Originally posted to rec.music.bluenote, 2 Sep 1993 01:07:24 -0400.
Zorn said he wrote this when he was 12. (Although in 1969 he would have been 16, assuming he's really 40 now...) He also said this would be the first (and no doubt last) public performance of this piece. I rather liked it. It started with Zorn on clarinet, sliding down and then up. It ended with wailing and screeching from everyone if I remember correctly. Lots of noise of various kinds in between.
This was an interesting piece. I only noticed Seaton's playing at the very end (she was off-stage even then). Norman Yamada conducted this one. The score looked liked it was notated conventionally. There were some nice low-volume moments, some frenzied moments, some interesting voicings.
I remember enjoying this one too. Zorn was quite amused by something at a certain point. Perhaps he fucked up playing in his own piece? There were occasional problems with some of the pieces. I guess people would get lost or something.
This was great. Some of it was Hendrixian in its noise-content. It almost did sound like the closest thing to massive guitar-amplifier feedback one could get from three woodwind instruments... All three of them seemed on the verge of cracking up at a certain point in the piece. (I think because Rothenberg had gotten confused or maybe he screwed up but then made a hand-single that everything was "OK" or something? That was my interpretation, it could be totally wrong.)
Also enjoyable, although not as much as some of the other pieces (like the previous one). Chris Cochrane played some fairly mellow stuff in addition to the usual guitar-torture. It was more recognizably in the "game-piece" format (judging from the hand-signals anyway).
Now this was noisy. Zorn said before playing it that they used to try to get the piece to last longer and longer as they kept performing it, and that as of about 1986 it was running about 70 minutes, but that tonight they wouldn't be doing that. It was all very short fragments of sound (some long tones by Zorn), lots of scraping and honking (by Zorn on game calls and mouthpieces).
This was a tape piece. Lots of random sounds, like television, piano playing, someone brushing their teeth (these are what I thought they were anyway), voices, vocalizations, telephones, etc. It had a few interesting or funny parts but on the whole it was boring.
Exciting news: for Spy vs. Spy (the music of Ornette Coleman) the personnel is Zorn, Berne, Dresser, JOEY BARON and TED EPSTEIN!!! This will rock. Joey Baron is also playing with Masada as part of the Radical Jewish Culture part of the Zornfest (with Sebastian Steinberg on bass -- his own band will play too, BTW -- and Ribot on guitar).
Annoying news: The Knitting Factory is really cracking down in certain ways this month, it seems. No smoking at all upstairs (not a big deal but slightly annoying) and no cameras of any kind allowed (EXTREMELY ANNOYING -- I was hoping to videotape everything I went to...). Didn't say anything about audiotapes though... Time to borrow a DAT deck!
Other news: I auditioned yesterday at the New School (I'm a piano student in the Jazz and Contemporary Music program there). After listening to so much of everyone staggering through standards and incompetent attempts to play swing/bebop, when it was my turn to be "featured" and I got to call a tune, I asked the bass player and the drummer (the only people left on stage -- I was the last one to play, which sucked as well because I had been awake for more than 24 hours at that point and wanted to get it over with...) if we could simply play a blues and "Just play anything besides swing, OK? Funk, rock, anything, just not swing and walking bass?" They looked kind of confused, shook their heads, said "No." So we played a blues, swing, walking bassline... I subverted it a little bit, tried to make something happen and force them to listen and improvise and to their credit they didn't stop, but they seemed confused. Reggie Workman (who, with Arnie Lawrence, was running things) then told me to play solo for a few minutes. So I did some free improv. I've done much better pieces, but it didn't go too badly (at least considering how tired I was, and considering that it was only the second time this summer I'd played a real piano -- playing keyboard has wreaked havoc with my touch, technique, and endurance). Anyway, we'll see what happens... There must be some people at the school who are into this kind of thing! (The auditions are for the purpose of placing the students into ensembles.)
Ciao,
-Ed