The Met Celebrates Sixty Intense Years of John Zorn

“When we did this at the Museum of Modern Art a couple of months ago, they put us over in the corner,” John Zorn said with a smirk to the crowd massed in the Abstract Expressionism gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier today. “Here, they put us right in front of the Pollock.” Sure enough, right behind Zorn and his bandmate Milford Graves was Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (No. 30).

Zorn had already gotten a foot in the door as a composer in the downtown scene during a time when the idea of a Pollock painting at the Met would have raised some eyebrows, not to mention a free jazz saxophonist and drummer squalling and rumbling in front of it. Has uptown finally caught up with downtown? As Dylan said, maybe everything’s a little upside down in New York right now, Zorn being feted at the Met for his antiestablishment antics and vast body of often strangely beautiful work while down in his old Lower East Side digs, it’s mostly Jeff Koons and Miley Cyrus wannabes strutting their stuff in the galleries and onstage. That someone who sounds anything like John Zorn wouldn’t be likely to get a gig in that neighborhood anywhere other than the Stone – Zorn’s own hangout – speaks to the LES’s death by gentrification more powerfully than just about anything else.

But Zorn was at home here and he played to the crowd. An alto saxophonist for the better part of four, maybe five decades, his chops have never been more razor-sharp. This duo improvisation was a roller-coaster ride, a sizzling display of extended technique peaking midway through with an endless series of trills delivered via circular breathing as Zorn slowly and very emphatically made his way up the chromatic scale over Graves’ crepuscular rumble. As intense as Zorn’s music can be, people sometimes forget what a great wit he is, and there was plenty of that here as well: a trick ending, a squonk or two that Graves slapped back at with a cymbal crash, and puckish pauses when least expected. Graves may be best known for his groundbreaking work in cardiac medicine, music history and acoustic science, but at 72 he’s absolutely undiminished behind the kit. And this one was considerably unorthodox: three floor toms, kick drum, ride cymbal and hi-hat, with two snares of differing sizes situated in the very front, Graves leaning on his central tom with his left elbow when he went for the very occasional higher timbre. That persistent low, matter-of-fact approach was the perfect complement to Zorn’s upper-register whirls and shrieks sprinkled with the occasional terse, pensive, chromatic phrase.

Elsewhere throughout the museum, small ensembles performed works from throughout Zorn’s career. In a Halloween-themed room in the American wing, a trio comprised of violinist Chris Otto, violist Dave Fulmer and cellist Jay Campbell had fun with Zorn’s spritely All Hallows Eve. They made it a warily suspenseful game of hide and seek, closer to an alternately lively and wispy Walpurgisnacht among the cicadas than, say, the John Carpenter movie. A quintet of Jane Seddon, Sarah Brailey, Abby Fischer, Mellissa Hughes and Kirsten Sollek sang the alternately rapt and assaultive antiphons of Zorn’s Holy Visions in the considerably more spacious medieval sculpture hall downstairs. Cellist Erik Friedlander treated the crowd packed into a room in the Assyrian section to a judicious, meticulously phrased solo take of Volac, a poignantly pleading partita from Zorn’s Masada: Book of Angels. The highlight of the morning was at the Temple of Dendur, where guitarist Bill Frisell, vibraphonist Kenny Wollesen and harpist Carol Emmanuel delivered a lushly gentle but incisively echoing version of the Gnostic Preludes and its warmly enveloping, hypnotic but anthemically interwoven, bell-like harmonies. And the museum opened with a sextet of trumpeters – Nate Botts, Wayne DuMaine, Gareth Flowers, Josh Frank, Stephanie Richards and Tim Leopold – premiering the brand-new Antiphonal Fanfare and its subtly crescendoingly, triumphant variations on a simple phrase a la Philip Glass. The reputedly prickly Zorn seemed anything but and during this piece was moved almost to the point of tears.

There were other performances later in the day for percussion, choir, oud, violin and finally the man himself at the museum’s venerable 1830 Appleton organ. What was all this like? After standing for five hours, with constant distractions from several millennia worth of fascinating stuff on the walls, it was time to call it a day. As the day went on, the crowds grew and everyone had their cameras out; there should be a ton of video out there if those people were generous enough to share it.

Ted Hearne’s Katrina Ballads: One of the Year’s Best Albums

A blackly hilarious, cerebral portrayal of malfeasance, mismanagement and suffering in the wake of the Bush regime’s failure to react to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, Ted Hearne’s Katrina Ballads evokes the surrealist political performance art of the 1960s. Released on the fifth anniversary of the disaster at the end of August, it balances the cruel cynicism of the Bushites, oblivious in their own comfortable version of reality, with the horrific experiences of the natives who for the most part probably did not vote for them. A mix of cinematic soundscapes and intricate art-rock with operatic vocals, its lyrics are taken entirely from news reports during the early days of the crisis. It’s like the Dead Kennedys for chamber orchestra.

Soprano Abby Fischer channels her inner soul diva on the opening track, stagy yet completely deadpan: “N’awlins is sinking.” She goes on to inform that in 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency ranked a New Orleans disaster as likely as a San Francisco earthquake or a terrorist attack on New York, over a backdrop that morphs from artsy indie classical rock to a hypnotic overlay of voices: “To some extent I think we’ve been lulled to sleep,” a quote from the head of the LSU hurricane center. The second track is a suspenseful instrumental that builds to matter-of-factly ominous art-rock. The deadpan operatics recur with the third track, a sadly terse account of a Biloxi resident whose wife was swept from the roof of their home, and with Isaiah Robinson’s recreation of Bush sympathizer Dennis Hastert’s assertion that “a lot of that place could be bulldozed.”

Bridge to Gretna vividly evokes the incident where white racists opened fire on unarmed black residents fleeing the destruction, a dialogue between Eileen Mack’s hopeful bass clarinet and Taylor Levine’s electric guitar slapping her away. The humor returns with CNN personality Anderson Cooper interviewing Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, done with a wickedly understated, satirical edge by Fischer and Anthony Turner: he’s all faux rage and she’s a robot, their carefully scripted vocal lines enhancing the fakeness. The funniest moment here is Hearne himself doing a sort of lo-fi hip-hop remix of “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” Anybody remember MC Rove?

Finally, a jazz-flavored piece appears – a salute at a funeral? – with murky David Hanlon piano, followed by more brutal levity, in this case the casual countrypolitan golf-club sway of a piece that quotes Barbara Bush: “Almost everyone I talk to says we’re moving to Houston…what I’m hearing which is sort of scary is that they want to stay in Texas. ” The album concludes with a long, elegiac chamber piece quoting New Orleans resident Ashley Nelson, whose feeling of abandonment is visceral, although she tragically fails to make the connection between 9/11 and the Katrina fiasco. It’s as valuable a piece of history as it is entertaining: look for this on our upcoming Best Albums of 2010 list next week.