the of mirror eye

* Naked City: Batman (4.5 mb) | The Sicilian Clan (5.0 mb) | Latin Quarter (7.0 mb) | You Will Be Shot (2.0 mb)
From Live At Bimhuis : Oct 20, 1989 : Amsterdam, Holland

To end this weekend, I’ve chosen another band that John Zorn plays a prominent role in, Naked City. Although this band may look like your normal every day sort of band, with drums, keyboards, bass, guitar and saxophone, it sounds more like a very carefully orchestrated train wreck. His compositions veer from jazz to heavy metal to cartoon music to soundtracks at the turn of a dime. To play this music, John Zorn assembled a veritable supergroup picked from the downtown NYC jazz scene.

Featuring Bill Frisell, Fred Frith, Wayne Horvitz and Joey Baron this was a true downtown supergroup brought together to realize John Zorn’s twisted compositional vision combining jazz, movie soundtracks, rock, rhythm and blues, hardcore punk, cartoon music, country and western and just about everything imaginable—often all in the same piece!

(from the Tzadik website)

For many, this will be a hard band to digest. The genre hopping, along with the intensity of the performances can be trying on the nerves. But the way these musicians interact and assemble and perform these songs is absolutely amazing.

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