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footnotes



John Zorn's Soundtracks
The Filmworks series


With Carl Stalling and Ennio Morricone as major influences, John Zorn's music has always had a cinematic quality. Stalling's cartoon themes inspired him to work in blocks — brief musical passages that can be laid out in sequence, mixed up, and repeated.

Morricone's career is a blueprint for an ambitious composer: He's written music for every kind of movie, his soundtracks are complete albums, and he can work with small ensembles. (He doesn't need an orchestra.)

So when Zorn was hired to make a few soundtracks for low-budget movies, he was ready. He had the right composition method, the musicians, and the determination to do something special for every project.

He also had a record company to release the music. Without Tzadik, nearly all of this music would go unheard by Zorn fans. Independent filmmakers can't release this stuff on their own. At a major label, it would go out of print overnight. Somehow, he has been able to cut a deal with every producer — they use the music in their films, but he gets to release the soundtrack himself. The result is an unusual set of albums: music for dozens of films you'll probably never see.

Zorn: The most important thing for me in doing soundtrack work is creative freedom. I'd rather not do the project than have to do what a director wants, and I couldn't care less about the money (relatively speaking that is).

Knowing that I can retain all rights and eventually release the recording on one of my filmworks compilations gives me a certain amount of economic security and independence that many young filmmakers love since they usually don't have any money left for scoring music at the end of their production anyway.

[ COMMENTS? ]

ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE SIX SEVEN EIGHT NINE TEN ELEVEN TWELVE THIRTEEN FOURTEEN

Some of the albums pictured above are reviewed on this page. (Click on the cover.) In the future, I'll add more reviews.


Zorn: It's the same thing for the cinema and music. If the budget is low then the quality is better. Imagination and creativity predominate. It is very difficult to do something creative with the majors. For them, it's all based on business and money.


The score so far
one animated TV show
one Hollywood movie
five erotic films or videos
nine documentaries
ten independent films





Filmworks V: Tears of Ecstasy

recorded October 1, 1995
released November 1996
ONE DISC:   forty-eight tracks, 58 minutes

In 1995, John Zorn recorded this soundtrack for an erotic film by Japanese director Oki Hiroyuki. The album is a collection of 48 one-minute songs. Most of the songs are a combination of guitar and percussion, played by Marc Ribot and Cyro Baptista.

This album is usually described as a collection of different genres — the musicians play a one-minute jazz song, then a one-minute rock song, then one minute of synthesizer music, then one minute of ambient, etc., etc.

But that's not quite right. Zorn created his own genres of music for this album. You might hear some familiar styles, but (for the most part) he's created all kinds of weird and subtle hybrids of drone music, eerie feedback, minimalist jazz, and sound effects. None of the songs develop in any substantial way — they start and end with the same sound.

After listening to Tears of Ecstasy over and over, I figured out that some of the songs are repeated. Zorn seems to have recorded half a dozen two-minute songs which he then cut in half. He scattered them around in the CD sequence to keep the different halves far apart. You can't figure it out until you listen to the album on random and you accidentally hear the same song twice.

(If you buy this CD and you want to find the duplicated tracks, I've written a list of all 48 songs on the footnotes page, grouped by their genre. If you don't own the CD, the list is extremely useless.)

About two-thirds of this album is good. A few of the abstract songs are a little dull, and there are five tracks of high-pitched squealing that are easy to skip. At one minute, you can get through them — except for Mean Difference, a two-minute track composed of nothing more than a continuous, high-pitched tone. You'd think that if Zorn was going break the one-minute rule, it would be for something worthwhile. But Mean Difference is a big chunk of filler.


Zorn: It was toward the end of September 1995 that I first got the call for this one. The concept was simple — a one-hour film divided into sixty one-minute sequences. The director wanted sixty one-minute pieces of music to go with it, and as far as he was concerned, anything goes. The director wanted the music by the first of October, only one week away.

I agreed immediately. The idea of recording and mixing these cues in one day seemed a real challenge, and with the right band it would be a lot of fun.

This clearly was the right band, because it was a fucking blast. Ribot, Quine and Cyro have worked with me for years, and at least one of them appear on virtually every film scoring job I've ever done. They are the best of the best.

Drawing upon their many talents, there's a wide range of styles here — rock, noise, ambient, world music, jazz, industrial, but mostly it's all a freak hybrid that belongs to none of these categories.

Themes will repeat now and again with variations or alternate arrangements (Morricone, the master, once told me that you really only need one theme to score a film properly) and of course there is plenty of room here for the players to "stretch out," even within the limitations of a one-minute time frame.


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Filmworks VI

recorded March and July 1996
released November 19, 1996
ONE DISC:   sixteen tracks, 64 minutes

The music on this CD comes from three short films:

    Anton, Mailman, directed by Dina Waxman
    Mechanics of the Brain, by Henry Hills
    The Black Glove, an S/M film by Maria Beatty

The four Anton, Mailman tracks are low-key, easy-listening tunes. Marc Ribot plays "twangy" guitar over a bouncing rhythm section. Stills from the film appear in the CD booklet. They show a balding mailman and a woman in her apartment. I don't know what the story is, but it looks a little creepy. Those images make the music more atmospheric.

The ten tracks for Mechanics of the Brain are all over the place. There's pure noise (Brain Scan), ambient droning (Witches' Cauldron), twangy guitar over complex drum machine percussion (Houdini and Surgery Montage), gurgling and howling over a metronome (Pendulum), and lots of improvised violin and cello.

The last two tracks (for The Black Glove) are all sound effects. The first, a 20-minute piece called Hot, combines sounds for striking matches, a flame-thrower, crackling flame, and sizzling. The second is Cool: 8 minutes of ice breaking, water, and chilled wind.

With Mechanics of the Brain in the middle, the CD steadily progresses from music to sound effects. This seems to match the content of the short films, from an off-beat story about a mailman to S/M erotica.

For some reason, this album never gets old. Maybe I like it so much because it was one of my first Zorn albums. But there's more to it than that. This album has a weird effect on you when you look through the CD booklet as you listen. The pictures and the music combine, giving you all kinds of ideas about what's happening in the short films. Maybe it's better to imagine these three movies than to actually see them.



Zorn: The project for Henry Hills is unique because it's the first time I've ever done music for his images using the familiar process that has been so successful in other sound track projects. Recorded and mixed in a day, I created a variety of ambients, classical miniatures, rocky grooves and improvisational fragments for Henry to cut up and use as he saw fit.

The film promises to be one of Henry's best — a sick, twisted cut-up inspired by Pudovkin's documentary on Pavlov's early laboratory experiments of human behavior. Some of this footage is frighteningly brutal — even for me.


Zorn: The music for Anton Mailman was recorded under an unbelievable amount of pressure. Everything that could possibly go wrong, went wrong. Amps blowing up, equipment breaking down, digital noises, last minute schedule problems, sudden illness.

Ribot had thrown his back out the day before and he had taken too many painkillers that morning. I couldn't figure out whether he was going to faint or puke on his guitar but he looked pale as a ghost.

By the time we had gotten it together and the engineer had shown, most of the day had gone by, and we had only two hours left to record the four cues I had brought in.


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Filmworks VII: Cynical Hysterie Hour

recorded 1988 and 1989
released 1990
re-issued 1997
ONE DISC:   twenty-three tracks, 25 minutes

In 1988 and 1989, John Zorn recorded this music for four episodes of The Cynical Hysterie Hour, an animated TV show in Japan. The show is written and drawn by Kiriko Kubo.

It was released in 1990 by CBS Sony, but it was out of print six months later. In 1996, when Sony needed to use the Knitting Factory for a private party on a night that Zorn had already reserved, he struck a deal — he'd give them their night if they gave him the rights to this music. He got it.

The music on this album is colorful and fun. A long list of instruments are used, but Bill Frisell's banjo stands out. I'm glad I bought this one, but it's not something I listen to for pleasure. The brief running time and the total disconnection from the cartoons makes it a little bit impersonal.

On the other hand, few Zorn albums benefit more from context: If you have no idea what these tracks were written for, you might be annoyed or confused. Once you find out this is the soundtrack for an animated TV show, it all makes sense.



Zorn: I am particularly proud of this music. As a long-time fan of cartoon music it was extremely intimidating for me to try to voice myself in this genre that I have championed and that has influenced me so deeply.

I was determined to create an original sounds world to go with Kiriko's images and characters, one that appealed equally to children as to adults, and I found one with the aid of some of the most exciting musicians on the scene.

A basic theme and set of chords tie the various episodes together, but the instrumentation is slightly modified for each separate cartoon, focusing on punk rock guitars, dark foreboding strings or upbeat percussion.
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Filmworks VIII

recorded July and November 1997
released 1998
ONE DISC:   twenty-one tracks, 65 minutes

This songs on this album come from two different movies.

"The Port of Last Resort is a remarkable documentary about the Jewish refugees who emigrated to Shanghai from Nazi Germany in the 1930s" (according to the CD booklet). The first eleven tracks come from this film. One of them, Ruan, appears in three different versions — one for guitar, one for solo piano, and the third for pipa.

The other ten tracks come from an erotic film called Latin Boys Go to Hell. "The story behind the making of this music is a long, twisted and painful one," Zorn says. He saw the film and decided to do an all-percussion score. This idea was rejected by the filmmaker, so Zorn dropped the project. A month later, he found out no one had written the score, so he said "If you still want me to do the music, I will deliver the percussion score on one condition: that no one contact me until it is completely recorded." With Cyro Baptista and Kenny Wollesen, he completed the tracks. But "the score was barely used in the final cut."

So let this be a lesson to you kids. If you're going to make a porno soundtrack, just get out your wah-wah pedal. Don't be artsy-fartsy like John Zorn.

Every track on this album is great. The Port of Last Resort songs sound like anything from Bar Kokhba. They are spare, disciplined, and usually very quiet. Zorn's compositions combine Jewish folk music with Asian instruments — the perfect musical complement to the documentary.

The percussion tracks at the end are just as good. Instead of rock drums or tribal rhythms, the two musicians play a series of melodies on vibes and bongos. The melodies are decorated with rhythmic breathing, handclaps, deep bass drums, and a rattlesnake or two.



Zorn: "Shanghai," "Or Ne'erav," and "Ruan" were written especially for the film. "Emunim" and "Ahavah" developed during rehearsals for Makigami Koichi's Japanese production of Richard Foreman's The Mind King, and were played by the great William Winant on percussion and myself on harmonium.

The other four compositions were drawn from the over 200 tunes that compromise the Masada book, chosen here to portray the range of moods and emotions felt by the ex-patriots in their safe but unfamiliar haven so far from home. Inappropriate for the regular Masada quartet, these pieces have never been heard before.


The pipa version of Ruan is played by Min Xiao-Fen:

Zorn: This was the perfect chance to call up Min Xiao-Fen, who I had met earlier in the year. One of the world's greatest virtuosos on the pipa,

I had the pleasure of hearing her solo concert and immediately hooked her up with Derek Bailey for a CD of duo improvisations on Avant. Her sensual tone on this album adds just the touch conveying the curious crossroads of Chinese and Jewish cultures.

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Filmworks IX: Trembling Before G-d

recorded 2000?
released December 2000
ONE DISC:   eighteen tracks, 65 minutes

This soundtrack was written for a documentary directed by Sandi Dubowski:

Trembling Before G-d is a feature-length documentary about Hasidim and Orthodox Jews who "come out" as gays and lesbians and the ways in which they negotiate their sexuality and identity in religious communities. It was shot over five years in Israel, Brooklyn, London, Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco.

The music needed to stem from Orthodox and Hasidic life. It needed to breathe across a range of styles and emotion — often from a lonely, barren place; sometimes from a table-banging, exuberant, G-d intoxicated one.

This is one of John Zorn's most sympathetic, heartfelt soundtracks. It's a minimalist album that employs one musical theme and two musicians (Chris Speed on clarinet and Jamie Saft on organ). Zorn makes the most of it, building up and breaking down the central melody, getting the two players to improvise, and changing the tempo to make each track unique.

The repeated musical theme unifies the album. The end result will please everyone except the hard-core Zorn fans, who will get a little bored halfway through. Personally, I love this soundtrack. It is boring, but that's okay.

Three tracks add other musicians. The first (track #6) is a joke: Zorn himself yelping "Mazel Tov!" over a drum machine and bouncy clarinet melody. The other two tracks feature Cyro Baptista on percussion. On Desert Montage, he changes the mood with hypnotic drums and chimes. On End Titles, he adds loud handclaps.


Zorn: As in many of the projects I've done, this film came to me with a temp track of pre- recorded music already in place. One of the dangers of laying down scratch music during the editing process is how the director can get obsessively attached to certain pieces of music.

This often becomes a stumbling block for both the composer and the producer, but here it became an inspiration and helped provide direction.

We were able to agree that a completely original score was the best way to go, but there was one track they would not let go of — the organ-clarinet version of Idalah-Abal from my first Bar Kokhba release.

In a documentary, where the location and technique shift radically from scene to scene it is important for the music to provide unity as well as comment on and bring out the unspoken emotional content of a given scene. Fot this reason we decided to base the entire score on the Idalah-Abal track, keeping the same instrumentation throughout.

The problem with composing an entire score solely for organ and clarinet was a stimulating challenge and I went into the studio almost the next day with a variety of themes and improvisational formats that would, I hope, prove successful for the film, inspiring for the musicians, and interesting as an isolated listening experience on CD.




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Filmworks X: In the Mirror of Maya Deren

recorded 2001?
released August 2001
ONE DISC:   fifteen tracks, 52 minutes

Like all of the best albums in the Filmworks series, these songs are complete instrumentals. With or without the context, the music is very satisfying.

Zorn's soundtrack work tends to be smoother than the rest of his music, with an emphasis on sustained sounds. Few Filmworks tracks are jarring like Naked City, or take off in wild solo flights like Masada. On his soundtracks, he creates audible moods.

This is easy to explain when you look at the song titles on this album. Drifting, Dancing, and Filming are creative interpretations of each of these activities. It's as if Zorn came up with the titles first, then filled in the appropriate music.

There are fifteen tracks, but only nine songs. The songs on the second half of the album are new arrangements of the songs on the first half. If you listen to them in sequence, you'll hear familiar musical themes, each stripped down a little or augmented for a slightly different effect. Haiti, for example, is an update of Dancing. On Dancing, Jamie Saft plays a simple melody on an organ over a repetitive rhythm. On Haiti, the organ is replaced by Cyro Baptista playing percussion.

The music is steady and atmospheric. The only track that will bother your grandmother is Voudoun, a three-and-a-half minute exercise in tribal rhythm. It's recorded a little bit louder than the rest of the album.


Zorn: Director Martina Kudlacek is a close friend of filmmaker Henry Hills, who I've known since the early 1980s, and when she offered me the chance to score her film documentary on the legendary Maya Deren I was delighted.

Although the rough cut was almost completely filled with music by composer Teiji Ito and field recordings by Maya herself, my enthusiasm for this project, personal connection to the subject matter and the persistence of the director herself finally convinced me that I could come up with a score that would help tie the various strands of her life and work together into an emotional narrative.

From the Barnes & Noble web site:

As conductor and keyboardist, Zorn employs a score built on repetitious patterns, spare, softly accented figures, and lilting, skeletal melodies that take into consideration the revolutionary compositions of Teiji Ito, Deren's love of the percussion that accompanied voodoo ritual, and the ancestral music of her native Kiev.

Piano and a plucked cello alter a small-chord progression continually, shifting the harmonics just enough to detect great movement while remaining still.




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Filmworks 11: Secret Lives

recorded 2002 ?
released July 2002
ONE DISC:   twenty-one tracks, 54 minutes

The first in a trilogy of Filmworks albums released in 2002, Secret Lives is the soundtrack to a Holocaust documentary directed by Aviva Slesin.

Aviva Slesin: Our film is about the rescue of Jewish children by non-Jews during the Second World War. We focus on children who were hidden without their parents, and rescuers who took them into their homes without payment and always at great risk to themselves and their own families. These rescuers were rare, but existed in every country under German occupation.

John's music felt right from the moment we heard it because it's rooted in his own Jewish identity, but ranges far and free beyond that. We imagined a lot of piano, thinking of all the lost children and the piano lessons they would never have. But John didn't take an intellectual approach. he heard strings in his mind's ear. They were warmer than percussion and had a yearning quality that felt right to him.

Our creative sessions with John were always short and spirited. They left us excited at the prospects, but just a little nervous. We knew he was brilliant, but also fiercely independent and true to his vision. In the end, it was a joyful collaboration.

This is one of John Zorn's few easy-listening albums. There is no chaotic improvisation, no noisy songs, and no sound effects. Every song is a beautiful piece of modern klezmer, played on violin, cello, and bass. On one track, Armistice Swing, Jamie Saft plays piano. Vanessa Saft adds vocals to two tracks, as well.


For a few months before this CD was released, the title was Under the Wing. When it came out, the CD case and booklet clearly listed it as Secret Lives, but the previous (incorrect) title can still be found here and there on the internet.


The music on this album is played by the Masada String Trio — Mark Feldman (violin), Erik Friedlander (cello), and Greg Cohen (bass).

They play two tracks on Taboo & Exile, an entire disc of The Circle Maker, parts of Filmworks 8, and a third of the tracks on Bar Kokhba. They rock!


Zorn: I've tried to capture a sense of the intense and often conflicting emotions of the children while tying together the various stories by an intimate orchestration. Musically, there are only a couple of places that actually sound like the Masada String Trio as we know it (the music here being more composed and often layered), but the group chemistry is magical throughout.




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Filmworks 12: Three Documentaries

recorded 2002 ?
released August 2002
ONE DISC:   twenty-seven tracks, 61 minutes

The first of the three documentaries is Homecoming, Celebrating Twenty Years of Dance at PS 122, directed by Charles Dennis.

ZORN: For over twenty years, PS 122 has been an important East Village venue, and they've been supportive and enthusiastic about my work from the very beginning. For the soundtrack, I decided to create a wide variety of moods, textures, and rhythmic feels appropriate for dance. Three of them function almost like a set of etudes on early minimalism, a music I absorbed and even mimicked when I was a teenager in the late sixties/early seventies.

The six tracks are played by piano, organ, glass harmonica, and violin — except the first track, which is a wash of layered vocal harmonies. In an unusual twist, Zorn performs most of the music himself.

The second documentary is Shaolin Ulysses, directed by Mei-juin Chen and Martha Burr. It tells the story of Shaolin monks now living and teaching in the United States.

These 17 songs take up most of the CD. They are light, up-tempo pieces that combine Western guitar with Eastern rhythm and pipa.

ZORN: My feelings were that the film would be best served if the music enhanced not what was already on the screen, but what was behind it — the emotions the monks felt as they were thrown into what was for them very alien environments.

To capture their very special spirit I kept the instrumentation very intimate, interweaving Min Xiao-fen's pipa with Marc Ribot's acoustic guitar. One of the big blasts was hearing these two master musicians going at it head to head. The end result was more successful that I could have imagined, blending two very different cultures in a remarkably organic whole.


The third documentary is Family Found, directed by Emily Harris. It is the story of Morton Bartlett.

Zorn: For lack of a family, Bartlett literally created one in perfectly- proportioned half-life-size children's dolls which he dressed in handmade clothing, positioned with handmade props, and then skillfully photographed in a variety of settings.

I discovered his work at the Outsider Art Fair in New York in the mid 1990s, and was instantly hit by the startling combination of innocence and danger, so reminiscent of Joseph Cornell and Hans Bellmer.

With this music, I've tried to capture that sense of innocence, danger and longing that I find so compelling.

This album feels incomplete. A few tracks from each of the three documentaries stand out, while other tracks blend together. Each set of songs has a few recurring themes that seem to drain the life out of the music. (Especially Family Found, which is basically the same song repeated four times.)

Although it's packed with creative musical ideas, this CD doesn't have enough of a "grand design" to stand out. It's one of John Zorn's minor, subtle works. Compared to other albums, it's right in the middle. You'll be happy you heard it (five or six times), but it won't make your brain explode with delight.




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Filmworks 13: Invitation to a Suicide

recorded June 2002
released September 2002
ONE DISC:   eighteen tracks, 58 minutes

Invitation to a Suicide is an independent film written, directed, and produced by Loren Marsh. "In the tradition of absurdist black comedies like Fargo and Harold and Maude," it tells the story of Kaz Malek, a young guy who tries to tries to steal money from a mobster. He screws up and ends up owing the mobster $100,000. If he doesn't pay it back, his father will be killed.

Kaz comes up with a plan so crazy, it has to work (or entertain an audience as it backfires). He decides to sell tickets to his own suicide to raise the money to save his dad.

Zorn was hired to write the soundtrack. Loren Marsh wanted the music before editing began so he could cut the film to the score (instead fitting the score into a completed edit). Zorn was uncomfortable at first because the music didn't seem to go with the tone of the movie. But in the end, it worked as a counterpoint to the imagery — the Polish immigrant part of Brooklyn set to elegant, atmospheric jazz.

The result is one of John Zorn's best albums. After releasing over 80 albums since the early 1980s, you'd think his best work was behind him. But he's still perfecting his soundtrack style. On this CD, he re-arranges a handful of songs so carefully, you can't hear the repetition. Only after listening to the album over and over do you realize that he's taken the melody of a song, re-written it for a different instrument, changed the tempo, and given it a different name. This repetition pulls the songs closer together, making the album feel like a single piece of music.

ZORN: Conducting this music I experienced a special exhilaration reserved for what some might call "pivotal" moments. There have been quite a few in my life — finishing Lacrosse (one of my first game pieces) — the long week recording Spillane — writing the first hardcore piece for Naked City — in the studio with Kristallnacht — the first Masada concert — composing my violin concerto Contes de Fees.

These beautiful moments seem magical, perhaps divinely inspired. When we left the studio that night, everyone knew that something very special had happened. This music is not only one of my best film scores, it was one of those "moments."


Some of the tracks on this album are repeated in different arrangements. For example, Aftermath (track #17) is a repeat of Billet Doux (#7) and Invitation to a Suicide (#1), re-arranged for solo cello.

Getting Suicidal (#15) is a guitar version of Suicide Blues 1 (#8) and Suicide Blues 2 (#13).

Suicide Waltz (#2), The Suicide Kid (#6), Lonely Are the Dumb (#10), and Bugsy's Jazztet (#12) are all the same song in very different arrangements — accordion-led jazz ensemble, cello-led jazz ensemble, "country" guitar, and rock/jazz fusion (respectively).

The final track, Unjust Reward, is a high-speed punk version of one of the other songs. But I can't figure out which one.


ZORN: From the beginning I knew Rob Burger was going to be the lynch pin of the sound. I had heard him play with the Tin Hat Trio and was blown away by his floating sense of time, his lyricism and remarkable control of the subtlest nuances of tone and touch.

He can do it all — musette, tango, jazz, cajun, blues, but as with all masters he does it in his own unique way, with his own unique sound. This was the first time we had ever worked together, but he blended with musicians I've been working with for over a decade like he'd been there all along.


After I heard this album, I bought Rob Burger's Lost Photograph. It's part of the Radical Jewish Culture series on Tzadik.

It's great. He plays over a dozen instruments including accordion, toy piano, glockenspiel, pump organ, and chamberlin. He's accompanied by Greg Cohen on bass and Kenny Wollesen on percussion.



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Filmworks 14: Hiding and Seeking

recorded April 2003
released July 2003
ONE DISC:   twelve tracks, 54 minutes

If you're a big John Zorn fan, you can get jaded. You're used to buying his latest CD and hearing something that's unique, fast, crazy, and experimental. When Hiding and Seeking came out, I said, "Is that it? Is that all?"

The album is "only" beautiful, with a perfect blend of Jewish melodies and carefully-paced arrangements. Using four of his most reliable musicians (Marc Ribot, Kenny Wollesen, Trevor Dunn, and Cyro Baptista), Zorn has created another soundtrack in the vein of Filmworks 13 — these songs stand up on their own, without any obvious reference to the documentary for which they were written.

There are eight songs. Four of them we re-recorded with vocals added. As you listen, each of these light, klezmer-influenced songs builds and connects with the rest of the album. The band plays perfectly, drawing each melody together using the same tempo. It feels like a single piece of music.

This album isn't part of the Radical Jewish Culture series, but it might as well be. The songs fit the experimental theme of the series, reworking traditional Jewish scales into new arrangements, combining an old style with a modern sensibility. The old style has a feeling of introspection and ceremony to it, but the modern method of playing is irreverent and slick. The only real drawback to this album is the fact that the musicians never cut loose and explore the songs recklessly.


Zorn: This project came to me during a very busy period. It seemed like a fun and easy job so I suspended work on my new string quartet Necronomicon for a few days and knocked this one out.

Coming from a "Martin Denny in the Catskills" mold, I've fashioned an acoustic quartet of vibes, classical guitar, bass and hand percussion to perform several light and breezy themes evoking Jewish luck, Jewish pride, Jewish loss, and the Jewish lot.

The music was written in about two hours, recorded in one day, and mixed the next.

From the Tzadik web site:

Scored for classical guitar, vibraphone, Brazilian percussion, acoustic bass and voice, and performed by an all-star unit from Zorn’s exciting band Electric Masada, this is one of the most delightful additions to the popular Filmworks series. Also features backing vocalist from the Smokey and Miho/Cibo Mato groups, Ganda Suthivarakom.








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