Customer Reviews

John Zorn's Cobra: Tokyo Operations '94

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In his liner notes to this recording, Cobra composer John Zorn states "[t]here has never been a Cobra like this one", a wholly accurate assessment. Performed by a group of Japanese improvisers prompted (more on that in a minute) by Makigami Koichi on a mix of traditional Japanese and western instruments, this performance is something that is, as Zorn alluded to, wholly different.

For those who aren't familiar with Zorn's Game Pieces, I'll provide a brief explanation, although you can see a clip of a performance in A Bookshelf On Top Of The Sky, and I'd highly recommend finding a way to see this live rather than just hearing it on record, even if it is just the clip on the documentary, it'll make a lot more sense. Anyway, the deal is that a Game Piece sets up a set of rules for improvisation-- the prompter serves as communication broker for the musicians, changing the gears of the interaction based on feedback from the musicians.

So the question is, what makes this special or different? It's tough to say, but for whatever reason, the vocabulary brought in by the Japanese performers as opposed to those rooted in Western music creates an otherwise uncommon sense of cohesion to the project. One of my consistent complaints with the Game Pieces on record, particularly those like Cobra that are performed by large groups, is that the pieces don't sound like coherent statements because by and large the rules of the Game Piece change the improvisation in a way that, lacking the visual cues of the prompting, seems wholly random, even with musicians who are highly experienced in this sort of stuff. But for whatever reason, maybe it's the relative foreignness of the Japanese classical music experience to me that lowers my expectations of the interactions or the blend between East and West in the music, or maybe it's the experience of the musicians-- their culture, their training, or their work together, but for some reason, this record SOUNDS like a record. It makes the experience of listening to it gel a whole lot better.

Bottom line, "Cobra: Tokyo Operations" is a great performance, a powerful improvisation, and well worth the relative difficulty to dig it up. Recommended.