Customer Reviews

John Zorn: FilmWorks: 1986-1990

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Never heard Zorn before, never heard his film music, and curious? This is the one best CD to buy. The music is great and it displays his strengths as a musician. He has a great ear for styles and can produce music in all of them, yet it's more than just mimicry, it's well made music with a strong core and a fine expression. He's an excellent alto player with great hard-bop chops and a nice, biting sound that comes right out of Jackie McLean. He also assembles great ensembles of musicians who have their own distinctive voices that benefit all the work. The music ranges from jazz to rock and beyond, never missing a beat, absolutey assured in everyway, constantly inventive and just great to listen to.

This was my first Zorn album. It is amazing. So many styles throughout the album. It really shows his strength as a musician and the deversity of his works. It is a lot easier to get into than some of his other works and I would recommend it to someone interested in checking him out. You get a little bit of everything, metal, jazz, country,classical and world music. Wonderful cd.

A strong, diverse first entry into his gigantic Film Works series finds the always-eclectic composer offering up an ultra diverse sampler from three of some of Zorn's earliest independent movie scorings. A few tracks are rough around the edges, but when that is not working in any piece's favor, the seemingly unlimited wealth of talented players always working with our warped maestro still usually demands attention. Even if we are listening to a tired blues theme or a standard jazz progression, the variations on these themes remain interesting for the most part still to this day. Hitting a masterful stride with the horn-heavy third act, Zorn proves once again why he is one of the most versatile, edgy, and equipped composers working today.

"Film Works 1986 - 1990" is an anthology of early soundtrack work by John Zorn, collecting soundtracks for three short films and a rightly famous arrangement of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" together. These days, Zorn has been pumping out a couple or three soundtrack pieces a year, but in the '80s, he was still the duck call guy, and it's intriguing to see his soundtrack work when it was very new to him.

The results are actually, given Zorn's place at the time, remarkably mainstream in their sound. Mind you, this isn't exactly Top 40, but it's a lot less frantic or dense as much of his early work. Expertly performed by some of the best musicians New York City had to offer-- Robert Quine, Bill Frisell, Mark Dresser, Bobby Previte, Wayne Horvitz, David Shea, the list goes on-- Zorn coaxes together a stew that accepts all his musical interests. At it's best, the performances are exciting and diverse (the hardcore punk of the "Main Title" from "White and Lazy", smokey, deep groove guitar jazz on "Seduction", the inexplicable "Theme" from "The Golden Boat" are all good examples), quite frankly at it's worst, the pieces on here are a bit too backgroundish, nothing is really bad. Morricone's infuence sits pretty heavy here, but it is uniquely Zorn.

I tend to find myself preferring Zorn's more recent soundtrack work, where he's shed the Morricone sound and really come into his own, but this is certainly an intriguing and powerful record. Recommended.