John Zorn's early reputation as a fearsome avant-garde jazzer still precedes him. Since he is many other things, this undoubtedly drives him nuts. But his scalding concert to open the Barbican Jazz 2000 season overturned all narrow views of his talents.
The gig was a triple-header. The Masada String Trio began, with the lilting, softly insinuating Yiddisher dance-music themes Zorn has adopted in the 90s. These were beautifully expressed by violinist Mark Feldman, who can play the instrument on his lap like a jazz guitar, or produce stomping riff-packed solos like a hoe-down fiddler. His technique makes the most passing sound sing. The material mixed explosive Ornette Coleman-like pieces (Coleman, John Cage, Anthony Braxton and Derek Bailey are the self-taught Zorn's big influences) with mellifluousness. Dense melo- dies tumbled with notes separated by sudden crash-stops. Feldman's exchanges with improvising cellist Erik Friedlander absorbingly fused jazz's rhythmic elasticity and classical music's sonorities. Bassist Greg Cohen was a rock and a gazelle in all three bands, sometimes both at once.
The second set, from the septet Bar Kokhba, brought some of the trio's material into contact with Latin rhythms, engagingly mingling the acoustic strings with Marc Ribot's twangy, 60s-surfer guitar. It often worked up a whooping clamour that brought the show an urgent intensity. Zorn lounged in a chair but the beseeching movements of his hands and fluttering of his fingers for tempo changes confirmed his presence in the music's shape.
The Masada quartet's finale was the killer. Though much of the material preserved the night's cultural references, Zorn's saxophone-playing revealed both tender lyricism and rawness (flat-out, he sometimes suggests the abstract multiphonics of UK virtuoso Evan Parker). His no-prisoners exchanges with Dave Douglas were astonishing: Douglas brilliantly combines free-music's looseness with bop trumpet's discipline, and he was contributing to a remarkable exposition of jazz at the limits. The music changed pace and shape so quickly that he took to playing out of the corner of his mouth so he could watch his mercurial partner at the same time.
Balancing chaos and order has long been Zorn's mission, and fans of his hellraising free-style might find his enthusiasm for strict rules contradictory. But he has always been prepared to alternate the worlds of "out" and "in" music, and this concert showed how creatively the two can come together. You would have to be a pretty strict improv-purist to insist it is nothing but a compromise to both.
