!!!!!!!!!!!Spotlight On: John Zorn!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I did one one Mike Patton, it's only natural to do John Zorn. Another prolific musician not afraid to push the boundaries of music. His discography is quite extensive, as I'm sure you know already, he's credited on over 400 albums as a performer or producer, and he's still going.
He was introduced to a whole mess of different music as a kid, his parents and brother all listened to an assortment of genres. The avant-garde part came after buying a Mauricio Kagel record at fifteen, pretty sweet kid. As a teenager he taught himself a lot about classical music by transcribing scores. He started playing the saxophone at sixteen and incorporated all the music he was listening to and all things he had learned into his first recordings from 1973. He dropped out of college and moved to Manahatten and established himself as a part of the downtown music scene through concerts at his apartment.
Punk-jazz-grind band Naked City was formed in 1988, and played "soundtrack themes, bluesy hard bop, speedy hardcore rock, squealing free jazz and metallic funk". They were extremeley diverse, obviously, with tons of blasting hardcore tracks, free-jazz, and performances of many classic compositions.
Painkiller was formed in 1991, with Mick Harris of Napalm Death fame on drums. Albums like
Execution Ground started to incorporate long, dub-ambient tracks.
With Mike Patton,
Hemophiliac was released in 2002. A double album of all around oddness and avant-noise.
In 2006 he joined forces with Patton again, this time with Trevor Dunn and Joey Baron, creating the Moonchild Trio, who would go on to release a number of recordings.
Those are his main groups, but that's only about half of his works, if that. And let's not forget the hundreds of klezmer styled jazz compositions from the Masada songbooks.
One of my favorite Zorn related........things, is the improvisational music "game", Cobra. Many talented musicians have joined in on the fun, Mike Patton, Marc Ribot, Fred Frith, among others. Someone holds up a card, people play, stuff and crap. I dunno, check it out
I haven't listened to every single album yet, but some of my favorites are
Elegy,
The Big Gundown,
The Gift,
Cartoon S/M, Naked City's
Radio, and so many other good ones. If you've never delved into the Zorn world (:O), I would honestly suggest listening to Naked City. Their albums draw on all kinds of different subjects, and you could get a good Zorn experience from it. If you don't like noisey, squealy, and weird jazz, then listen to
The Gift, it's pretty laid back surf-persian funky stuff.
John Zorn and Mike Patton are two of my musical heroes not only for all their kick-ass music, but also the fact that they're just doing whatever the f*ck they want. Some people are in it for the money, some people want to pour their brains out through music and have a good time.