John Zorn Plays Harry Smith

In the last 50 years, very few artists have been as boundless as John Zorn, from his ideas to his energy to his organization. After first emerging in the experimental Wild West of New York’s downtown scene in the ’70s, the span and scale of Zorn’s work have only seemed to increase over the intervening decades. From his breakthrough reinterpretations of Ennio Morricone and ground-breaking musical “games” like Cobra to his splenetic art-grindcore with Naked City, from his jazz-reorienting in Masada to his compositional gauntlets like Moonchild and Incerto, Zorn has packed several lifetimes of music-making into 72 years. He seems to have only grown more active and tireless of late. Zorn has also been a crucial catalyst for the development of experimental music, whether establishing his great Tzadik label or his New York space The Stone, or convening brilliant bands that otherwise might not have come into existence. After making his Big Ears debut in 2022 and celebrating his 70th birthday here in 2023, Zorn returns to Big Ears with a staggering cast of collaborators for two days at the Bijou Theatre.

At this point in the 21st century, Harry Smith is best known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, a landmark compendium of folk, cowboy, country, and blues songs recorded at the wild edges of American culture. Since its release nearly 75 years ago, it has inspired not only multiple folk resurrections but also expansions of what that term might mean. But like Zorn, Smith was a true New York polymath and polyglot whose complete interests lay far beyond the 78s he archived. A dedicated occultist whose understanding of magick was one of the presiding forces in his life, Smith was also an illustrator and avant-garde filmmaker whose legacy in cinema has only grown since he died in 1991. Smith’s often-silent films are early examples of psychedelic abstraction, with colorful and interlocking shapes moving rapidly across the screen, a dazzling light show of signs and sigils. Zorn first encountered these screenings as a New York teen frequenting underground arts spaces. On saxophone, he joins drummer Ches Smith, bassist Jorge Roeder, and electronics innovator Ikue Mori to improvise scores for a selection of Smith’s films. They explore the dazzling color show and spiritual framework within the works of one of America’s great exploratory minds.

Ensemble:

John Zorn

Ikue Mori

Jorge Roeder

Ches Smith