Words matter. These are the best John Zorn Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When I’m writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I’m trying not to get in the way.
You know, when we were kids, we had to go to a theater to see a movie. And then television came in and you had to wait until midnight to see the one you wanted to see. Now, all you’ve got to do is go to a store and buy it and you can watch it whenever you want!
I run around, I listen to a lot of music, go to a lot of concerts. And when I see someone that gases me, I try to go out of my way to involve them somehow in what I’m doing or get involved in what they’re doing.
The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive.
As soon as you get a certain amount of attention, then everybody kinda wants to start taking pot shots at you. All your old friends that supported you don’t support you any more.
You can’t be idealistic in this world and not be crazy.
I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it’s not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out.
I don’t ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn’t work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who’s playing.
And I try to be as diplomatic as I can, but it always ends up being a psychodrama up there on stage.
Music is about people for me. It’s not about sounds. It’s about people; it’s about putting people into challenging situations. And for me, challenges are opportunities.
Like you have seven people with their hands up. I gotta make a choice. Y’know, that’s tough. Sometimes I gotta go with someone that has an idea and make several calls in a row, because they got an idea.
If someone is a straight jazzhead, or a straight metalhead, or straight classical, they have a very narrow range of what they allow into their lives. But the people who listen to what we put out into the world have to be open-minded. Because we’re so pluralist.
It’s a blast to watch. It’s a lot more interesting live than it is on record. I mean, it really is a theatrical event. It’s a sporting event! Cause you never know what’s gonna happen.
That’s where I began to ask questions that maybe don’t have one specific answer. And the more people you get answers from, the richer the environment becomes.
Eye was a great discovery. He is one of the great vocalists of all time.
Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don’t want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance.
Well, in Japan, I have got a group of musicians that I have worked with a lot, that concentrate just on the hardcore stuff, say, that Naked City has been working on. We have like a repertoire of sixty songs now.
No one sits in front of a drum set and thinks they invented it all out of whole cloth. The fact that the set is there means that you’ve got some dues to pay to Baby Dodds.
The magic that you find in surf music, I think, is really timeless. You know, when I was very young, I was in a surf band. Surf music is an instrumental music that still means a lot to me, not in an nostalgic way, but as something that really gets to the heart of the guitar itself.
I started the label Tzadik to support an entire community of musicians, not just Jewish musicians. But the radical Jewish culture movement was begun in a lot of ways because I wanted to take the idea that Jewish music equals ‘klezmer’ and expand it to, ‘Well, Jewish music could be a lot more than that.’
I’m getting ready to write a piece now, and it’s been six months thinking about it, changing the instrumentation, changing the name, doing more reading.
I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages.
I have about two or three people, we don’t have an office, we don’t even have a dedicated phone line. We do it out of our own homes, and we make it work.
Great musicians accept everything that they hear and find something good. They take what they like and they throw away what they don’t like.
For about seven years. I really like it there. There are a lot of great musicians. The scene is very open. A lot of stuff going on. People’s ears are really open, they are not closed. A lot of scenes here, people just get tunnel vision and are into one thing.
