Naked City
The Complete Studio Recordings[Tzadik; 2005]
Rating: 8.5
If you check out every musician that Naked City ever thanked, covered or paid tribute to, you'll discover Ives, Messiaen, Debussy, Morricone, Mancini, John Barry, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus ("on Candid"), Eric Dolphy, Tony Williams' Lifetime, Live Skull, Blind Idiot God, Napalm Death, the Boredoms, Hüsker Dü, Derek Bailey, Larry Ochs, Carole King, Morton Feldman, and Funkadelic.
But nobody outside of music school gearhead bands says they're influenced by Naked City.
Over a decade since their breakup, Naked City still looms over composer and saxman John Zorn's catalog. Yet compared to his other major working band, Masada, Naked City has remarkably little sway over Zorn's work now, and this box set-- which collects all seven of the group's albums, released between 1989 to 1993-- forms a puzzling legacy. Masada produced a songbook that Zorn has exploited across two dozen records; a chunk of Naked City's material was covers, and the rest died with the band. Masada celebrates his immersion in his Jewish heritage; Naked City emerged at a time of hostility and deep stress in Zorn's life, and half the album covers showed corpses and body parts.
Most people know Naked City from their only American release, the self-titled debut on Nonesuch. Every time I move into a new place-- even before I cart in the boxes-- I set up a stereo and blast that LP in the living room: It cleans out the evil spirits and even clears out bad smells. On Naked City, Zorn introduced an amped-up surf/lounge/punk band featuring downtown New York's biggest talents, who blast and din through the "James Bond" theme song, the theme to Chinatown, and a sound portrait of New Orleans' Latin Quarter-- and then right when they slip into a groove, out of nowhere, the band launches punishing blasts of noise and catastrophe, flaming wreckage that blows up and collapses on a dime.
The vigorous rhythm section of Fred Frith on bass and Zorn's cerebellum, Joey Baron on drums, backed Wayne Horvitz and Bill Frisell on keys and guitar, genre chameleons who each brought a sonic bestiary to Zorn's arrangements. (The band is almost unthinkable without a guitarist as unique yet accommodating as Frisell.) And sharing the frontline with Zorn's own nasal alto sax squalls was part-time sixth member Yamatsuka Eye of the Boredoms, the star vocalist who brought a thousand screams to the hardcore tracks. For a fun art exercise, try to sketch what the inside of Eye's throat must look like based only on how it sounds. Don't cheat!
But Naked City the band differs from Naked City as a conceptual project, and over their next few albums Zorn pulled them into every possible direction. Following the band in the early 90s meant chasing down Japanese imports that grew more unpredictable and withdrawn over time, and rather than building on the band's successes, the discs felt like a bank of unconnected lab experiments that were each searching for the biggest bang.
For example, on Heretic, they broke off into duets and trios to perform short freely improvisations. It's their weakest effort, because most of the guys understood free improv but weren't really in love with it. (The best cuts are Zorn's duets with Eye, including "Here Come the 7,000 Frogs".) The one long piece on Leng Tch'e features droning guitar tones that run at excruciating/ecstatic durations, pulling the flesh of your chest until Zorn and Eye come in to twist your nipples. And Absinthe, their final disc, is a haunted palace of distant ambient pieces that turn the players into unrecognizable clouds of sound: chains drag and long tones ring out of the mist, in passages that are so spring-wound and intentionless that you wonder if the instruments are groaning while the band has left the building.
Grand Guignol, the band's masterpiece, comes in three sections, separated like wings of a museum. The title piece opens the album with a seventeen-minute creepshow of menacing sounds and flashes of violence; in the middle section, Zorn pays homage to modern composers like Ives, Scriabin, and Messiaen; and that's followed, as if because shit just got too quiet, by 34 cuts of their patented "thrash jazz."
Zorn's trademark move involved juxtaposing unrelated styles at breakneck speed, an effect often compared to spinning a radio dial. (See "Speedfreaks" for the best example and "N. Y. Flat Top Box" for the funniest.) In concert, these hardcore minatures drove crowds into the mosh pit, but the studio reveals that these were meticulous compositions. The genius of putting thrash jazz pieces on Grand Guignol actually wasn't to contrast them with the contemporary classical pieces; it was to compare them and highlight their meticulous construction-- even as the performers hammer them out with a bloodthirst. Zorn was making post-modern art with the release of a primal scream.
Radio, the second to last album, almost brought them back full circle to their debut; it starts out sleek and cool like a 60s Cali car chase movie, before it comes unglued in the second half in a metal/punk/funk pastiche. It's intriguing, but it's also clinical: The kitsch is studious, and even on tunes like "Surfer Girl" and "Party Girl", the band sounds like they can't take off because they're waiting for a cue to switch to something else.
That record also marks the point where Naked City wore out its greatest trick: Zorn crossed the ideas on paper, but he no longer synthesized them in action. Ten years after these albums, critics and fans are still shocked when a jazz artist makes an unexpected album-- for example, when Matthew Shipp uses beats and samples, or Cecil Taylor gigs with Thurston Moore. These transgressions look minor next to Zorn's, but the artists can surprise us because they defy our expections of them: they built an identity, and the diversions have meaning. Zorn had worn out that option. Nothing that Naked City could do-- bluegrass, Mexicali, opera-- would have surprised anyone. As an artist, Zorn had turned into a radio.
Although the chilly detachment of Absinthe actually made their last album more effective, it's easy to believe they were out of juice, and aside from a few reunion gigs, that was the end of the band. Naked City will always be Zorn's "coolest" project, the best vehicle for his early ideas, and one of the most intriguing ensembles its members ever joined. And now, Zorn can inter it in a single box and once again set it aside.
-Chris Dahlen, January 20, 2005
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