Alea Iacta Est is one of the most demanding and compositionally dense works in John Zorn’s already massive catalog. Released on his Tzadik Records label, it continues his late-career focus on chamber-jazz hybrids that blur the line between composition and improvisation.
Composed from 2020 to 2024, “Alea Iacta Est (The Die is Cast)” is one of Zorn’s most challenging masterworks—a complex and varied piano concerto that runs the gamut of moods, styles, and tempi. Performed brilliantly by four of the most trusted and passionate interpreters of his work—the trio of Brian Marsella, Jorge Roeder, Ches Smith, with guest star Sae Hashimoto on vibraphone on one track—this stunning new work is an essential piece of the Zorn puzzle. Astonishing!
Tag Archive: John Zorn
John Zorn’s Sing Me Now Asleep captures The Gnostic Trio — Bill Frisell, Kenny Wollesen, and Carol Emanuel — at their most delicate and inward-looking. Drawing on minimalism, early music and jazz, the album unfolds with a quiet assurance that favours space, texture and restraint over virtuosity. Sing Me Now Asleep is their first CD in over five years and not surprisingly it explores some unexpected new directions — notably two ambient-influenced pieces in the spirit of Zorn’s Absinthe and Redbird, and a dramatic long form composition in the style of his cinematic file card works. Enhanced by the moody electronics of Ikue Mori on one hypnotic track, this ninth CD in the legacy of The Gnostic Trio is their most gentle and soothing to date, and heralds a striking…
Written in the 1970s, Zorn’s earliest game pieces are legendary (often discussed and workshopped in secret but rarely performed in public) and Curling from 1978 is one of the most elusive and hermetic.
Focusing exclusively on long tones, it is quite unusual in Zorn’s canon-meditative, minimalist, and hypnotic.
Performing here are two ensembles from the Bay Area that have had close ties with Zorn for over forty years and are perfectly suited to execute this challenging and beautiful work.
This recording brings together two Bay Area ensembles with deep, decades-long ties to Zorn’s music: the Rova Saxophone Quartet and the William Winant Percussion Group.
The fourth CD in Zorn’s remarkable series of piano trio recordings exploring classical forms, Nocturnes is an absolute delight.
Preceded by Suite for Piano (2022), Ballades (2024), and the Impromptus (2025), Nocturnes is Zorn’s personal take on the beautiful tradition of night music. Touching on Chopin, Scriabin, Debussy, Berg, and more, the music is a wonderland of subtlety — dreamy, drifting, and utterly compelling. Brian, Jorge, and Ches, three of Zorn’s closest and most trusted collaborators perform with their trademark telepathic interplay, and an uncanny sense of surprise and creativity.
With a stunning virtuosity that is always at the service of the music, the trio opens up new doors with each successive recording.
This CD is about quality not quantity – less than thirty minutes in total, but absolutely some of the most incredible music Zorn has ever composed. Dramatic, intense, mercurial, challenging, and endlessly virtuosic, Zorn’s writing for strings is amongst the most exciting ever achieved in the classical world.
Here he expands the fabulous Jack Quartet to a quintet and sextet with the addition of two of the most accomplished musicians in the New York scene: Yura Lee and Michael Nicolas. Composed in 2020, during the initial months of the Covid-19 lockdown, these are two of Zorn’s greatest masterpieces, beautifully recorded at Oktaven by Ryan Streber, and passionately performed by six members of Zorn’s inner circle.
Friends and colleagues for over 25 years, John Zorn and Dave Lombardo are two of the most uncompromising and powerful musical visionaries in modern music and Memories, Dreams and Reflections presents these two extreme virtuosos in an exciting session of pure improvisation.
Drum shaman Dave Lombardo and renegade sax alchemist Zorn are at their freewheeling best here and their connection has never been tighter.
Intense, telepathic, filled with love, surprise, respect, and an insatiable curiosity, this is an unexpected but inevitable meeting of two old friends who are also two modern musical masters.
With “Suite for Piano” in 2022, Zorn began exploring classical forms in the context of the jazz piano trio.
The second CD in the series was a beautiful collection of “Ballades,” released in July 2024.
This third project presents nine Impromptus — freewheeling forms that unfold like brilliantly imaginative short stories.
Brian Marsella, Jorge Roeder, and Ches Smith outdo themselves here with telepathic interplay, endless creativity, and a courageous ability to go places that have never been discovered before.
With each new recording, this trio gets both tighter and more explorative.
John Zorn’s compositions for classical soloists with rhythm section are among the most successful and powerful meetings of classical and jazz ever conceived — completely notated virtuosic scores for classical players augmented by improvisers who illuminate the music with surprise, support, and an imaginative unpredictability.
Mining this magical world since 2010, the project reached its apotheosis in the acclaimed 2021 release Heaven and Earth Magick. Here that same quartet divides into different groupings to present a varied and dramatic program of new music at its complex, mischievous best. Joined by electronic wizard Ikue Mori on one track, Fantasma — Illusions from a Surrealist Mirror is an endlessly imaginative and compelling new…