Customer Reviews

The Big Gundown: John Zorn Plays the Music of Ennio Morricone (15th Anniversary Edition

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I just recently took the plunge on this reissue of the Big Gundown, comparing it to my original Nonesuch CD, and the new one is a winner. The music is obviously the same, and great it still is, but I always regretted the thickness of sound and low-level mastering of the original CD. The reissue has cleaned, brightened and polished the sound to a much higher level, it blossoms immediately in the ears and is now superb. The additional tracks are a treat too, Chi Mai is one of Morricone's greatest and pithiest themes, although the manner of the new material is fairly straight-ahead. Also nice is the extensive liner notes, an addition from the original release and a departure for many other Tzadik-Zorn recordings. Zorn fans should go for this in an instant, as should the Zorn-curious. This is his single greatest and most important record.

Morricone fans, you should give this a try too! This will challenge your ears and your notions of one of your favorites, and that's a good thing. Zorn is always true both to the themes from the movies and the context of those movies, which is the most remarkable thing. But for those only used to straight renditions of the music, this CD will shock, because the music is put through a cut-and-paste technique that owes much to cartoon music, and a recontextualization that owes is all to a free-improvisation aesthetic. Don't let those ears and minds get flaccid, folks!

The first thing to note here is that this Tzadik reissue/remaster of John Zorn's Ennio Morricone tribute "The Big Gundown" genuinely sounds better that the original Nonesuch CD release. This is particularly noticeable on the more noise/cut-up oriented pieces like 'Metamorfosi' and the Zorn original 'Tre Nel 5000', where previously obscure sounds now stand out with alarming clarity. If this side of Zorn isn't to your liking, lusher tracks like 'Poverty (Once Upon A Time In America)' add more color-- Guy Klucevsek's accordion, Toots Thielmans' harmonica and pitch-perfect whistling-- to the extended pallette of Zorn's first cover project. The new liner notes are extensive to a fault, while the bonus tracks offer some new pleasures that really make this disc worth buying. The bonus tracks are not from the original sessions; they were recorded recently to flesh out the disc, but they're more than mere filler. 'Svegliatti & Uccidi' pairs Marc Ribot and Derek Bailey for a delightful jarring guitar excursion, while members of the Masada chamber ensembles (Ribot, Mark Feldman, Greg Cohen et al) tackle 'The Sicilian Clan' and 'Chi Mai' with real gusto. But for me, the highlight of this album remains the last track on the original release: Jody Harris and Robert Quine sculpting a towering wall of electric guitar pasta on the title piece from Sergio Leone's 'Once Upon A Time In The West.' An essential part of any Zorn collection. Now if only Tzadik would reissue the News For Lulu sessions....

One of the best albums in Zorn's catalog, "The Big Gundown" is a masterpiece augmented in this 15th anniversary edition with a number of new recordings. These are reinterpretations of Mooricone pieces (with one Zorn original) for various groups. The entire record is powerful and energetic, with breathtaking arrangements, brilliant performances, and a fire that had not been captured in Zorn's previous recordings. It is also probably his first true masterpiece.

I think in many ways, the opener and title track best illustrates the aesthetic on the record, if you don't like that one, you'll probably not care for the rest of it-- it covers a number of moods, being dark, haunting, theatrical, explosive and esoteric, sometimes all at once. This sort of theatrical mood extends across a number of songs, the haunting circular piano and percussion workout "Peur Sur la Ville" (with a blazing alto sax solo from Tim Berne), an the dark electric guitar workout take of "Once Upon a Time in the West", reduced a funereal pace.

But there are also many moments of delicate beauty as well-- take for instance "Poverty (Once Upon a Time in America)", with an unusual instrumentation of whistling, harmonica (both handled by Toots Theilman), harp and accordian. Particularly when the harmonica takes the melody, the support swells and embraces and holds on, expressing pain and loss and fear for the future. Or consider the brooding and yet someone still light "Giu la Testa (Duck You Sucker!)", building anticipation through its dark motifs and bizarre instrumentation (among others, the Japanese shamisen, english horn, acoustic guitar, gamecalls and keyboards).

The bonus tracks are no less essential-- Zorn brought in about everyone he played with for the originals, these were a chance to catch up. The amazing thing about Zorn is that as an arranger, he's lost none of his flair in the intervening years, in fact, he may have even gotten better. Zorn uses his "Bar Kokhba" sextet (the Masada String Trio augmented by guitarist Marc Ribot, drummer Joey Baron and percussionist Cyro Baptista) to great effect on breathtaking arrangements of "The Sicilian Clan" and "Chi Mai", and adds another great guitar workout feature with Ribot and Derek Bailey in a noisy, disjoint take of "Sveggliatti and Uccidi", but its Mike Patton's Tom growl on "The Ballad of Hank McCain" that is the gem of the material-- stunning delivery that really captures something special (and may be the best vocal Patton has ever done) over a delicate organ (Jamie Saft) and percussion (Baptista) backdrop that matches and perhaps outstrips the best of the original material.

This is essential music for Zorn fans, if you're not, this may well be a good place to start-- the music can be difficult, and it covers a ton of moods, but there is a lot to hear. Highly recommended.

Caca most certainly but not music!
What a poor excuse for it.
This is nothing more than noise! Definitely my top ten worst buys!
This would be equivalent to Industry's Bang A Can.....pure rubbish!!

Kudos to Diamanda for her composition of the vocal tracks on Metamorfosis. It is extremely powerful, her work.
How did Zorn get her to do this? She never collaborates,let alone giving him composer credit. She must have
thought he was a sweet guy. She is a tough cookie, I have heard.

Other reviewers have summed this album well enough that the only comment I'd like to add is that Zorn's version of "Poverty (Once Upon a Time in America)" is one of the most hauntingly beautiful tracks I have ever heard, and really does justice to the subtleties of the original score.

3 1/2

Marking a noticeable evolution in this radical composer's one-of-a-kind-career, 1984's early breakthrough interpretations of the spaghetti western king proved a worthy and memorable endeavor. Through Zorn's typically cracked lens Morricone's dusty constructs are given a whole new, usually quite darkened reworking. More traditional fans of these original compositions may initially be turned off with the expansive and distorted liberties taken to resurrect these themes (as compositionally sound as much of the recording is, of course this long album comes with quite a few unsettling, anti-musical audio adventures) but any Zorn fan would be remiss not to own what would start out a long tradition of these fractured, often rewarding tributes.

The only John Zorn I was familiar with before I got this was Spy vs. Spy. Being a Morricone fan (a fairly new one) I found this to be outstanding. I would reccomend buying "A Fist Full of Film Music" on Rhino before this though.

I find it hard to believe that the Mike Patton freaks out there haven't found this album and fallen all over themselves praising it in the reviews... Maybe Patton's other Tzadik work has been just too too alienating for the meshback scene, or maybe I'm just not reading all the reviews, but he turns in a great, great performance of "The Ballad of Hank McCain," the song that rolls with the titles at the end of MACHINE GUN MCCAIN, a tacky, brutal, and kind of entertaining Italian mobster movie from the 1970s that featured the rather interesting "package deal" cast of John Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands, and Peter Falk. Patton does it perfectly; I know no other singer who can sound absolutely sincere and utterly ironically covered in cheese at the same time and in the same way. It's only one track out of many on the disc, mind you -- one of the bonus cuts on this edition -- but I felt it deserved some extra praise (got to keep the meshbacks on the path). By the way, if no one mentioned it already, the bonus cuts were recorded with a different crew from the original albums, and feature more recent Zorn collaborators like Chris Speed, Jamie Saft, and Cyro Baptista. One of Zorn's most thoroughly likeable, listenable, and "important" discs. Why don't you own it already? (Meshback!).

Back in the mid-1980s, Zorn wrote new arrangements of Ennio Morricone's soundtrack music. He hired the best musicians to play the songs. Then, in 2000, he remastered the old album and filled out the disc with five more Morricone songs.

The result is CD that's all over the place, ranging from beautiful to ugly, from very complex to painfully simple. "Chi Mai," for example is a song you'll listen to over and over. It never gets old. But then there's "Metamorfosi," in which a woman howls and screams over the sound of slowly pounding drums.