John Zorn interview
Timothy Worsley
appeared--I believe--in Fanfare a few years ago. Enjoy. (I've
omitted a mildly amusing but irrelevant preface in which Strickland
pays homage to the hard-boiled detective fiction genre...)
(BTW, I was quite disillusioned when Zorn said he doesn't stay out
late, drink or do drugs!)
S: What can you tell me about Spillane?
Z: What do you want to know?
S: How far do you and Mickey go back?
Z: [laughs] I've been reading him since I was a teenager, and
watching the Mike Hammer movies, one or two of which actually have
Spillane in them. But it's the whole world that attracted me, not one
particular story or movie. The whole hard-boiled world of the
detective--hard-edged sex and violence--for me is summed up completely
by Mickey Spillane, just by the word Spillane.
S: The way John Lennon once said another name for rick 'n' roll
could be "Chuck Berry." Your record starts out [laughs] pretty
unusually with a blood-curdling scream.
Z: That's Carol Emanuel the harp-player. She does a lot of the
screams.
S: Do the exaggerated sexist and violent elements in Spillane put
you off or are you treating them as camp?
Z: I'm dealing with it just as part of his world. It's part of the
sleazy, dirty world the hard-boiled detective lives in and works in.
It's just something that I dealt with because it's in the territory.
It isn't anything that particularly bothers me. This is a dream-world
that this man has invented. It's more about sex to me than it is
about sexism.
S: What made you decide to compose around the Spillane theme?
Z: I really don't know where it came from except New York. Like you
I was born and went to school in Manhattan and lived in Queens. From
kindergarten I went to the UN school and had friends from all over the
world. I suppose I can trace my connection to Japan back to that--I
had a lot of Japanese friends then and I live about half the year in
Japan now. Anyway, Spillane was part of the New York experience, like
being attracted to film noir as a teenager. I'm not much of a
sleazeball, not much of a late-nighter. I don't go to bars, I don't
drink or do drugs--but there's always something about the mystique of
the lone detective and his world that I've always been attracted to.
S: The detective has been called a contemporary version of the
medieval knight.
Z: I was just going to say the Japanese samurai, who's another
example of that and part of another genre I was attracted to as a kid.
S: I can see a clear connection between the title-work on SPILLANE
and your earlier work, even the game-pieces on Parachute like ARCHERY
or POOL.
Z: That's nice to hear. I see the connection with the later works
like the Godard piece and the Weill piece. I'm thinking specifically
of the way I worked with my musicians in the studio, exploiting all
their possibilities.
S: You're best known for musical structure involving a lot of
juxtaposition, discontinuity. It's almost to me a dismemberment
stylistically--you could call it a sparagmatic style, going back to
the tearing apart of Dionysus. For example, in COBRA on Hat Art
you're listening to somone wail on the sax for a minute and then--
Z: Or 10 seconds. [Both laugh.]
S: And then 10 seconds later you're listening to rock or Wagner. In
"Spillane" you've got longer sections but still the movement from
strip-club music to country-and-western to blues etc. So I was
wondering if the picaresque style of the detective novel influenced
your decision to work on this.
Z: That's the way I work period. You can trace it back not only to
ARCHERY and POOL but to my very earliest compositional attempts when I
was 13 or 14, studying at school and with a tutor. The biggest
influences I had were Stravinsky, who worked in block form; Ives, who
also was interested in weird juxtapositions and discontinuity in a
certain way; and what came off the tube, which I was brought up on.
As a *baby* I was watching--to keep me quiet my mother used to put me
in a basket in front of the tube.
S: Little did she know what would transpire. [Both laugh.]
Z: Her fault! Completely! Also just the crazy speeded-out world
we're living in--and New York is a crazy mix of a place.
S: One would assume listening to your music that you'd be a
hypertense, sort of archetypal New Yorker, speeding away, zipping
away.
Z: I *was* a hypertense person. I grew up! I think I'm an
archetypal New Yorker. I was always kind of hyper ... I was a real
asshole! [Giggles.]
S: That's the archetypal New Yorker.
Z: Hey! your body gets old. I'm getting old, man. I can't keep up
on that kind of level, but inside--I may look relaxed on the outside,
but inside I'm still going at that rate. Everyone has a different
metabolism. I eat as much as I want, really stuff myself, and never
gain a pound. I've been 135 for I don't know how many years. The
archetypal New Yorker has that kind of speed.
S: You compose the music. I have to describe it, which might be a
tough job.
Z: Describing it *is* difficult. It's a music that draws on rock
elements, blues elements, classical elements, ethnic folk elements,
and the music is put together, as you say, in a very--"picaresque" is
an interesting word--I would use maybe "filmic" way, montage. It's
made of separate moments that I compose completely regardless of the
next, and then I pull the, cull them together. It's put together in a
style that causes questions to be asked rather than answered. You sit
down and listen to it or you just don't even put it on. So it's put
together in blocks and moves from one thing to the other really
quickly and draws upon many elements and traditions.
S: You once compared your music to walking down the street in New
York. I can tell you honestly that before I read that I once
described your work to someone as like being in a New York subway
station: the same diversity of different influences you suggested, but
also there's a lot of mechanical sound in your music, as if the train
pulls in once in a while. In the station you've got all these
different types of musicians, jazz-flutists or classical violinists.
Part of the mix there is that you're blending a lot of [makes
quotation marks with fingers] high art and low art.
Z: This is something I really react strongly against, the idea of
high art and low art. I mean, that distinction's a bunch of fucking
*bull*shit. That's the kind of thing created to make it look like you
listen to classical music while you're sipping champagne and with rock
music you're boogeying with a bottle of beer and jazz you're in some
dirty club with a shot of whiskey or some shit like that. That's a
fucking bunch of *bullshit*! There's good music and great music and
phoney music in every genre and all the genres are the fucking *same*!
Classical music is no better than blues because this guy went to
school and got a degree and studied very cleanly while the other guy
was out on the street living it. This is the attitude I've been
fighting against. People who grew up in the '60s listening to blues,
rock, classical, avant-garde, ethnic music--I think we all share one
common belief, that all this music is on equal grounds and there's no
high art and low art. Pop music has musicians creating lasting works
of art and also schlock that's gonna be thrown away the next day. And
the same thing in the classical world--there's an incredible amount of
bullshit being written.
S: Like what?
Z: I don't want to get into [sing-song] name-calling....
S: The average classical music fan will buy the next Bach Orchestral
Suites recording that comes out to see if it's better than the dozen
he's already got before trying something new. Now in the second work
on SPILLANE, "Two-Lane Highway," I thought you were doing a suite, but
a blues-suite.
Z: That's what it is.
S: Is it classical music?
Z: To me all the music on that record is classical music, because
that's my background, that's where I was brought up. I listen to rock
and blues and draw on those traditions in creating my own music the
way Bartok drew upon folk elements. Today you're able to buy music
from all over the world at the first record store you see. This is
the music that results. My study, my life, the world I dealt with,
the traditions I felt connected to, my heroes Harry Partch, Steve
Reich, Ives, Stravinsky, Varese--all these people I see as a line and
I see myself at the end of that line. Even though I created a
blues-suite I don't see myself going to blues clubs and being a blues
musician. I could make a movie, but that doesn't make me a
movie-maker. I'm a musician, I dealt with classical music all my
life, that's the tradition I feel close to. But if I use these other
elements that doesn't mean I immediately become a jazz musician or
blues musician. It's how you see yourself, where you want your music
to fit in.
S: Suppose we put out "Two-Lane Highway" on an EP, let's say
mentioning Albert Collins as the guitarist but without using your
name.
Z: Then I would be the producer. "Produced by John Zorn."
S: Okay. No one ever heard of you. No one every heard of Albert
Collins or anything else. They pick up the record, they play it--
Z: They go, "What is this?" [Laughs.]
S: Do they say "Oh, it's a good blues record" or "Oh, it's a good
classical record" or "What's goin' on here?" [Laughs.]
Z: They'd say "Hey, what's goin' on?" They'd say that with every
piece that's on that record. It's a crazy mix of things. That's the
point.
S: I heard "Two-Lane Highway" almost as a Baroque Suite--here's the
Allemande, now the Courante.
Z: I don't used classical models, I try to create new forms.
"Spillane" is a new form, though connected to Strauss tone-poems.
In "Two-Lane Highway" the scenes are a little longer because Albert
needed the time. Formally--that's my strong point, more so than
content--I think in terms of structure and form--I wanted to stretch
Albert out, to put him in a new setting. I wanted to make him feel
comfortable, to get the best playing out of thim. So I set it up--you
make him comfortable and then you sock it to him with something weird.
Then you make him comfortable again and you sock it to him again.
Know what I mean? You sort of set him up to pull the rug out from
under him. But you're not really pulling the rug, just sort of
guiding him into this other area.
S: Had you known Albert Collins for a long while?
Z: I knew his music for a long while and wanted to do a tribute
piece to him, made the contact, he seemed interested, and we went
ahead and did it. I knew I'd only have one day in the studio for the
piece, so I couldn't work like in "Spillane", which took 70 hours of
recording at least. So I put the piece together in a very simple kind
of way--more simple than I would have desired. I rehearsed the band
for two days so they were able to do it in one take, though bit by
bit. We'd do the first two sections, then take a break, do sections
three-four-five, take a break.
S: How much of it was notated?
Z: This is the kind of music that's best not written down on paper,
so I didn't write it down. Nothing. I knew what I wanted--
S: Chords? Keys?
Z: Well, I wanted to use classic blues chord sequences, 12-bar
blues. Key sequences I had decided. Bass-lines I bassically knew
what I wanted, basic rhythms. I put stuff down on tape and played it
to the musicians. In "Spillane" there was written music but a lot of
it isn't notated in any conventional sense, because we're dealing with
musicians that improvise, that work in a very personal language that
defies notation from the word go. There's no point in writing it
down, because it's not meant to be written down. If you write it down
you're taking something away from that spark. They don't want to sit
there and be looking at a page. I explained what I wanted and
ultimately I think Albert and the other musicians felt more
comfortable that way, because everyone was on an equal level.
S: The final work on SPILLANE is "Forbidden Fruit". I'd heard last
summer your were doing a string Quartet based on the "Fallingwater"
home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Did that become "Forbidden
Fruit"?
Z: Yeah, in a certain sense. I was interested in the idea of
translating architecture into music. Like Xenakis' drawing upon ideas
from Le Corbusier. The "Fallingwater" building was approaching its
50th anniversary. It's a beautiful building. I wanted to do a piece
that was more pristine, that didn't have the greasiness of "Spillane"
or the hot live quality of the Collins piece, something that dealt
with the classical world, which of course is very dear to me, as well
as the blues world, in a very adventurous way. I began to write the
piece for Kronos, Christian Marclay on turntable and the Japanese
vocalist Ohta Hiromi, who was there in connection with Frank Lloyd
Wright's obsession with the Far East. So I worked on the piece, and
worked and worked and worked, and for one reason or another it just
wasn't going the way I had hoped. I didn't think I really could do
justice to the building. The connections weren't as concrete as in
"Spillane", where a car crashes and I could say, "This is the car
crash" and anyone can say, "Yeah!" Here I was dealing with a room in
a building and I'd say to someone "This music is that room in that
building" and they'd go "*What* the *fuck* are you talking about?!"
It was just too oblique somehow and I couldn't justify it to myself.
So I chucked the idea and decided I would do a series of variations,
just pure music, and maybe that could be the most pristine thing I
could do, the way Schoenberg would write a string or wind quintet. So
I began working on that. Halfway through, one of my heroes, Ishihara
Yujiro the Japanese film-star, died. It was really a shock. These
are all [gestures to several shelves of tapes] Japanese videotapes,
and I must have about 20 of his films. I wanted to create a tribute
piece for the forthcoming record, so I began to revise the set of
variations I had written to include a further set of variations on the
first film he had made which could be translated as "Fruits Gone
Wild"--a very sexual connotation. "Forbidden Fruit" had a more sexual
connotation in English, though it's not a literal translation. What I
had was a set of maybe 12 musical themes--all the players staccato,
all the players performing glissandos, or *col legno*--12 themes and
12 variations on those themes, which is what I would call harmonic
counterpoint where each of the four musicians is given a different
theme to play. First violin plays glissandos, second plays pizzicato
viola plays maybe *col legno*, and the cellist improvises. I worked
out 12 different combinations of variants on these 12 themes that
combine them harmonically so that they're working simultaneously.
Then I added 12 scenes from the movie and orchestrated them as if I
was writing the music for the soundtrack ... and there are 12 tributes
to quartet composers--a tribute to Bartok, Elliott Carter, Beethoven
... and there are 12 sections that I completely notated in my own
style. So there are the themes, the variations on the themes, the
movie stills, the written music, the tributes, which kind of work with
the written music, and the improvisations with Christian Marclay.
S: One interesting element in your work is the use of quotation,
Mozart, for example, in "Forbidden Fruit".
Z: Yeah, it's an arrangement of a C-minor Mozart piano sonata.
[Both sing opening.] I wouldn't have used one of his string
quartets--that's too much.
S: How'd you like working with Kronos, who don't come out of an
improvisational tradition?
Z: They were very excited with the way I was working. It was very
hard to get them together, but when we finally figured out
logistically the three days we could go into the studio it was great.
It took exactly three days, we were right on schedule. It wasn't like
"Oh, I can't improvise." I gave them a situation that I knew they
could deal with--it couldn't go wrong. It was like a fail-safe
system. Maybe if I gave them a one-minute improvisation, that would
be too much for them at this point, so each section was three to six
seconds long. I'd say, "Go and improvise with Christian on turntable.
Go and do whatever the hell you want. I don't care what it is."
They'd say, "How long do you want us to do it?" "Six seconds."
They'd go, "Oh! Well ... okay! We can do that!" I also had written
sections where they played incredibly well. The kind of precision
they deal with was a whole new level. I'm a perfectionist, but these
guys were ridiculous! They'd do a take and it'd sound great to me.
"Okay! That was it!" I'd see them all nodding their heads. I'd say,
"Okay, great, great!" And then I'd click on to what they were saying.
It'd be "Yeah, I fucked that up really bad." "Sounds great to me!"
"No, we gotta do it again. That G-flat was a *lit*tle sharp." It was
incredible.
S: [laughing] And their public image is so devil-may-care.
Z: Man, they're precise! They're a composer's dream. They're gonna
play the shit out of your music, no matter who you are. They're gonna
figure out what you're all about and *play* it and do it right.
They're amazing.
S: How many splices are there in those 10 minutes? Or is the figure
too astronomical to estimate?
Z: There are *no* tape splices! I never work with tape splices.
Even with "Spillane" there are no splices. And this is the reason for
my success in this area. People have done tape work for years. There
are *no* interesting tape piese, period--'cause they're always using
tape splices and the ear gets tired of that. It's too sharp a change.
S: You admire Steve Reich. What about his early tape pieces.
Z: Well, yeah, they're wonderful pieces. He's a great, great
musician. But what I do is done live in the studio. We'll rehearse
the first six-second segment, put it on tape, roll the tape back to
the top, rehearse the next section, then roll the tape again and get
ready for section two while we listen to section one. As soon as
section one is over I give the cue, they come in with the next section
and we punch it in. We have A and B tracks. This way there's always
a slight overhang, slight decay--as A is fading out B is already in
there. There's a kind of organic glue, as if the sections were
growing one out of the other instead of chopped up and pasted
together. At the end of one day of work usually I have about three
minutes of music.
S: After eight hours of work?
Z: After 10 hours. We complete three minutes of music--but complete
is exactly the right word, it's complete. Everything, the echo, the
EQ--everything is done right then. Now we can go on! It's like
through-composing a piece of music.
S: To rephrase the earlier question then, how many fragments are
there in the 10:20 of "Forbidden Fruit"?
Z: "Fragments" is a better word. There are 60, one per section.
S: Getting back to quotation, what's the function of "Fur Elise" in
"The Big Gundown" or the Wagner in COBRA? There's a comic element
there.
Z: It's not comic at all. In many ways Ives used quotations to
comic effect, but you're really dealing with emotion. Like signposts.
"Fur Elise" to me is not comic at all. It's nostalgic, a very tender
moment.
S: I was thinking more of the Wagner in COBRA.
Z: *That's* hilarious!
S: Okay. What's the point of using Wagner hilariously?
Z: It's just another tool. It's something that's out there, part of
the world that's out there. I didn't say "Use Wagner." Christian
Marclay wanted to use it. Everything he does is quotations because
he's using records as his material.
S: Is it a way of deflating the pomposity of Wagner by transposing
it to an alien context?
Z: No, I'm not interested in anything like that. That particular
piece was chosen by Christian right then. He wanted to use it, he
used it. I had nothing to say about it. In COBRA the musical
materials are completely up to the performers. I have nothing to say
about it. I make no musical decisions. I set the situation up, I set
the rules up. *They* make the decisions. Getting back to "Fur
Elise", it was used by Morricone in the original soundtrack. He plays
with it, makes variations on it. Why did he use it? Go ask him! The
ROUTE 66 theme in "Spillane" I used as a kind of icon of the detective
world.
S: What's your compositional process like? It seems programmatic,
but in a very unusual way.
Z: I write every day, fragments. [Takes out notebook and indicates
several notations, all short musical phrases.] Sometimes I'll put,
like here, "nostalgic" or "mysterious ... romance ... tension." But
when I create a piece, [takes out inch-thick pack of flashcards] I
work visually. I write things down on cards. This is a new piece I'm
working on about China--[reading from cards] "Legend of the Mountain
... Chinese drums and flutes ... thunder ... rain and thunder ...
balladeer pipa in the castle ... cat transformation ... birds in the
trees." And sometimes I'll write down [reads] "high strings" blah
blah blah. Each section relates very specifically to a theme. I'm
using a visual kind of node to inspire me because I was brought up on
TV and love movie soundtracks, so in "Spillane", as you suggested,
each section relates to an adventure in the picaresque detective
novel: he goes to a strip joint to relax or goes to a country and
western bar and gets the shit beat out of him.
S: Actually I thought your distillation of the detective novel was a
lot better than any of the Spillane books [Zorn gives long high shriek
and smiles], which I liked best when I was 12 looking for the dirty
parts by the rack at Woolworth's.
Z: Yeah, yeah, yeah! The dirty parts, yeah! Actually, though, it
was a distillation of *all* the books. Those scenes are in almost
every one of his books. It's the epitome of the hard-boiled detective
world. And the ending is the apocalyptic ending of every one of his
books.
S: You've got that great rain section at the end, which of all your
work might be the most--maybe tender isn't the word...
Z: Tender's the word. I cry when I hear that section. That section
is about Mike Hammer done with whatever he's done, killed whoever he's
killed, lied wherever he's lied. Now he's alone again walking down
the street in the rain smoking a cigarette with his trenchcoat on,
walking away from the camera into oblivion. It's in every western ...
it's the archetype, and ultimately if you can get to the archetype you
can't lose.
S: It's not just tender, like a lyrical piano piece. It's also
menacing. It's in a minor key, right?
Z: Yes. [Laughs.] Most of the things that I write are in minor
keys. I hear minor. But Wayne Horvitz told me it's because I write
on this little Casio and on a Casio minor chords sound good [plays]
but major [un-flats the third] sound like shit! [Both laugh.] I need
a good keyboard, there's no doubt about it.
S: Other examples of the odd kind of programmatic work you do is the
game-pieces. Along with Spillane or spaghetti westerns you've got
records called LACROSSE, POOL, ARCHERY, and COBRA, all based on
game-structures. Now I don't know these games too well. What's the
relationship between the sport archery and the composition?
Z: There's no relationship specifically. The pieces have
game-structures but not those of the games in the titles. I tried to
pick games that had names that had another meaning. Architectural
archery, a pool of water, a snake. The connection between the game
pieces and the later works which are more composed is what I'm doing
with the musicians physically. I'm setting them up in situations
where they can produce a certain kind of fast-moving structure--that's
my sound, that's what I live for. I'm really trying to milk something
new out of them and that's what all improvising musicians want--to
play their best, play something they haven't done before. The live
concert is not a record, it's a game, a play of personalities. It's
not just music, it's an event. Sports I think is the same way. You
don't want to put the World Series on videotape and then watch it over
and over again. You know what the outcome will be. Although some
people do that.
S: I've watched a videotape of the Mets' final inning in the sixth
game of the '86 Series at least 20 times.
Z: Yeah, but how many other games do you watch?
S: Very few and only sections, never a whole game.
Z: Live is what it's about in sports or improvised music. Maybe
there's one or two or three improvised concerts a year that you can
put on tape and watch. They shouldn't be put on tape. Looking back
on the records I've made, I don't feel I made a mistake. I'm happy
with what I've done, but these situations weren't made for record--you
had to be there!
S: COBRA is by far my favorite of the game-compositions, though I'm
not sure if I can separate the music from the cover, which is one of
the greatest ever.
Z: Kiriko Kubo, the designer, is incredible. I'm glad you like it.
S: In COBRA we've got a studio version on disc 1 and a concert
version on disc 2. But again we're not talking about two different
versions of the Concerto for Orchestra or even a jazz standard. You
agree that we could call POOL ARCHERY and ARCHERY LACROSSE or LACROSSE
COBRA or whatever. But is there any continuity in the two versions of
COBRA? Could we call the concert-COBRA POOL or ARCHERY or LACROSSE?
Z: The piece stays the same in concert as in the studio.
S: How?
Z: Because the rules are the same.
S: What are the rules?
Z: Wow! If I was to go into that, man, we'd be here all day. To
put it as simply as I can, there's a set of 18 cards, each card
standing for a different set of relationships among the players. When
I give downbeat number 1, which I call Pool downbeat, it means "People
who are playing, stop. People who are not playing may come in if they
wish." The Runner downbeat means "Only people I point to can come in.
Everyone else, stop."
S: Come in playing what?
Z: Whatever the hell they want. I don't talk about information.
Content is left to the performer. So I have a whole series of
different relationships, like Trading games--when the card comes down
you can do duos with whoever you want, etc. The cards act as dividers
to set the improvisations up into little sections, so that it works
the way "Spillane" works, in blocks. But what happens in those blocks
is completely up to them. How those blocks are ordered is completely
up to them. *I* don't make decisions saying "Now it's this, now it's
that." The musicians make signs to me telling me what they want to
happen and I just act as an intercom device.
S: What kinds of signs?
Z: [touching index and middle finger to nose] "Nose two". On the
score the section that says "Nose Two" is "Pool", for example.
S: "That's what I want to play. Give me a chance."
Z: Right. I hold up a sign that says "Nose Two" and give a down
beat and everybody plays Nose Two. Then someone looks at me and says
"Ear One". I hold up a card that says "Ear One"--everybody knows what
that means, so we play Ear One.
S: Nose Two and Ear One have no thematic content. They're just
structures--I play and Joe plays but Sally and Jim don't play?
Z: This is gonna be very complicated. Is this very important for
your article, to talk about this?
S: I would just like to get some idea--all the articles talk about
your games but never explain anything. I think it's important so we
know what you're doing. It's important to me.
Z: [takes out score of "Cobra", in one column a series of cues, Ear
One to Four etc. beside each one the name of a game structure.] I'm
interested in working in blocks, but the problem is I have a dozen
improvising musicians, each of whom has his or her own style. They
don't want to be told what to do, they want to play their fucking
*music*. But at the same time I've got to create a structure that
makes it my music as well. So I don't tell people *what* to play but
create a structure that tells them *when* they play.
S: I understand that, but I don't get the distinction between Ear
One and Nose Two.
Z: Ear, Eye, Nose, Head are just ways of making cues.
S: Right. So what happens if I cue you [puts index finger below
eye] that I want Eye One?
Z: When you want Eye One, [moves finger from left column to right]
you want "Cartoon Trades". Then I hold up the sign that say "Cartoon
Trades".
S: Aha, good! The sign says the name of the game, not "Eye One".
Now is there any relationship between "Cartoon Trades" and cartoons,
which you've mentioned as another big influence?
Z: No. "Cartoon Trades" means one player plays one sound and passes
it to another player.
S: I go [sings] doodoodoodoo and the next guy goes [sings]
dingdingdingding.
Z: Yeah. And the next guy goes datdadatdadat and the next goes
WHAAAAANG!! and the next goes Boom! And this structure continues
until the next downbeat, so no one can sneak in. Except then we start
talking about the Guerilla Systems [indicates another pair of columns
on the right side of the page with graphic symbols (squiggles etc.,
possibly indicating hand gestures) and corresponding game-structural
notations]. These are ways of fucking up the structure. Then people
can sneak in a downbeat, people can become guerillas and have squads,
get people to imitate them, capture people, switch them ... so it
really becomes a game that's fun to play. It creates real excitement
onstage. The musicians are into it. They want to create a situation
where they can be in control, where they're the guerilla leader with
their squad telling this guy to stop and this guy to play.
S: So it might be the saxophonist and I temporarily against the
tuba-player and the electric guitarist. That clarifies it.
Z: And each piece has a different set of rules. Similar elements
may crop up but the situations will be very different.
S: So now you've temporarily given up all the games.
Z: No, only the game titles. I still use the game structure, but
the most recent piece is called HSU FENG.
S: What does HSU FENG mean?
Z: It's the name of a woman. That woman. It's the name of a
Chinese actress. [Gestures to several photos of her around the room.]
I'm still doing the games but now I'm not calling them sports but
Chinese actresses. *You* figure it out! [Both laugh.]
S: When I heard you play Ornette Coleman in October you had HSU FENG
advertised in the papers.
Z: It just wasn't ready. If it'd been five years ago I would've
done it anyway. No problem! [Laughs.] Now I have to be a little
more careful. Now if a piece isn't perfect I'm just not gonna do it,
because it's very delicate. For example, if I have the players chosen
and one guy says he can't do it, if the chemistry isn't right I won't
go ahead. Ten years ago, "Sure, go ahead, push, keep going!" Now I
feel I'll just do one or two a year.
S: You ended up playing Ornette in a quintet introduced as W.R.U.
Z: It's from a series of Ornette compositions in the early '60s
based on works of Freud. T.&T. was TOTEM AND TABOO. I forget what
W.R.U. meant.
S: When did you start playing alto?
Z: When I was about 20. I started playing piano when I was about
nine or so, playing by ear. I took guitar lessons when I was about
11, playing Beatles shit. When I got to be 14 I knew I wanted to be a
composer and started taking composition classes.
S: Your records are as likely to be found the jazz as the classical
section. There's also a strong rock influence in your work. Did you
ever play in rock groups?
Z: Not really. I began working in that style when I became friends
with people like Arto Lindsay, Anton Fier, Bill Laswell, people who
were dealing in that world. Because I liked them and their music very
much I became attracted to that world and realized I'd hear a lot of
great musicians there and I became open to using them in my music as
well, and they began asking me to play in their music and that's how
the work with the Golden Palominos and Bill Laswell's group happened.
It became a real conversation between two worlds.
S: I though Arto Lindsay's texts for "Spillane" were terrific.
Z: He did a great job.
S: In the past couple of years you've gotten a lot more acceptance.
Earlier you drew some colorful but not always flattering critical
comments. How did you feel as a composer when your music was
described as, what was it, a rhinocerous caught in barbed wire?
Z: [Laughs.] Oh, you remember that one? It was an elephant--no, a
constipated elephant! Or "a horde of army ants gone duck-hunting."
[Both laugh.] I think it's great. I've got a copy of the _Lexicon of
Musical Invective_. It's one of my main sources of inspiration, and
through those years if I didn't have that book I probably would have
really been depressed. But critics have their job, they do their job.
It's not easy music, it takes time. It took 10 years and I'm very
happy that I kind of did it the hard way and I went through a lot of
bullshit to get here and paid my dues. Even the ones who said it was
just boring crap, the same old jam-sessions of special effects, were
dealing with it the best way they could, which was completely lame. I
know it's not boring crap. [Laughs.] I know it hasn't existed before
and they just don't know what the hell they're talking about.
S: Talking about the army ants gone duck-hunting, in the early and
mid-'80s you used a lot of very weird duck-calls and bird-calls as
instruments. [Laughs.] Wasn't an attempt to get back to nature?
Z: No, I just wanted some kind of raucous, ugly sound.
S: You used the adjective "ugly", and I wonder if in fact some of
your music isn't just that. You're often imaginative enough to
incorporate these sounds into a context that's aesethetically
satisfying, but if you played a section of those calls *out* of
context, I'd say, "Come one, put on another record!"
Z: I don't think they're ugly. I find them beautiful. It's like
Thelonious Monk's title "Ugly Beauty". People used to think his
playing was ugly, now it's recognized as a classic.
S: You were away from New York for a year and a half, coming back in
'74.
Z: I was studying at Webster College in St. Louis and it was exactly
what I needed to do at that time. I needed to be exposed to the black
jazz scene in Chicago, AACM [Association for the Advancement of
Creative Musicians] and BAG [Black Artists Group] in St. Louis,
Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith. BAG was mixing improvisations with set
structures in a very interesting way at that time.
S: So that made the trip West, or Midwest, worthwhile. How did you
find the New York scene when you came back?
Z: I dropped out of Webster in '74 and went to the West Coast and
played and met people like Phillip Johnston who works with the
Microscopic Sextet. Then I came back to New York in late '74, went
back to the West Coast, and came back here in '75. I was performing
in my little apartment on Lafayette Street, meeting musicians one by
one. The downtown improvising scene didn't exist at that time. I met
all the musicians I work with one by one over the years and they all
helped me grow as a musician.
S: What else was going on then that attracted you?
Z: Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....
S: The Minimalists were strong downtown, and only downtown, then.
Z: That was very big, the SoHo scene. Glass was performing in
galleries, La Monte Young, Reich. They were really inspiring to me.
They were doing something different and showing the classical world
that you didn't have to write music for the usual ensembles. You
could create a band and travel like a rock group the way Philip Glass
did, and it was still classical music. Reich was drawing upon
influences from Africa after having studied there, which was very
inspiring to me. They were also working in a collaborative way with
their groups. They'd bring music in and if it didn't feel right on
the saxophone [Jon] Gibson would say, "Can I make this into a such and
such pattern instead?" "Yeah, go ahead, do it!"
The jazz music scene was beginning to get some new blood at that
time. Henry Threadgill was working with Air, and he's someone I
admire very much as a composer. The punk thing at CB's was very
exciting.
S: You've mentioned a few already, but what other contemporary
composers do you particularly admire?
Z: I think John Adams' sense of orchestration is brilliant.
Orchestration is something I pride myself on. I always had a
particular talent for it and I love it. For me it's a matter of
mixing electric and acoustic instruments. John Adams can deal in the
traditional world and create a new sound. I think it's beautiful what
he's doing. I like the way Steve Reich's compositions move, but I
think there's a real danger in giving fast 16th-note patterns that are
meant for mallet instruments to winds and strings. It can turn to
mush very easily, and there's a real danger in that, but I think he's
done a lot of really great music. More than Glass, whose
orchestrations just suck the bird, forget it. I like the young
composer Aaron Kernis. He's a great, great talent. Scott Lindrofth,
Henry Threadgill ... Wayne Horvitz and Elliott Sharp are doing really
interesting things. Yuki Takahashi's great.
S: What are you're recording plans for Nonesuch?
Z: The Ornette band, W.R.U. is recording a record for release in
September. I want to do a romantic piece next, called "Live and Let
Live", which should be out early next year. I have a list [takes
folder from shelf] of people I want to work with, but I haven't
contacted anybody yet: a Chinese pipa player who's living here in New
York, Nana Vasconcelos, Robert Quine, some rock people like the
bassist from Live Skull, Husker Du, Prince, Gidon Kremer, Tom Waits.
I'm working on a hobo piece as a tribute to Harry Partch, and I hope
Tom Waits will be interested.
S: Have you thought of doing any orchestral work?
Z: The Brooklyn Philharmonic calle me up and want me to write
something for next year. I'm gonna write a chamber piece. No
improvisation, entirely notated. Every note--because that world is
not about improvisation. I'm not interested like Cage in giving a
symphony orchestra a bunch of little pictures from Thoreau and seeing
what they come up with. I'm interested in getting the best out of
these players and inspiring them, which means finding out who loves to
play virtuosic music and who doesn't and writing specifically for that
group.
S: One last thing I want to ask you about is the genesis of the
opening section of "The Big Gundown". It's mentioned by Robert Polito
briefly in his notes to your first Nonesuch album, and the story of
its coming to you in a dream intrigued me since I write about Romantic
poetry and it recalled Coleridge's experience in "Kubla Khan".
Z: Coleridge, yeah, yeah! I normally can't remember my dreams too
well, and I don't otherwise have that kind of musical dream as far as
I can recall. My dreams are very filmic. It's almost as if I'm
watching myself in a movie. I see different shots and angles. Often
very weird architectural structures--I'll go into a building and it'll
be a maze or a giant cube. Very large and complex structures. I
think that's from my interest in musical structure. I woke up from
the dream you mentioned drenched in sweat, remembering each image
vividly, like cockroaches crawling on my body. It was a horrible
nightmare, but there was music accompanying each separate image. I
don't exactly know where that dream came from.
S: And you incorporated all that music into the opening of the title
cut on THE BIG GUNDOWN.
Z: It was the first five minutes until the Brazilian percussion
comes in.
S: This is fascinating, and I hate to invade your private--
Z: It's not private at all! [Laughs.] I just wish I could remember
it all. Being in the middle of the desert completely parched. There
was a scene playing in the air and seeing the moon really close. It
was wild dream, man. If I listened to the piece I'd probably remember
[laughing] all the different images, but I don't think I *want* to
remember some of those images!
--
Ed (not Tim), epr...@sql.sybase.com (not wildman@athena...)