ZORN, JOHN

ZORN, JOHN (1953– ), U.S. saxophonist, bandleader, composer, festival organizer, record label founder and owner. If any single figure can be credited with the revival and reinvention of Jewish-American musical culture in the last decades of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st, it would be the mercurial John Zorn. It may not have been Zorn who coined the term "Radical Jewish Culture" to describe the scintillating musical and theatrical hybrids that emerged in that period, but it was Zorn who shaped the constituent elements that became that reality. Zorn, who was born and raised in New York City, began as an avant-garde composer and alto sax player, influenced by such disparate figures as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ornette Coleman, Ennio Morricone, and Warner Brothers cartoon composer Carl Stallings. His early work is a frequently abstract, almost antiseptic exploration of blocks of sound, focusing on the seams and unlikely swerves and turns between them. He was also fascinated with game theory and frequently applied it to group improvisation with uneven but fascinating results. He worked with a film-noir-influenced band, Naked City; wrote numerous soundtracks for independent films; issued numerous solo albums; and founded the Tzadik record label. At some point in the late 1980s, Zorn became interested in exploring his Jewish identity, as his label name suggests. Starting with his 1990 album Kristallnacht, he began developing a new band, Masada, whose focus was on a specific set of the prolific composer's original compositions, most of them a flavorful blend of Blue Note hard-bop and Middle Eastern themes. The band's book became the basis not only for countless Masada recordings featuring Zorn's powerful alto but also for numerous spin-offs including a string quartet, an electric band, and a rock-inflected group. What Zorn had been attempting was nothing less than the creation of an entire body of new Jewish music for the new millennium. To that end, he also encouraged many unlikely musicians from the worlds of avant-garde jazz, post-rock, and performance art to explore their own Jewishness on his record label, involving such luminaries as Steve Lacy, Borah Bergman, and Marty Ehrlich, and his own core of superb musical collaborators, including drummer Joey Baron, cellist Erik Friedlander, and pianists Anthony Coleman and Uri Caine among others. Zorn also promoted this new Jewish culture with a series of festivals, concerts and clubs (Tonic and his own The Stone chiefly) that moved the "downtown" scene gradually into the mainstream. Despite much acclaim and the growing success of his vision of Jewish music, Zorn remained a prickly figure, unwilling to speak to the press and intensely private. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: S. Hopkins, "John Zorn Primer," in: The Wire (Feb. 1997), at: www.thewire.co.uk\>\> ; "John Zorn," in: Music-Web Encyclopaedia of Popular Music, at: www.musicweb.uk.net\>\> ; S. Maykrantz, "John Zorn, a Biography and Discography," at: www.omnology.com/zorn\>\> . (George Robinson (2nd ed.)