"Denio (rhymes with 'Ohio' or 'gennaio') is an internationally recognized record producer, composer, improviser, singer and multi-instrumentalist.
Her main instruments are voice, alto saxophone, clarinet, accordion, acoustic and electric guitars, electric bass, and theremin.

Awards
Denio created and produced the soundtrack for choreographer Pat Graney's piece 'Girl Gods', which was awarded two NYC Bessie Awards at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October 2016, including one for Best Overall Production.
In 2015 she was inducted into the Seattle Jazz Hall of Fame by Earshot Jazz.
In 1997 Denio received her first NYC Bessie Award for her soundtrack to choreographer David Dorfman's piece 'Sky Down'.
She received the Mayor's Award for Artistic Achievement from the City of Seattle in 1990.

Collaborator
Denio co-founded The Tiptons Sax Quartet and Drums (1988-present).
She has recorded many CDs and videos with Bosnian metal/punk/folk group Kultur Shock since 1999. They've toured internationally since 2002.
From 2006-2009 she composed for, recorded and toured with Austrian trio Die Resonanz Stanonczi.
She co-founded Ama Trio with Correo Aereo in 2004.
You can hear Denio's limpid voice as featured vocalist on A Beautiful Western Saddle (1993) and with The Science Group in 1999.

Denio has toured solo and has collaborated and recorded with various groups and musicians such as Matt Cameron, Bill Frisell, Chris Cutler, Guy Klucevsek, Pauline Oliveros, Tarik Abouzied, Francisco Lopez, Danny Barnes, the Relache Ensemble, Faust, Fred Frith, Hoppy Kamiyama, KMFDM, Il Parto delle Nuvole Pesanti, and Ronin. She played alto sax in the horn section of Chuck D's Fine Arts Militia at the Experience Music Project in Seattle.

Fellowships and Residencies
Denio has been awarded Fellowships from Artist Trust (Seattle, Westport Ireland) Seattle Arts Commission (Seattle) and Civitella Ranieri (Umbertide Italy). She was Rosencranz Artist In Residence at Mills College in Oakland, CA. In 2006-2007 the Dream Community in Taipei Taiwan commissioned Denio to arrange and produce a recording of Taiwanese indigenous and pop music with Samba rhythms, performed by 25 teenagers from the Amis Tribe who played samba drums particularly well. She entitled it Naruwan: Brazil meets Taiwan.

Film Composer
Kino Lorber commissioned Denio to compose a soundtrack for 'Daughter of the Law' written, produced and starring Grace Cunard in 1921 for their Women Film Makers / Women Composers series.
Denio scored 2 animated films by Thomas Edward ~ 'Pangaea's Brood' which won 'Best Animated Film' at the 1999 NY Underground Film Festival, and 'Synchrony in Estrus' which won 'Strangest Film' at the 2003 Motion Arts Festival in California.
She scored Jamie Hook's feature film 'The Naked Proof,' which received honourable mention at its premiere in the 2003 Seattle International Film Festival, and was voted 'Best Undistributed Film' by the Village Voice (NYC).

Film Maker
Denio loves making documentary films about her voyages.
Check out the Deniaural Youtube Channel

Founding Member
She's a founding member of The Tiptons Sax Quartet and Drums
(formerly Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet)
Ama Trio
Tone Dogs
Danubians
Pale Nudes
Lao Tse and The Entropics
and her Italian chamber/kitchen quintet Quintetto alla Busara.

Onboard
President of The Tiptons Sax Quartet and Drums, LLC
Vice President of Seattle Composers Alliance
Board member Kultur Shock, LLC

Selected Denio Commissions and Projects:
2017 Truth Is Up For Grabs
Denio composed music for 20 piece chamber orchestra for a multi-media event inspired by current events, poetry by Pablo Neruda and the political economy of war, which included projected images created by James Drage. Funded in part by 4Culture
2016 Pat Graney Dance Company: GIRL GODS
~ Denio composed and produced the soundtrack. Girl Gods received 2 NYC Bessie Awards in October, 2016, one for overall production.
2013-2015 Tiptons Sax Quartet: Mythunderstandings
~ Produced by Denio, a collaboration between her Tiptons Sax Quartet, Salish master musician Paul 'Che oke ten' Wagner, film maker Adam Sekuler, and directed by Lisa Halpern.
2010 Dan Hurlin and Dan Froot: Who's Hungry? Santa Monica
(funded by Meet the Composer)
2009 Sonic Bench
~ Denio's interactive public art on permanent exhibit at the Vashon Island Parks Department (Funded by Seattle Arts Commission and 4Culture)
2006 The Tiptons Sax Quartet and Drums: House of Wild Dreams
~ a collaboration between artist Danijel Zezelj, film maker Aric Mayer and the Tiptons (Funded by Seattle Arts Commission)
1999 The Danubians
~ a collaboration with Csaba Hajnoczy, Gabi Kenderesi, Pavel Fajt and AD, produced in Budapest, Hungary (funded by Arts Link/CEC International Partners)
1997 False Prophets or Dang Good Guessers
~ A collaboration with the Shaking Ray Levi Society, Jessica Lurie and AD (funded by King County Arts Commission)
1996 Pollo d'Oro
~ A collaboration with Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet and Ne Zhdali. Produced in Tallinn, Estonia (funded by Arts Link/CEC International Partners)
1992 Pat Graney Dance Company: Saxhouse
~ Performed by her all-women group The Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet (funded by National Endowment For the Arts)
Denio has received additional support from Washington State Arts Commission, Pew Charitable Trust, Arts International, as well as composition commissions from various philanthropists.

Other commissions include creating and producing compositions and recordings for Italian National Radio, the Berkeley Symphony, The New York Festival of Song, Relache Ensemble, the Austrian chamber octet Die Knodel, choreographers Victoria Marks, Aiko Kinoshita, Li Chiao-Ping, Cheronne Wong and Carla Barragan; multi-media performance group Run/Remain Ensemble, UMO Ensemble, The Cabiri, and choreographer/actor/clown Lorenzo Pickle.

Spoot Music
Home-taper since the Dark Ages of Analog, she started her label and publishing company Spoot Music in 1986, with the release of her first cassette, No Bones. Since then, she has recorded & released over 50 cassettes, LPs, CDs and short videos, created solo and with an array of international musicians.
Listen to her newest release, The Big Embrace, released in the Fall of 2017.

Teacher
Denio teaches at the Kultur Shock was the featured group at the Nilüfer Festival in Bursa Turkey, performing for more than 25,000 people."-Amy Denio Website (http://www.amydenio.com/body/Biography.htm)
11/29/2024

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"Chris Cochrane is a songwriter and guitarist who has been playing in New York since the 1980s.

Chris has played with Thurston Moore, Zeena Parkins, John Zorn, Marc Ribot, Billy Martin, Eszter Balint, Mike Patton, Henry Kaiser, Andrea Centazzo, Annie Gosfield, Tim Hodgkinson, Miguel Frasconi, Richard Buckner, Davey Williams, Ladonna Smith and Jim Pugliese. He has composed music for Dennis Cooper, John Jasperse, Neil Greenberg, Nayland Blake, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Jennifer Monson and Circus Amok. He was in the bands No Safety and Curlew, and is currently in Collapsible Shoulder with Brian Chase, Kato Hideki and Kevin Bud Jones and Bee Line with Billy Martin and Kato Hideki. He will be touring this summer with Marc Ribot's Young Philadelphians."

-Chris Cochrane Website (http://thechriscochrane.com/bio/)
11/29/2024

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"Thomas Henry Corra (September 14, 1953 - April 9, 1998), better known as Tom Cora, was an American cellist and composer, best known for his improvisational performances in the field of experimental jazz and rock. He recorded with John Zorn, Butch Morris, and The Ex, and was a member of Curlew, Third Person and Skeleton Crew.

Tom Cora was born in Yancey Mills, Virginia, United States. He made his musical debut as drummer on a local television program and in the mid-1970s he played guitar for a Washington, D.C. jazz club house band. He took up the cello while an undergraduate at the University of Virginia and studied with cellist Pablo Casals' student Luis Garcia-Renart and later with vibraphonist Karl Berger. During this time he formed his own group, The Moose Skowron Tuned Metal Ensemble and began constructing instruments for it.

In 1979 Cora moved to New York City where he worked with Shockabilly guitarist Eugene Chadbourne, introducing the cello to the honky tonk circuits of North America. He performed at improvising clubs and venues in New York with John Zorn, Fred Frith, Andrea Centazzo, Butch Morris, Wayne Horvitz, David Moss, Toshinori Kondo and others. Cora also collaborated with George Cartwright and Bill Laswell which led to the formation of the art rock band Curlew in 1979 . Cora remained with Curlew for over ten years and appeared on five of their albums.

In 1982 Tom Cora and Fred Frith formed Skeleton Crew, an improvising rock and jazz band best known for their live performances where they played various instruments simultaneously. Cora and Frith were each one-man bands on stage and for their act, Cora constructed musical contraptions he could play with his feet. The band existed for five years during which time they toured Europe, North America and Japan extensively. They made two studio albums, Learn to Talk (1984) and The Country of Blinds (1986), the latter with Zeena Parkins who had joined the band in 1984. In October 1983 Skeleton Crew joined Duck and Cover, a commission from the Berlin Jazz Festival, for a performance in West Berlin, followed by another in February 1984 in East Berlin.

Cora was also a member of the improvising trio Third Person, formed in 1990 as a live collaboration with percussionist Samm Bennett and a "third person" who changed from concert to concert. Two CDs of some of their performances were released, The Bends in 1991 (with "third persons" Don Byron, George Cartwright, Chris Cochrane, Nic Collins, Catherine Jauniaux, Myra Melford, Zeena Parkins, and Marc Ribot) and Luck Water in 1995 (with "third person" Kazutoki Umezu).

Cora performed with a number of other bands, including Nimal with Momo Rossel and post-rock quartet Roof. In 1990, he played two concerts with Dutch anarcho-punk band, The Ex, and the success of this collaboration resulted in Cora performing hundreds of concerts with The Ex and appearing on two of their CDs. In 1995 in The Netherlands, Cora and Frith collaborated, as Skeleton Crew, on Etymology, a CD-ROM sound sample library of sonic sounds and wire manipulations.

Tom Cora died of malignant melanoma at the age of 44 in a hospital in the south of France, where he lived with his wife, singer Catherine Jauniaux, and their son, Elia Corra."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Cora)
11/29/2024

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"Trumpet player Lesli Dalaba, a New York resident since 1978, was a member of Wayne Horvitz's, Elliott Sharp's and La Monte Young's ensembles. Despite keeping a low profile, throughout the 1980s she contributed to renovate the vocabulary of the instrument with a style that made the cerebral sound lyrical. Her first album, Trumpet Songs and Dances (march 1979 - Parachute, 1979), collected solos (Tanz Pesen, Barrytown) and duets (Two Up with Wayne Horvitz).

Relocating to Seattle in 1989, she joined Jeff Greinke's Land and in 1996 formed Radio Chongching.

Her recordings were rare and subdued. Dalaba Frith Glick-Rieman Kihlstedt (Accretions, 2003) was a collaboration with guitarist Fred Frith, pianist Eric Glick Rieman and violinist Carla Kihlstedt. The 13-minute Worm Anvils features some of Dalaba's most sophisticated counterpoint to the most fragile scaffolding as guitar, violin and piano conspire to weave ghostly drones and dissonances. After about eight minute, the 12-minute Shallow Weather creates enough structure from chaos to sound like a funereal fanfare. At the synergetic peak of their jam the four personalities are well defined, as Dalaba's sustained tones collide against Frith's dadaistic noises, Glick-Rieman's anemic notes and Kihlstedt's demented whistles in the 16-minute Ant Farm Morning.

Core Samples (Dossier, 1992) was the first major collection of her own compositions, mainly two multi-movement suites: Core Sample (1989), with two movements performed by the 10-piece Zlatne Ustne brass band (two alto saxophones, three baritone saxophones, a tuba, three Eastern European "truba" wooden trumpets and percussion), two duets with trumpeter Herb Robertson, two duets with guitarist Elliott Sharp and vocalist Sussan Deihim; and Violin Sentiment (1989), with Sharp, violinist Jim Katzin and a drummer.

Zahir (Endless, 2002) was a trio with Bill Horist on guitar and Randall Dunn on sax and keyboards, and the album collects material recorded in 1999.

Timelines (Tzadik, 2004), featuring Zeena Parkins on harp, Amy Denio on vocals, Ikue Mori on keyboards, Carla Kihlstedt on violin, was another suite, but this time also a full-blown concept album dedicated to the history of the world. The quintet of veteran female players crafts abstract instrumental interplays that challenge the dogmas of both jazz jamming and classical chamber music. The spirited performance reinvents music as both a cathartic experience and a social experience.

Lung Tree (january 2004 - ReR, 2005) is a set of nine compositions/improvisations with Eric-Glick Rieman on prepared piano, Lesli Dalaba on trumpet and Stuart Dempster on trombone. The music is puntillistic but not overtly abstract. Emotions surface from the shy, sparse, subdued interchange of the trio. The pieces are a display of slow-motion and subliminal elegance. Most of them are sleepy elegies caught in the interplay between trumpet and trombone, such as the delicate droning and wailing of The Dock-Red Ice and Walking Ruminations, and especially Bed Shadows into Sleep, each of them littered with metallic piano noises. This paradigm culminates in the light trumpet and trombone drones of Morning Light Through the Smokestacks, the most abstract and otherworldly track, although towards the end the trumpet begins to "sing" a real song. A flickering melody is also drowned in the jelly of overtones of Waking by the Refinery. Two of the pieces are significantly different in spirit. Timbral Shift 10/ Coward's Line/Lobby Bar unfolds a series of non-musical dissonant staccato notes. The frantic piano metamorphoses of Dissolution and Redemption Animals (besides being infinitely more energetic than the rest) produces an angular melody out of what initially appears to be a mathematical game. Talking into the Wind closes the album in a somewhat desolate and depressed tone."

-Scaruffi (https://www.scaruffi.com/avant/dalaba.html)
11/29/2024

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"Though the point of reference for many remains the iconic band Henry Cow, which he co-founded in 1968 and which broke up more than 30 years ago, Fred Frith has never really stood still for an instant.

In bands such as Art Bears, Massacre, Skeleton Crew, Keep the Dog, Tense Serenity, the Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, Eye to Ear, and most recently Cosa Brava, he has always held true to his roots in rock and folk music, while exploring influences that range from the literary works of Eduardo Galeano to the art installations of Cornelia Parker.

The release of the seminal Guitar Solos in 1974 enabled him to simultaneously carve out a place for himself in the international improvised music scene, not only as an acclaimed solo performer but in the company of artists as diverse as Han Bennink, Chris Cutler, Jean-Pierre Drouet, Evelyn Glennie, Ikue Mori, Louis Sclavis, Stevie Wishart, Wu Fei, Camel Zekri, John Zorn, and scores of others.

He has also developed a personal compositional language in works written for Arditti Quartet, Asko Ensemble, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Ensemble Modern, Concerto Köln, and ROVA Sax Quartet, for example. Fred has been active as a composer for dance since the early 1980s, working with choreographers Bebe Miller, François Verret, and especially long-time collaborator and friend Amanda Miller, with whom he has created a compelling body of work over the last twenty years.

His film soundtracks (for award-winning films like Thomas Riedelsheimer's Rivers and Tides and Touch the Sound, Peter Mettler's Gambling, Gods, and LSD, and Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow's Thirst, to name a few) won him a lifetime achievement award from Prague's "Music on Film, Film on Music" Festival (MOFFOM) in 2007. The following year he received Italy's Demetrio Stratos Prize (previously given to Diamanda Galas and Meredith Monk) for his life's work in experimental music, and in 2010 was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Huddersfield in his home county of Yorkshire.

Fred currently teaches in the Music Department at Mills College in Oakland, California (renowned for over fifty years as the epicenter of the American experimental tradition), and in the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland."

-Fred Frith Website (http://www.fredfrith.com/biography.html)
11/29/2024

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"Gerry Hemingway has led a number of quartet and quintets since the mid 1980's. In addition he has been a member of a wide array of long standing collaborative groups including Brew with Reggie Workman and Miya Masaoka, the GRH trio with Georg Graewe and Ernst Reijseger, the WHO trio with Michel Wintsch and Bänz Oester, as well as numerous duo projects with Thomas Lehn, John Butcher, Ellery Eskelin, Marilyn Crispell, and others. Mr. Hemingway is a Guggenheim fellow and has received numerous commissions for chamber and orchestral works as well as being noted for his innovative and multifaceted work as a solo performer which began in 1974. He was a member of the Anthony Braxton Quartet between 1983 and 1994 and is also well known for his collaborations with some of the world's most outstanding improvisers and composers including Evan Parker, Cecil Taylor, Mark Dresser, Anthony Davis, Derek Bailey, Leo Smith and many others. He currently lives in Switzerland having joined the faculty of the Hochschule Luzern in 2009."

-Gerry Hemingway Website (http://www.gerryhemingway.com)
11/29/2024

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"Wayne Horvitz is a composer, pianist and electronic musician who has performed extensively throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. He is the leader of the Gravitas Quartet, Sweeter Than the Day, Zony Mash, The Four plus One Ensemble and co-founder of the New York Composers Orchestra. He has performed and collaborated with Bill Frisell, Butch Morris, John Zorn, George Lewis, Robin Holcomb, Fred Frith, Julian Priester, Michael Shrieve and Carla Bley, among others. Commissioners include the NEA, Meet the Composer, Kronos String Quartet, Seattle Chamber Players, BAM, and Earshot Jazz. Collaborators include Paul Taylor, Liz Lerman, Bill Irwin and Gus Van Sant. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including two MAP grants and the NEA American Masterpiece award. Recent compositions include The Heartsong of Charging Elk based on the novel by James Welch and 55: Music and Dance in Concrete: a site-specific collaboration with dancer Yukio Suzuki and video artist Yohei Saito. He is the music programmer for The Royal Room, a performance venue in Seattle, Washington, and a professor of composition at the Cornish College of the Arts."

-Wayne Horvitz Website (http://www.waynehorvitz.com/about/)
11/29/2024

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"Catherine Jauniaux is a Belgian avant-garde singer. She has been described as a "one-woman-orchestra", a "human sampler", and "one of the best kept secrets in the world of improvised music". Her solo album, Fluvial (1983) is regarded as one of her most accomplished works. She was married to the late American experimental cellist and composer Tom Cora.

Catherine Jauniaux began her career as an actress in Belgium at the age of 15. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, she sang with several experimental rock groups, including Aksak Maboul and The Work. In 1983 she teamed up with The Work's Tim Hodgkinson (ex-Henry Cow) in London to record her first solo album, Fluvial. Jauniaux and Hodgkinson wrote most of the tracks for the album, which are "imagined folk songs" that include elements of "contemporary art song, African singing, Native American legends, and alien nursery rhymes". The album centres on Jauniaux's voice with additional instrumentation by Hodgkinson, Bill Gilonis (The Work), Lindsay Cooper (ex-Henry Cow) and Georgie Born (ex-Henry Cow). AllMusic rated the album as "highly recommended, especially to fans of unusual female vocal art."

In the early 1990s, Jauniaux moved to New York City, where she became part of the Downtown music scene, performing with a number of musicians, including Fred Frith, Tom Cora, Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins, Butch Morris and Ikue Mori. Jauniaux founded the duo Vibraslaps with Ikue Mori and later married Tom Cora. In 1995 Jauniaux and Cora moved to Southern France where she continued performing with various European musicians, including Louis Sclavis, Heiner Goebbels, Otomo Yoshihide and Christian Marclay. Cora died in 1998.

Jauniaux works regularly with artists in the field of dance and film, and sang in Heiner Goebbels's opera, Roemische Hunde in Frankfurt in 1991. She is inspired by traditional music, both real and imagined, and her performances mix seriousness and humour. She explores sound, emotion, melody and abstraction, and her vocal improvisations range from "traditional French chansons to breathy folk to Dadaistic glossolalia"."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Jauniaux)
11/29/2024

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"Multi-instrumentalist/composer/improviser, Zeena Parkins, pioneer of contemporary harp practice and performance, reimagines the instrument as a "sound machine of limitless capacity." Parkins has built three versions of her one-of-a-kind electric harp and has extended the language of the acoustic harp with the inventive use of unusual playing techniques, preparations, and layers of electronic processing.

Inspired and connected to visual arts, dance, film, and history, Zeena follows a unique path in creating her compositional works. Through blending and morphing of both real and imagined instruments, crafting, recombining, and layering mangled, sliced, massaged or possibly disengaged sounds, drawing from extra-musical sources for unusual scoring and formal constructions as well as utilizing multi-speaker environments, Zeena remains in process with sound as material and music, engaged in translations of sonic states in the concert hall, the black box theater, the dance studio, the recording studio, the classroom, the cinema, the skyscraper, the ocean and the gallery. Zeena has a particularly strong commitment to making scores for dance and continues to re-evaluate the nature and issues of the body's imprint on sound and sound/music's imprint on movement.

Parkins's compositions have been commissioned by NeXtWorks Ensemble, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Roulette Intermedium, The Eclipse Quartet, William Winant, Bang on a Can, The Whitney Museum, The Tate Modern, Montalvo Arts Center, The Donaueschinger Musiktage and Sudwestrundfunk/SWR.

Parkins has released four solo records featuring her electric and acoustic harp playing and has released her compositions and band projects on six Tzadik recordings, with a new Tzadik CD with Ikue Mori and Phantom Orchard Orchestra, Trouble in Paradise, to be released in November 2012. As a sought-after collaborator Zeena has worked with: Fred Frith, Björk, Ikue Mori, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Maja Ratkje, Hild Sofie Tafjord, John Zorn, Butch Morris, Chris Cutler, Elliott Sharp, Nels Cline, Alex Cline, William Winant, Anthony Braxton, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Christian Marclay, Matmos, Yasunao Tone, So Percussion, Bobby Previte, Carla Kilhstedt, Tin Hat, James Fei, Kim Gordon, Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore.

Awards: The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship, NYFA Music Fellowship, Meet the Composer Commission, NYSCA Composer Commission, Multi-Arts Production Fund Grant, American Music Center, BAFTA award for best interactive media with visual artist Mandy McIntosh and sound artist Kaffe Matthews, Peter S. Reed Fellowship, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust Commissions, Arts International, Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention for Phantom Orchard in the Digital Music category.

Curatorial: Guest curator for The Music Unlimited Festival in Wels, Austria, co-curator of the Movement Research Festival: Sidewinder, in NYC and curator for a month + a week of shows at The Stone in NYC

Residencies: Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, Oxford University, Harvestworks, Steim, Paf: Performing Arts Forum, Wooda Arts Residency, Montalvo Arts Center, RPI/iEAR and The Watermill Center.

Teaching: Zeena has given lectures at Oxford and Princeton Universities and has taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Bard and Mills College. Currently, Zeena is a Distinguished Visiting Professor, at Mills College Graduate Music Department."

-Zeena Parkins Website (http://www.zeenaparkins.com/about.html)
11/29/2024

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"John Zorn (born September 2, 1953) is an American composer, arranger, producer, saxophonist, and multi-instrumentalist with hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, and producer across a variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, surf, metal, klezmer, soundtrack, ambient, and improvised music. He incorporates diverse styles in his compositions which he identifies as avant-garde or experimental. Zorn was described by Down Beat as "one of our most important composers".

Zorn established himself within the New York City downtown music movement in the mid-1970s performing with musicians across the sonic spectrum and developing experimental methods of composing new music. After releasing albums on several independent US and European labels, Zorn signed with Elektra Nonesuch and received wide acclaim with the release of The Big Gundown, an album reworking the compositions of Ennio Morricone. He attracted further attention worldwide with the release of Spillane in 1987, and Naked City in 1989. After spending almost a decade travelling between Japan and the US he made New York his permanent base and established his own record label, Tzadik, in the mid-1990s.

Tzadik enabled Zorn to maintain independence from the mainstream music industry and ensured the continued availability of his growing catalog of recordings, allowing him to prolifically record and release new material, issuing several new albums each year, as well as promoting the work of many other musicians. Zorn has led the hardcore bands Naked City and Painkiller, the klezmer/free jazz-influenced quartet Masada, composed over 600 pieces as part of the Masada Songbooks that have been performed by an array of groups, composed concert music for classical ensembles and orchestras, and produced music for opera, sound installations, film and documentary. Zorn has undertaken many tours of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, often performing at festivals with many other musicians and ensembles that perform his diverse output.

Zorn's compositions cross many genres and he has stated "All the various styles are organically connected to one another. I'm an additive person-the entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so obsessed with the surface that they can't see the connections, but they are there." For Zorn "Composing is more than just imagining music-it's knowing how to communicate it to musicians. And you don't give an improviser music that's completely written out, or ask a classical musician to improvise. I'm interested in speaking to musicians in their own languages, on their own terms, and in bringing out the best in what they do. To challenge them and excite them." "

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Zorn)
11/29/2024

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