I’ve said before that John Zorn is an enigma among enigmas for me. In a nutshell, I just love most of what I’ve heard from him, but apparently when I trigger any sort of endorsement for Zorn in Pandora’s player, the “learning” engine gleefully and completely misses the point, suddenly forgetting (again) what I have repeatedly told it for some years: that no, I do not now want to hear an endless procession of jazz piano trios because I liked something from John Zorn. (Nothing against a good piano trio, of course, but this automatic and pervasive association–it doesn’t happen with anyone else–seems so utterly ignorant of the bulk of Zorn’s work, if not outright lazy in simply lumping anything the engine can’t understand as catchall “jazz”, as to make me wonder if it must somehow be willful.)
(Sorry, pedantic vent again. Pandora’s been a useful thing for me for a long time now, and maybe I’m just “lucky” in the Chinese-curse sense, but this “learning” engine, sometimes…simply doesn’t.)
Anyway, today I heard Zorn’s “The Middle Pillar” from The Gnostic Preludes, and…man, it is so Zorn it just reaches right into me and starts ripping at insides with full abandon.
It needed a bookmark, and a thumbs-up in Pandora…which (sigh) probably consigns me to a few weeks of piano trio whac-a-mole.
For me, though, Zorn is worth that. What a marvelous gift to music.
Craftygrass 