Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2005

MUSIC REVIEW

Radical Jewish Culture

John Zorn's Tzadik Label

By Ron Nachmann

Throughout his twenty-five-year career as a musician, producer and owner of the esteemed Tzadik record label, New York saxophonist and composer John Zorn has forged a hugely eclectic and uncompromising canon of music. Working with a global network of musicians to fold aspects of world music, cartoon soundtracks, and hardcore punk into an aesthetic based on the compositional freedom of jazz, Zorn has made his greatest contribution to Jewish music by questioning everything we think we know about it. What exactly is Jewish music? Is it klezmer, pop, or musique concrète? Is it music simply made by Jews, or is there an intrinsically Jewish musical aesthetic?

Radical Jewish Culture (RJC), a series of over 100 releases by artists selected by Zorn for Tzadik, both asks and answers these questions with each release. Yes, it's klezmer, but in keeping with the purest spirit of that music, it ignores boundaries in the purest spirit of that music—which itself blends gypsy music, Eastern European folk, and American jazz, among other influences. Listen to clarinetist David Krakaur's daring RJC album Klezmer Madness, and you hear tradition expanded in the most imaginative of ways.

Yes, it's also simply music made by Jews. The RJC series itself contains a sub-series of tribute albums called Great Jewish Music. Those albums mostly spotlight popular songwriters like American pop icon Burt Bacharach, French chanteur Serge Gainsbourg, and English glam-rocker Marc Bolan (of T. Rex) (whose Jewish identity has been largely invisible) with covers of their songs by Tzadik artists and other associated Jewish avant-garde and punk musicians.

And yes, Zorn seems to say that there exists an intrinsically Jewish musical aesthetic, one that above all values confrontation, risk, and diversity. Zorn fleshed out the RJC agenda in 1993 with his own provocatively themed album Kristallnacht, named after the night of Nazi attacks on German Jews in 1938 that catalyzed the Final Solution. Alongside the album's dogged, jazz-rooted avantklezmer stood the terrifying twelve-minute piece "Never Again," a sound interpretation of Kristallnacht itself. Building on both incidental human sounds (Jewish liturgical singing, a solitary bell ringing) and the overwhelming white noise created by layered recordings of screams and broken glass, Zorn viscerally represents a moment of Jewish life being swallowed up by terror.

Over the last decade, RJC has proven a hugely eclectic series, encompassing everything from the compelling noise of ritual percussionist Z'ev, the Cuban-Jewish jazz of Roberto Rodriguez, the Jewish reggae of David Gould, and the Sephardic and Arabic folk textures of Pharoah's Daughter.

RJC also includes releases by Zorn's dynamic avant-klezmer quartet, Masada, which he surrounds with references to an uncompromising and iconoclastic sense of Judaism. Each album in the Masada series is dedicated to Asher Ginsburg, also known as Achad Ha'am, the early twentieth-century cultural Zionist who broke from mainstream Zionism. Masada's music, which injects klezmer's richness with a bold, free-jazz spirit, typifies the depth of RJC's musical ideology.

Radical Jewish Culture's daring and direct sense of sonic eclecticism reflects the kind of cultural trait that compelled Arthur Hertzberg to call the Jews "sophisticated bedouins." In fact, in Jews: The Essence and Character of a People, Hertzberg summarizes what might be the RJC manifesto: "Tidy categories that may work for other people do not fit the profile of the Jews—that is what makes us so interesting, and so unsettling to others."

Zorn has given various personal reasons for gradually embracing Jewish themes in his work, including his experience of anti-Semitism while traveling in Germany, the death of his father, and his realization that most of his musician friends are Jewish. But the effects of that embrace are equally important. By sincerely absorbing cultural Judaism into his life and work as a respected, radical jazz explorer in the post-punk era, Zorn has inspired a generation of Jewish postmodern culture workers to consider what Jewish music and, by extension, Jewish life means to them.

Can the politically progressive Jewish community as a whole take a daring cue from Zorn as his music carries our culture into the heart of the twenty-first century? Like most of the questions that Zorn's work raises, that question's tough—but not half as tough as Zorn's resolve to keep pushing himself and his fellow musicians forward as creators of gutsy, inspired Jewish music.

Music editor Ron Nachmann is a journalist, editor, and culture worker living in San Francisco.

Source Citation

Nachmann, Ron. 2005. Radical Jewish culture: John Zorn's Tzadik label. Tikkun 20(1):78.