Before the World Knew His Name: John Zorn in the 1980s

An archival Musician Magazine profile examines Zorn’s early days in New York’s downtown scene.

Note: This profile of John Zorn was originally published in Musician Magazine in 1985. Written by Peter Watrous under the title “Raw, Funny, Nasty, Noisy New Music From a Structural Radical,” it captures Zorn in the early stages of his now-legendary career—restless, irreverent and already reshaping the boundaries of experimental sound.

Imagine a stage littered with duck calls, deconstructed clarinets and saxophones, bowls of water, turntables, keyboards, guitars, a trap drum and an electric drum machine, two harpists, and maybe a cellist or two. In the middle of this stage sits a prompter, surrounded by cue cards. As John Zorn’s composition Cobra takes off, the players onstage start raising their hands, just like in Social Studies class with Mrs. Butterworth.

Next, the prompter points to a musician, who in turn demands a card from the prompter. Each time this happens, the music changes: two people play a duet, then guitars smash the tranquility, or else Zorn himself bubble-baths a solo by blowing parts of his various reed instruments into the bowls of water.

It all happens very quickly; musical episode rolls over musical episode. And as players wave their hands to get the prompter’s attention, and the audience follows every move they make, something else happens—the show takes on the euphoric unselfconsciousness of a high-school bullshit session. Musicians are tossing sounds and ideas around like baseballs, and the audience is having a blast.

Welcome to the world of John Zorn: Zorn the bop saxophonist who first created minor groundswells in the New York jazz community by resuscitating the compositions of Ornette Coleman, Hank Mobley, Kenny Dorham and Sonny Clark; Zorn the dialectic balancer who composes for free improvisers; Zorn the musicologist whose favorite easy-listening music includes Swiss yodels, Latin orchestras and Burt Bacharach; and finally, Zorn the revolutionary, whose compositions and method owe as much to game rules and strategy as they do to traditional forms.

“Solemnity is something I really reacted against when I was a kid,” explains the thirty-one-year-old Zorn, peering owlishly through his black-rimmed glasses. “That’s why I was attracted to the jazz scene—because it was all life. It was wow! And that’s what I wanted in new music.”

Zorn’s apartment reflects his mind: a shelf of strategy books juts out, and in front of the books are cassettes, most with funny little flowers printed on them. The cassettes are Chinese, and damn if Zorn doesn’t know all about them, where they’re from in China—”These are to these,” Zorn points out helpfully, “as New Orleans R&B is to Chicago blues.”

What’s left of the apartment is as compact as the inside of a boat, with a shower built into the hallway, a corner cut out of the bathroom door to allow Zorn’s cat entry to the litter box, and blackboards scribbled with diagrams and his monthly playing schedule suspended from the walls. Zorn leads a compact, well-structured life. But then structure, ironically, is what Zorn’s really all about.

But Zorn’s reputation isn’t limited to composition; in fact, ask any other New York musician about Zorn and chances are they’ll want to talk about his ridiculously low rent—$52 a month—or his record collection, which isn’t just big, or huge, but well, just like his rent, ridiculous.

Zorn’s Lower East Side apartment is flooded with records, all the way up to the ceiling. Thousands, possibly millions. There’s a whole shelf of Ocora (an ethnic label), an entire shelf of Duke Ellington, of Stockhausen. Books take up most of the other space.

He was born in 1953. As a kid he attended the United Nations School in Manhattan and studied with Leonardo Balada, the Argentinian tangoist and classical composer. He started out playing guitar à la the Fab Four, and from an early infatuation with The Phantom of the Opera’s organ playing, drifted from the Doors’ Ray Manzarek to Bach, influenced along the way by the quick musical juxtapositions of Warner Brothers cartoon music composer Carl W. Stallings.

During the 60s he trekked to Webster College in St. Louis, which “used to be a Catholic girl school, and in the hippie period turned into a coed freak-out center,” where he discovered that he could do his thesis on Stallings and Stravinsky while at the same time absorbing the lessons of Oliver Lake. He also discovered that St. Louis’ influential Black Artists Group and the European tradition weren’t necessarily contradictory.

“I had been a bit involved in improvisation, mixing it with composed elements via aleatoric John Cage and Christian Wolf, and I was saying to myself, ‘I’m playing the music here, and I’m just staring at the page. I might as well do it myself.’

“I thought Michael Mantler’s work with the JCOA (e.g. the Mantler double LP with no title, silver cover) was interesting at the time, but it was Pharoah Sanders and Cecil Taylor who really turned me around. I got involved with the saxophone as a sound source, via Braxton’s For Alto. At that time I loved be-bop, but couldn’t do it. It was difficult. But I would even claim Jack Benny as an influence, even George Burns. Comedians really have timing down.”

So Zorn’s evolution into one of new music’s most important player/composers has diverse roots; oddly, none of them show. Some people claim that a Zorn performance sounds like Charles Ives at his knottiest and most American, but I would describe it as closer to the expressionistic jazz of the 60s.

On records and in concert, Zorn’s compositions flit by extremely rapidly, just like segmented cartoon music. Little twitters of sound follow blast-off guitar and saxophone squalling, followed by turntable manipulation of opera or surf music, combined with filtered voice. Since Zorn skips working within the confines of conventional harmony or time, and since the instrumentation is unique, it doesn’t really sound like anything you’ve heard before.

Zorn sculpts blocks of sound. Whether he’s using a small group—like the groups on Locus Solus (all his records are available from New Music Distribution Service, 500 Broadway, New York City, NY 10012)—or a large group like on Archery, free improvisation is tempered by a type of composition that sounds unforced yet economical, tightly exuberant but random and prickly.

“Though I had always wanted to have my own group, and travel and play a repertory of pieces—now I don’t. It would be too regimented. You need to throw a wild card in there, someone who’s never played the piece before, and is really going to be on edge, and put everyone else on edge.”

Though Zorn’s most important works are his own, he’s also collaborated and recorded with New York’s crit-fave band the Golden Palominos (Celluloid/N.M.D.S.), which features chic funksters like Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Michael Beinhorn, Bill Laswell and more. He plays with Derek Bailey and George Lewis on Yankees, an LP whose long and gently undulating group improvisations underscore the unpredictable changes and dynamic fluctuations of Zorn’s own works.

On his newest record, a brilliant series of duets with Japanese shamisen player Michihiro Sato, Ganryu Island, Sato sets up melancholy riffs that in the hands of an uninspired collaborator would probably beget long, wailing, mimicking notes. Not from Zorn the subverter: instead he yips, shrieks, howls and in general raises a ruckus, capsizing the solemnity of the occasion.

But Zorn’s penchant for surprise isn’t limited to his own compositions. He’s equally capable of reviving the canons of Black jazz composers revered and obscured, from Dorothy Ashby (“I like digging up underestimated players who deserve to be heard and doing a little more on them”) to Thelonious Monk. Zorn’s arrangement of Monk’s “Shuffle Boil” featuring Arto Lindsay, Wayne Horvitz and Mark Miller appears on Hal Willner’s tribute to Thelonious, That’s The Way I Feel Now, and is easily the most oblique reading of Monk on the album.

“Monk for me was humor and outrageousness, and really taking it to the edge,” Zorn explains, “but (he was) rooted in a certain type of bluesiness… To attack all the parameters—rhythm, harmony, pitch organization, orchestration—all the elements that make a piece of music what it is, and try to radicalize every one of those, that’s the important thing. To me, that’s Monk.”

Zorn’s music is unique, and when he plays at New York’s club 8BC, or in Japan, or at the Moers festival in Germany, he’s playing like nobody else. No one has developed similar systems of musical composition or performance; no one sounds the way his groups sound.

And astonishingly, in the age of Ronald and Julio, people actually like the music, radical sonic assault or not. John Zorn’s playing schedule is packed. He doesn’t have to carry a day job.

“I’m playing very weird music and it’s not accessible at all,” Zorn observes happily. “I’m doing exactly what I want to do. And I’m making a living.”