“Tight as a drum and hot as a blowtorch, these two incredible live performances will leave you breathless. Hyde approach to the music.Ĭompare the quiet Abidan to the complex and brutal Metal Tov. The obi that goes with double-disc live album ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ puts it right: No surprise it was one of Zorn’s own groups: the allmighty Electric Masada, which took a Dr. 20’.Īlmost a decade before that, a rather extreme ensemble aimed at the Masada repertoire too. In 2013, Pat Metheny had a shot at taming Zorn’s ‘Book of Angels, Vol.
PETER BROTZMANN OCTET MACHINE GUN RYM SERIES
Masada is the name of a series of insanely versatile klezmer-inspired songbooks written by John Zorn. Versatile? Because these compositions have been interpreted by numerous bands and musicians, both within and outside of Zorn’s immediate entourage. They were released between 19, which raises another question: was 1959, when ‘Kind of Blue’ (Davis) and ‘The Shape of Jazz to Come’ (Ornette Coleman), iconoclastic statements in their own right, freed musicians from their harmonic and compositional straight jacket, the year when jazz became more epic?Įlectric Masada – ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (2005) Here’s a list of records that sound epic or cinematic to my ears, ordered counter-chronologically, honouring the unruly nature of many of these albums. Epic jazz unfolds its stories patiently, sometimes violently, and might deal with matters that transcend our understanding, such as time and space, inhuman suffering and superhuman achievements, … A timeless atmosphere or cinematic quality that oozes out of jazz’s most grand and often groundbreaking gestures. So what … is ‘epic’? It’s a feeling, a mood, certainly not a genre. But as Miles Davis would say: “So what.” He rewrote the rulebook more than once: most notably on modal jazz milestone ‘Kind of Blue’ (1959) and on the monumental – one might say epic – double album ‘Bitches Brew’ (1969), which paved the way for a cornucopia of fusions between jazz, rock, funk and world music. Think of a well-known Smiths melody and start scatting: “Some jazz is more epic than other.” It might not be one hundred procent correct grammatically.