a lot going on here and it does repay concentration.
The fourth Tuesday in February brought with it "In Search of the Miraculous". This appears to be part of a new series of works by Zorn called "Odes for the New Millennium". It is lyrical chamber music, perhaps you might call it chamber jazz if you had to bang a nail into it from which to hang a particular shorthand description. The opening theme sets the tone: melodic piano and vibraphone, with restrained drumming lurking in the background. You could put this on in a fancy restaurant and it wouldn't raise too many eyebrows. Which, y'know, when you're talking about John Zorn is actually a remarkable thing. He seems to have been working with melody and restraint rather a lot lately: the difference being that he no longer seems to feel the need to break the mood with passages of noisy skronk (which, obviously, has its place, but it does mean you don't get to introduce most of his music to the squares, even though they would like much of it).
March: Zorn's Dreamers ensemble, what I have come to think of as his "such fun" outlet, came along with their own take on Book of Angels, "Ipos". It perhaps doesn't need to be said, but this is a delight from beginning to end. The music is constantly changing, but almost invariably the changes raise a smile. (If Dreamers sound like any other Zorn combo, it would be Naked City as they were on parts of the debut album and, most directly, on "Radio".) Anything with Marc Ribot on board is bound to be quality.
The Tzadik site lists not one but two Zorn releases for April. Which one is the Zorn of the Month Club entry? The first is Zorn and Fred Frith improvising in the studio. There is a side of John Zorn's work that I have to allow others to make sense of. In the absence of anything to grab onto I find this type of unstructured improv impossible to enjoy, and hence impossible to listen to. I know that's my bad.
The other April release is another Book of Angels volume: number fifteen, "Baal". It is by two-thirds of the Jamie Saft Trio (responsible for the essential Book of Angels volume one, "Astaroth") with a different drummer, Kenny Wollesen -- another Zorn regular -- plus Ben Goldberg on clarinet. It promises to be very klezmer. I haven't heard it yet.
May has promised us one of Zorn's modern-composition pieces, from which I will probably keep my usual distance. I doubt that it's reached our shores yet.
Have we reached saturation point? Well, I haven't, anyway. (And nor has this been all: in February he also snuck out a reissue of "Chimeras", "a child's adventures in the realms of the unreal" (but which would more likely induce nightmares), with some reworkings and additions.) There is enough of a something-for-everyone feeling about what has come out so far (or has been announced -- a second Masada String Trio recording of Book of Angels material!; a sequel to In Search of the Miraculous) that he might just be able to pull this crazy stunt off, and without scraping the bottoms of any barrels, either. Stay tuned. (And then he will probably somehow top it in 2011: a disc a week, perhaps? I'd better resurrect my own survey of the "Filmworks" project, before it's too late.)
