Naked City

About

Naked City is an album by John Zorn, originally released on Nonesuch Records in 1990. The band which would become known under the same name included Zorn on alto saxophone with Bill Frisell on guitar, Wayne Horvitz on keyboard, Fred Frith on bass and Joey Baron on drum, and was established in 1988 as a "compositional workshop" to test the limitations of a rock band format. The album was rereleased as part of the box set Naked City: The Complete Studio Recordings on Zorn's Tzadik label in 2005. The Allmusic review by Scott Yanow awarded the album 5 stars stating "The stimulating music rewards repeated listenings by more open-minded listener." Jon Pareles observed in The New York Times that "Mr. Zorn doesn't bother with transition. While he and his musicians create every sudden textural shift themselve, without technological assistance, his guides are the splice, the jump cut, the video edit - not to mention the jack-in-the-box and its more sinister relatives in funhouses and horror movie. In his music, coherence is barely more than propinquity; one sound or style simply doesn't predict the next." Guy Peters stated "John Zorn’s Naked City-project was about the most far out you could get, and Zorn’s exploration of what he “could come up with given the limitations of the simple sax, guitar, keyboard, ba, drums-format” became the pinnacle of avant coolne... The result was a post-modern hybrid that cut up sequences as he saw fit and treated all genres equally: jazz, grindcore and country & western, were allowed to coexist, even in the same song." Christopher Thelen noted "While Naked City is certainly groundbreaking, it hardly is for everybody. The faint-hearted will be running for the exits before Zorn and crew can really get warmed up; purists of jazz, rock, and possibly even grindcore might consider the marriage of several styles of music sacrilegiou. Possibly. But for the rest of u, Naked City represents unbridled energy, passion and possibly even anger channeled into music. The resulting noise is sheer joy to those who get it, and sheer madness to those who don't." .

via Last.fm

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