John Zorn – Spillane (1987)

I’m currently writing a piece for voice, three saxophones, synthesizer, drums and electric bass about a scientist in late-1980s Greenwich Village who accidentally turns himself into a monster, so I figured I should take a closer listen to this Zorn piece — both because it’s an actual example of the kind of music that inspired my choice of setting (it seemed like an obvious choice with that instrumentation), and because it’s a piece that engages in the kind of cultural archaeology and myth-making that I’ve been interested in for the past few years.  I’m not sure why I don’t know Zorn’s music better, honestly; he seems like the go-to guy for that kind of thing.  It’s probably just that the first piece I heard by him was Cat o’ Nine Tails: Tex Avery Directs the Marquis de Sade (1988), which is such an extreme exercise in fragmentation that I find it tiresome after about two minutes, and that gave me an unfair prejudice against him for a long time.

Spillane is a tribute to crime writer Mickey Spillane.  Everyone who talks about it mentions that it’s one of several Zorn pieces constructed using flash cards to guide improvisation — most of the performers involved come from the avant-jazz world — but I can’t find too much information about what’s actually written on the cards.  A handful of examples are reprinted in the CD liner notes, but they’re covered in handwritten annotations and scribbles, so I assume they’re early drafts.  Even if they hadn’t been edited, they’re so vague that Zorn must have given the musicians extensive instructions on how to interpret them.  I mean, I can imagine what a musician might do with “Free crazy VIOLENCE” or “gtr sonority echo space water,” but what about

“ROUTE 66
riding down
Sway
strings, drums”
?

Anyway, the result is essentially a long-form version of the Naked City formula — fragments of genre music, usually various types of jazz (Latin, bop, piano lounge, country blues, 70s neo-noir film score) — but occasionally doomy goth-rock (with churchbells!) or eerie electric chamber music, set off by bursts of wild, improvisatory noise.  I don’t know if “long-form” is really the right way to put it, since as far as I can tell the piece is basically formless, except that it ends on an atypically somber, drony, rainy, maybe even elegiac note.  It creates coherence not from a dramatic arc, but from the fact that all its elements evoke a particular cultural world — especially since they’re combined with sound effects:  gunshots, screams, snatches of hard-boiled dialogue.  And it works, too:  the piece never feels aimless or overlong, and it does succeed in creating an image of a world full of crime and hard-boiled men in fedoras.  Strangely, though, the piece sounds nothing like actual film-noir scores, which are usually in the breathless post-Wagnerian style typical of classic Hollywood.  Just as visions of the future always reveal more about the era they were created than the era they depict, Spillane is at least as much an 80s piece as a 50s piece.  It’s a myth of one era seen through the imagination of another.

The other thing that strikes me is how dependent the piece is on studio recording.  Not so much because of the sound effects, which are played on a sampling keyboard and could easily be done live, but because of the reverb.  Without that wet sound, the piece would be further removed from its genre sources, less sonically unified, and less dreamlike, and it wouldn’t be nearly as effective at conjuring up a noir reverie.  I also have a feeling that doing the piece live would dilute its impact simply because the audience would be looking at a bunch of musicians rather than sitting at home letting their imaginations run free.  In the liner notes, Zorn refers to Spillane and Godard (1986) as “aural cinema.”  One of the things I’ve been struggling with lately is trying to figure out the semantic function of the music in an artwork that includes both music and text and is based on cultural archetypes.  It’s particularly a problem for my mad-scientist piece, since there’s a vocalist who takes on the role of various media figures, which raises the question:  is the music a part of the TV and radio shows he hosts, or an external comment on it?  Doing a piece like Spillane as a studio album for home consumption goes a good way toward solving the problem by having the music simply be there, like a film score, rather than resulting from visible actions by visible people whose presence needs to be accounted for.