John Zorn

Zorn's family had diverse musical tastes: his mother, Vera (née Studenski; 1918–1999), listened to classical and world music; his father, Henry Zorn (1913–1992), was interested in jazz, French chansons, and country music; and his older brother collected doo-wop and 1950s rock and roll records.

Zorn spent his teenage years exploring classical music, film music, "listening to The Doors and playing bass in a surf band."

He explored the experimental and avant-garde music of György Ligeti, Mauricio Kagel and Karlheinz Stockhausen as well as cartoon soundtracks and film scores.

Zorn taught himself orchestration and counterpoint by transcribing scores and studied composition under Leonardo Balada at the United Nations International School.

John Zorn (born September 2, 1953) is an American composer, conductor, saxophonist, arranger and producer who "deliberately resists category".

His avant-garde and experimental approaches to composition and improvisation are inclusive of jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, contemporary, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and world music.

Zorn began playing saxophone after discovering Anthony Braxton's album For Alto (1969) when he was studying composition at Webster College (now Webster University) in St. Louis, Missouri, where he attended classes taught by Oliver Lake.

While at Webster, he incorporated elements of free jazz, avant-garde and experimental music, film scores, performance art and the cartoon scores of Carl Stalling into his first recordings.

Leaving Webster after three semesters, Zorn lived on the West Coast before returning to Manhattan where he gave concerts in his apartment and other small NY venues, playing saxophone and a variety of reeds, duck calls, tapes, and other instruments.

Zorn immersed himself in the underground art scene, assisting filmmaker Jack Smith with his performances and attending plays by Richard Foreman.

Zorn's early major compositions included many game pieces described as "complex systems harnessing improvisers in flexible compositional formats".

These compositions "involved strict rules, role playing, prompters with flashcards, all in the name of melding structure and improvisation in a seamless fashion".

Zorn entered New York City's downtown music scene in the mid-1970s, collaborating with improvising artists while developing new methods of composing experimental music.

Over the next decade he performed throughout Europe and Japan and recorded on independent US and European labels.

Zorn's early game pieces had sporting titles like Lacrosse (1976), Hockey (1978), Pool (1979), and Archery (1979), which he recorded and first released on Eugene Chadbourne's Parachute label.

Zorn spent significant time in Japan in the late 1980s and early '90s but returned to Lower East Side Manhattan to establish the Tzadik record label in 1995.

Tzadik enabled Zorn to establish independence, maintain creative control, and ensure the availability of his growing catalog of recordings.

He prolifically recorded and released new material for the label, issuing several new albums each year, along with recordings by many other artists.

Zorn performs on saxophone with Naked City, Painkiller, and Masada, conducts Moonchild, Simulacrum, and several Masada-related ensembles or encourages musicians toward their own interpretations of his work.

He has composed concert music for classical ensembles and orchestras, and produced music for opera, sound installations, film and documentary.

Tours of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East have been extensive, usually at festivals with musicians and ensembles that perform his repertoire.

John Zorn was born in New York City to a Jewish family, attended the United Nations International School, and studied piano, guitar and flute from an early age.

In the early 1980s, Zorn was heavily engaged in improvisation as both a solo performer and with other like-minded artists.

Zorn's first solo saxophone recordings were originally released in two volumes as The Classic Guide to Strategy in 1983 and 1986 on the Lumina label.

Zorn's early small group improvisations are documented on Locus Solus (1983) which featured Zorn with various combinations of other improvisers including Christian Marclay, Arto Lindsay, Wayne Horvitz, Ikue Mori, and Anton Fier.

His most enduring game piece is Cobra, composed in 1984 and first recorded in 1987 and in subsequent versions in 1992, 1994 and 2002, and revisited in performance many times.

Ganryu Island featured a series of duets by Zorn with Michihiro Sato on shamisen, which received limited release on the Yukon label in 1984.

Zorn has subsequently reissued these early recordings.

Zorn's breakthrough recording was 1985's widely acclaimed The Big Gundown released on Nonesuch Records, where Zorn offered radical arrangements of Ennio Morricone's music for film.

The album was endorsed by Morricone himself, who said: "This is a record that has fresh, good and intelligent ideas. It is realization on a high level, a work done by a maestro with great science-fantasy and creativity ... Many people have done versions of my pieces, but no one has done them like this".

In 1986, he received acclaim with the release of his radical reworking of the film scores of Ennio Morricone, The Big Gundown, followed by Spillane, an album featuring his collage-like experimental compositions.

Zorn followed with another major-label release Spillane in 1987 featuring compositions performed by Albert Collins, the Kronos Quartet, along with the title track, an early "file-card" composition.

This method of combining composition and improvisation involved Zorn writing descriptions or ideas on file-cards and arranging them to form the piece.

Spy vs Spy (1989) and Naked City (1990) both demonstrated Zorn's ability to merge and blend musical styles in new and challenging formats.

Zorn described the process in 2003:

"I write in moments, in disparate sound blocks, so I find it convenient to store these events on filing cards so they can be sorted and ordered with minimum effort. Pacing is essential. If you move too fast, people tend to stop hearing the individual moments as complete in themselves and more as elements of a sort of cloud effect ... I worked 10 to 12 hours a day for a week, just orchestrating these file cards. It was an intense process."

Zorn's file-card method of organizing sound blocks into an overall structure largely depended on the musicians he chose, the way they interpreted what was written on the file cards, and their relationship with Zorn.

"I'm not going to sit in some ivory tower and pass my scores down to the players."

said Zorn,

In 2020 Rolling Stone noted that "[alt]hough Zorn has operated almost entirely outside the mainstream, he's gradually asserted himself as one of the most influential musicians of our time".