Originally brought together in September 2015 to perform the Zorn Bagatelles, Julian Lage and Gyan Riley have become two of Zorn’s most trusted and soulful musical collaborators, having recorded over a dozen CDs of his compositions for acoustic guitars both in duo and in trio with Bill Frisell.
Seven Sonnets is their sixth CD together as a duo and the music is a lovely series of compositions referencing early music, minimalism, contemporary classical, soundtracks, folk, jazz, and more. Two of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed guitar virtuosos perform a beautiful book of original music inspired by the Sonnets of William Shakespeare. Volume One of Zorn’s musical Sonnets contains some of his loveliest and most intimate creations.
Tag Archive: Tzadik
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!
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…
Vadim Neselovskyi is a Brooklyn-based composer who teaches jazz piano at Boston’s Berklee, yet as Perseverantia shows, the ties to his native Ukraine remain strong (now 48, Neselovskyi left Ukraine at the age of 17). To that end, the recording, issued on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, coincides with the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion of his home country on February 24, 2022. Clocking in at 71 minutes, the work is an 11-movement suite of stylistically expansive character scored for piano and string trio. Neselovskyi himself performs on piano alongside the Netherlands-based Ysaÿe String Trio (Rada Ovcharova, violin; Emlyn Stam, viola; Willem Stam, cello). In honouring the ongoing struggles of the Ukrainian people, Perseverantia is a fitting follow-up to 2022’s…
Cruelty Bacchanal, the second release from guitarist Matt Hollenberg’s group Shardik, is a ferocious statement of intent. Years in the making and issued on John Zorn’s Tzadik label, the album presents a volatile and politically charged fusion of modern classical structure, metal intensity, and free jazz unpredictability.
Hollenberg’s compositions are marked by intricate rhythmic architecture and an uncompromising sonic vision, alternating between explosive virtuosity and dark, layered atmospheres.
Executed with surgical precision and blistering intensity, Hollenberg’s playing veers between soaring lyricism, dense harmonic structures and searing improvisation. The result is a tightly coiled set of compositions that challenge…
…Jim Staley on trombones, Ikue Mori on electronics, and John Zorn on alto saxophone.
Friends and musical cohorts since the early ’80s, these three master improvisers come together to perform a freewheeling set of outrageous and mind-blowing improvisations. Recorded at Roulette, founded in 1978 and one of New York’s most adventurous venues, the music is full of surprising twists and jumps from one mood to another with mercurial synchronicity. Dedicated to the memory of Downtown theatrical genius Richard Foreman, Alchemical Theatre presents nine pieces of telepathic, counter-intuitive New York improvisation by three legendary figures of the Downtown scene.
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.
Performing with veteran free improv percussionist William Winant, Zeena Parkins – probably one of the greatest living harpists – returns with a poetic, magickal set inspired by visual artist Jay DeFeo.
Always reliable, whether she’s working alone or with regular collaborators like Ikue Mori or Fred Frith, Parkins is an incredibly distinctive player. We can’t think of many other artists who can make an instrument like the harp sound so different and so open-ended. And playing against Winant’s microtonally-tuned set of bells and gongs she sounds fully refreshed, playfully following his resonant chimes with plucks and runs that skewer perceptions of the instrument. It’s almost too easy to label Modest of the Magic Thing as hypnotic, but Parkins has a way of casting…
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…