John Zorn's 30-day B-day festival.
John Zorn 50th Birthday Celebration, every night in September at Tonic, 107 Norfolk St. (betw. Delancey & Rivington Sts.), 212-358-7501
Celebrating the 50th birthday of an unrelenting force of nonconformity, Tonic will present a massive 30-day tribute to John Zorn in September. Concerts dedicated to Zorn's vast output of jazz compositions, classical concert works, film music, noise, free improv, game pieces, cartoon music, songs and Radical Jewish Music will mark every evening at Tonic throughout the month, filling the Labor Day calm between the end-of-summer festivals and the beginning of regular seasons. It makes sense that Zorn's music would fall between the cracks of seasons, as he has always been a self-proclaimed outsider "looking out" instead of in.
The Tonic celebration is both a retrospective of some of his most significant and powerful musical inventions as well as a sneak peak at what's in his brain now, including world premieres of two new concert works, Sortilege (Sept. 21) and Necronomicon (Sept. 28). Considering pretty much his entire life has been devoted to the three muses (music, literature, film) it's not surprising that at age 50 (an age when a lot of classical composers and jazzers are just getting their due respect) he continues to produce a mind-boggling amount of work. To help the interested navigate their way through the abundant vegetation of his oeuvre, the celebration drops works into several different categories, each embracing a different limb.
Zorn opens the celebration on saxophone, engaging in two sets of improvisation with his good friends Ikue Mori, the first lady of drum machines, and Mike Patton, former lead singer of Faith No More. Four other improv concerts are scattered throughout the month featuring the likes of Susie Ibarra, Wadada Leo Smith, Milford Graves and Derek Bailey.
On his actual birthday, Sept. 2, the festival presents two of Zorn's compositions dedicated to French artists: Duras, inspired by writer Marguerite Duras (and flavored with Olivier Messiaen's mystical language) and Duchamp, a noise trio dedicated to the conceptual artist and proponent of both Dada and the Surrealist movement. Other concert works worth noting in this festival are his complete string quartets (Sept. 7) and Kristallnacht (Sept. 23).
Day three introduces one of Zorn's most beloved works, Cobra, a work for large ensemble improvisation, structured and manipulated by a set of "rules," which are basically instructions written out on cards that the prompter (Zorn) introduces as the piece unfolds. The chaotic results are the ultimate in post-modern glee, jumping gracefully between styles and resembling (in sound, though not in structure) John Cage's Imaginary Landscapes No. 4 for 12 radios and 24 performers: The music jumps abruptly between different genres of popular music, jazz, and classical with interstitial noise and, of course, the added element of surprise. Other works that are part of Zorn's "game pieces" lineage such as Lacrosse, Xu Feng and Locus Solus will be presented throughout the month.
Another major influence on Zorn's art has been his connection to his Jewish heritage, which formed the impetus for the Masada project, during which Zorn mined ancient Hebrew melodies, jazz, rock and klezmer to create an instrumental songbook containing more than 200 pieces in about four years. For several of these events (the first is on Sept. 4), songs have been arranged for the String Trio.
The retrospective wouldn't be complete without some wild performances by Zorn's band Painkiller and a couple of nights dedicated to his film music. Having written for shorts, experimental films, narratives and pornos, Zorn's film output is expectedly eclectic, often stunningly beautiful and other times just plain rockin'.