DEOSTER | SHRINES | THE ZORN ZONE | Naked City

What is Naked City?

Naked City is a band formed by John Zorn around 1988 as a composition workshop based around the rock band format and the jazz, blues, and extreme punk and metal music that Zorn was interested in at the time.
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Before Naked City

Naked City came together, as mentioned previously, in large part as a "composition workshop" for Zorn. It was a place to explore and test new ideas within the limitations of a very classic band lineup. But these ideas didn't come out of nowhere—they emerged out of a set of influences and headspaces Zorn was already working with before the formation of Naked City proper. It's informative and interesting to take a look at some of these earlier works and highlight how they concur and how they differ with what Naked City would become, while, of course, not forgetting to take and appreciate them on their own unique individual merits.

Spillane, 1987

Is it accurate to put Spillane under the Naked City tent? Maybe not completely, but given the similar themes (jazz, crime, sleaze), similar composition methods (Zorn's "file-card" method of composition here is, I believe, a direct ancestor of Naked City's later affinity for the "flipping through radio stations" sound best exemplified in compositions like "Snagglepuss" and "Speedfreaks"), and a few shared players (Frisell, Horvitz), I think it's fair to consider Spillane a spiritual predecessor and stepping-stone to what would become Naked City.

Spy vs Spy, 1989

Spy vs Spy was a 1989 album that prefigured some of the work Zorn would go on to do with Naked City, especially the early emphasis Naked City on reinterpreting and reappropriating standards. Simply: Spy vs Spy is an album of Ornette Coleman tunes played really, really fast and really, really loud. It marks an early collision in Zorn's work between jazz and extreme punk and metal music—the liner notes thank Coleman and his son followed by a list of musicians from bands typically described with some aggressive sounding verb ending with -core. It doesn't have the compositional and improvisational complexity that later Naked City work would have, but it trades this in for a nonstop barrage of sound, impact, and action that I argue Naked City never reached in terms of sheer focused and single-minded intensity.
I will admit I feel a not-insignificant amount of guilt and shame in saying that I enjoy Spy vs Spy more than any individual Ornette Coleman project I've listened to so far. It feels a bit like saying you prefer the "Alvin and the Chipmunks" version of a song. But I have to be honest with myself, and, I suppose, as the John Zorn super-fan that I am, it makes a bit of sense. My favorite thing about Ornette Coleman are his melodies. Coleman writes these incredibly singular, unique melodies that hypnotize and bring me to life; they're spiralling and beautiful but somehow also perfectly naturalistic and rough and human. "Lonely Woman" is, of course, a standout, but I could name so many others. With that said, the soloing on his records, while fantastic, often just doesn't inflame me as much as the melodies do, and so I'm occasionally left just waiting around for the head to come back.
With Spy vs Spy, you never have to wait too long, and I suppose that's one of the things I love about it. You hear a fine tune, Zorn and pals spend rarely more than a minute trying to break through the boundaries of the recording with the sheer power, force, and desperation of their soloing, and then that same tune comes back again to reassure you that everything's going to be ok and that there's at least some order to this world before the track closes out. Repeat seventeen times, calming down just a little bit in the last third. I like that. I love that. It makes me feel alive.
The soloing does feel truly "desperate" sometimes. Spy vs Spy regularly achieves through its sheer intensity a type of musical moment I absolutely love and that is ordinarily quite difficult to earn. I adore when there's a certain amount of "sloppiness" or imperfection in a musical performance, but it's distinctly felt that this imperfection comes, not from laziness or lack of skill, but from the fact that the performance is pushing the players to their absolute limits. Brian Eno's famous quote about "the sound of failure" is relevant here. There was a video on YouTube—that I, tragically, cannot find again for the life of me—of this group rehearsing, and in it there's this great moment where either Joey Baron or Michael Vatcher says "I can't play this fast!" to which John Zorn replies, wonderfully, "don't worry, we can't either." This effect is pronounced in the track "Chronology"—the shortest and one of my favorites off this record—where the punk drum beat being played sounds almost entirely rhythmically disconnected from the lead melody line, in a way that suggests that the drummers are thinking "ah, fuck, I've lost the beat entirely. Let me just play some bullshit fast and hope it works." Of course, it was likely much more intentional than that, but I enjoy immensely the energy and effect that conceptualizing the performance in that way gives me.

Naked City Studio Discography

Naked City, 1990

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Torture Garden, 1990

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Grand Guignol, 1992

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Heretic, 1992

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Leng Tch'e, 1992

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Radio, 1993

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Absinthe, 1993

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Naked City Live Discography

Naked City Live, Vol. I: The Knitting Factory 1989, 2002

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