John Zorn - 1990 - Naked City

John Zorn

1990

Naked City

01. Batman 1:58

02. The Sicilian Clan 3:27

03. You Will Be Shot 1:29

04. Latin Quarter 4:05

05. A Shot In The Dark 3:09

06. Reanimator 1:34

07. Snagglepuss 2:14

08. I Want To Live 2:08

09. Lonely Woman 2:38

10. Igneous Ejaculation 0:20

11. Blood Duster 0:13

12. Hammerhead 0:08

13. Demon Sanctuary 0:38

14. Obeah Man 0:17

15. Ujaku 0:27

16. Fuck The Facts 0:11

17. Speedball 0:37

18. Chinatown 4:23

19. Punk China Doll 3:01

20. N.Y. Flat Top Box 0:43

21. Saigon Pickup 4:46

22. The James Bond Theme 3:02

23. Inside Straight 4:10

Bass – Fred Frith

Drums – Joey Baron

Guitar – Bill Frisell

Keyboards – Wayne Horvitz

Vocals – Yamatsuka Eye

The debut album from his top-flight quintet Naked City foresaw the content overload of the Internet while paving the way for jazz-metal fusion and mash-ups.

1. This album might change your life, or at least, might change how you perceive jazz. It did for me, anyway: it opened my eyes to a new language and a whole new night-time. This album took my virginity.

2. But there's something depressing about the people who call this or Sonny Sharrock's Ask the Ages the best jazz album of the 1990s. They probably are, but most of the reason why people say that is because neither sound like jazz, which is both a comment about the sorry state of the genre in that sorry decade, and also a comment about the sorry state of the listeners - the same probably didn't bother with any respectable albums released by veteran jazz artists that were released that decade, of which, there are plenty (why not?). To say nothing of new-school jazz artists.

3. This is his best album, wherein Zorn reigns in his postmodern tendencies for flashes of melodies between his trademark attack. The results: a lot of humour (ie. the cartoon gunshots in "The James Bond Theme"; the way the keyboardist seems to slam his entire forearm on the keyboard in the same song); soundtracks for films never made (ie. "Contempt"); diversity (ie. "N.Y. Flat Top Box" shifts from country to freakout and back again and so on); exoticism (ie. "The Sicilian Clan"; "Latin Quarter"); etc. It's all here, sometimes all packed in the same 1-minute song.

4. There's an 8-track grindcore stretch in the dead-middle of this album broken up by a brief jazz-ambient detour on "Demon Sanctuary" where Yamatsuka Eye (of Boredoms) tests the limits of his voice. The rest of this album suggests a blender-style approach - start with "Batman" and put the rest on shuffle, so to speak - but this stretch suggests the exact opposite: play as an album.

5. John Zorn: “Compositionally the challenge I set for myself was to see how much I could come up with given the limitation of the simple sax, guitar, keyboard, bass, drums format.”

This Album is Everything.

It's exactly what the album cover and name say. Upon listening to the opening track again, it is quite funny. A lot of this album is really quite funny and/or terrifying. "I Want to Live" never fails to give me chills. I can almost imagine myself in a seedy bar regretting everything while listening to this amazing music. Everything about this album is nonsense, cool, unique, hilarious, and terrifying. Haunting especially after the first nine tracks. After that, it just devolves into a horrifying frenzy of noise and (amusing) gurgling sounds, then to some sort of demented elegy to Chinatown. "Chinatown" and "Saigon Pickup" are John Zorn's "Taxi Driver Theme". It's cool. Calm and collected, but, to me, it conveys everything but that. The further you get into the album, I think, the sadder it gets. Like I said, this album is everything. It's not just "jazz grindcore"–I mean, some tracks are like that but–, it's everything. If you don't know what kind of mood you're in.. by all means listen to this album. Depending on the day, I might be horrified throughout the entire album or laughing half the time and crying the other half or just.. y'know.. vibe the entire time. I recommend imagining yourself strutting down the streets of New York to this album. Day or night, in the middle of a big fire, superheroes flying through the sky, a man running away with a poor lady's purse, drunk man crying in the middle of the street, walking to your pitiful job, getting ice cream, going to the museum, or even reading the newspaper. It's all in this album. This album really is everything.

Long before John Zorn’s insanely versatile quintet Naked City released its eponymous debut album thirty years ago this month, the leader had already spent years experimenting with concepts that in many ways defined the band’s whiplash sound, particularly its jump-cut aesthetic. Yet Naked City was the project that elevated the notorious gadfly composer and saxophonist out of New York’s downtown ghetto and allowed to him reach a much wider and younger audience. In a sense this was his pop-rock band—albeit as uncompromising as anything he’s ever done--a nimble quintet driven by remarkable musicianship and a machine-gun spray of ideas that would seemingly make more sense in a rock club than the jazz festivals that usually programmed them.

At once a focused distillation of many of Zorn’s long-term musical concerns and interests and a highly prescient illustration of musical consumption in the Information Age, Naked City still maintains much of its power through its concision, precision, and sheer fury, even if the passage of time has taken some of the edge from its once-radical juxtapositions and nonchalant genre shuffling. As jazz critic Neil Tesser wrote in the Chicago Reader back in 1989, “Rather than shrink from the laser-optic pace at which information flies through our society, Zorn embraces it: his compositions segue rapidly from one chunk of an idea to another often unrelated one careening like a barely controlled roller coaster. In this way, the very structure of the music reflects the speed and rhythm of the late 20th century (which, depending on how you feel about the late 20th century, may or may not be a good thing).”

This conceit was laid bare on Naked City, a 26-track onslaught released by the major label Elektra-Nonesuch, that juggled and collided Zorn’s take on the hardcore sounds he’d been mainlining at the time, film themes by the likes of Ennio Morricone, Henry Mancini, John Barry, Jerry Goldsmith, and Georges Delerue, and a quick-blink hodge podge of tropes purloined from country, bebop, reggae, New Orleans R&B, and more. Zorn’s top-flight band—bassist Fred Frith, guitarist Bill Frisell, keyboardist Wayne Horvitz, and drummer Joey Baron, then all active denizens of New York’s polyglot downtown scene—translated the leader’s vision brilliantly, articulating his rapid-fire shuffle of ideas with stop-on-a-dime exactitude. While Zorn’s colleague John Oswald had unleashed his mind-boggling sampling opus Plunderphonics in 1989, with its head-spinning profusion of cuts, and that same year the Beastie Boys dropped the astonishing Paul’s Boutique, with the style-splicing production of the Dust Brothers, Naked City was able to convey a similar spirit without the aid of computers. In 1989 I saw the band perform at Chicago’s Civic Opera, and its seamless performance left most of the audience with jaws agape.