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Apr. 29th, 2014 08:26 amIn my more or less annual tradition, I listened to John Zorn's Kristallnacht on Sunday in honor of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. I revisit it every year, gingerly and cautiously, because every year I find new depths to the music (See my Kristallnacht tag for posts on some past listens).
The piece is a forty minute long structured experimental jazz meditation on the Holocaust by Zorn, a downtown jazz and experimental classical musician who's been among my favorite musicians for quite a while. Its centerpiece is an eleven minute long movement called "Never Again", punctuated by high pitched squeals and by the incessant sound of broken glass. The CD's label warns that repeated listening to this movement can cause hearing damage. Not to be taken lightly.
Obviously we've talked about "Never Again" here recently in other contexts. "Never Again" is the motto of Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League, the terrorist group that has, in the context of preventing another Holocaust, assaulted and bombed Arab groups, Soviet groups, and others it considers enemies of the Jewish people.
It's hard to say what relationship Zorn is imputing between his music and the JDL. Zorn positioned Kristallnacht as one of the opening salvos of an intentional artistic movement he still calls (at least in marketing materials) "Radical Jewish Culture", which he has fostered through mentorship, releases on his Tzadik record label and performances at his Stone music space. In the two decades since Zorn initiated "Radical Jewish Culture", its manifestations have mostly been culturally radically, not politically radical. Female voices in mostly male spaces. Non-Jewish voices in mostly Jewish spaces. Atonal voices in mostly tonal spaces. If I'd had to define "Radical Jewish Culture"'s ideological concerns, I would talk mostly about its interest in portraying Judaism and Jewish life as a living culture in communication with the other cultures it lives beside. "Radical Jewish Culture"'s most radical idea is that Jewish music is not for the museum, but is still evolving as we watch. And yet...
And yet in its opening salvo we see Zorn as political provocateur, contextualizing Kristallnacht against not merely the classical history of the Holocaust but against its more radical reinterpretations. A later movement, set after the Holocaust and exploring Israel's struggles to assert itself against its neighbors, is titled "Barzel (Iron Fist)", and of course I made reference to this idea, also originally belonging to Kahane, in my stories.
As I paid close attention to Zorn's "Never Again", I had a weird back and forth. At first, it seems formless, the patter of broken glass slamming figuratively against your ear at random. Then, if you listen close enough, you start to hear patterns in the squeals and the shatters, or are you really hearing them? Maybe you're just imagining the patterns, maybe you're assigning meaning to something that is just random noise, possibly even computer generated noise. The shattered glass stops, several minutes in, pausing in silence for moments that stretch out with incredibly tension, and then it resumes again, maybe a little more structured this time. So you keep listening, and now you are starting to believe there's a plan behind it. Now you hear voices, the electronically distorted remixes of the Nazi speeches that infested the previous movement, degrading ever further in disturbing parody. Okay, these elements are clearly intentionally introduced, so we have further evidence of a dark and disturbing plan. Except you revisit it at the end of the eleven minutes and all you've heard is eleven minutes of incomprehensible noise.
Which is to say, among all the other things it does, "Never Again" induces a powerful examination of that core question of the Holocaust as systematic or senseless.
The piece is a forty minute long structured experimental jazz meditation on the Holocaust by Zorn, a downtown jazz and experimental classical musician who's been among my favorite musicians for quite a while. Its centerpiece is an eleven minute long movement called "Never Again", punctuated by high pitched squeals and by the incessant sound of broken glass. The CD's label warns that repeated listening to this movement can cause hearing damage. Not to be taken lightly.
Obviously we've talked about "Never Again" here recently in other contexts. "Never Again" is the motto of Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League, the terrorist group that has, in the context of preventing another Holocaust, assaulted and bombed Arab groups, Soviet groups, and others it considers enemies of the Jewish people.
It's hard to say what relationship Zorn is imputing between his music and the JDL. Zorn positioned Kristallnacht as one of the opening salvos of an intentional artistic movement he still calls (at least in marketing materials) "Radical Jewish Culture", which he has fostered through mentorship, releases on his Tzadik record label and performances at his Stone music space. In the two decades since Zorn initiated "Radical Jewish Culture", its manifestations have mostly been culturally radically, not politically radical. Female voices in mostly male spaces. Non-Jewish voices in mostly Jewish spaces. Atonal voices in mostly tonal spaces. If I'd had to define "Radical Jewish Culture"'s ideological concerns, I would talk mostly about its interest in portraying Judaism and Jewish life as a living culture in communication with the other cultures it lives beside. "Radical Jewish Culture"'s most radical idea is that Jewish music is not for the museum, but is still evolving as we watch. And yet...
And yet in its opening salvo we see Zorn as political provocateur, contextualizing Kristallnacht against not merely the classical history of the Holocaust but against its more radical reinterpretations. A later movement, set after the Holocaust and exploring Israel's struggles to assert itself against its neighbors, is titled "Barzel (Iron Fist)", and of course I made reference to this idea, also originally belonging to Kahane, in my stories.
As I paid close attention to Zorn's "Never Again", I had a weird back and forth. At first, it seems formless, the patter of broken glass slamming figuratively against your ear at random. Then, if you listen close enough, you start to hear patterns in the squeals and the shatters, or are you really hearing them? Maybe you're just imagining the patterns, maybe you're assigning meaning to something that is just random noise, possibly even computer generated noise. The shattered glass stops, several minutes in, pausing in silence for moments that stretch out with incredibly tension, and then it resumes again, maybe a little more structured this time. So you keep listening, and now you are starting to believe there's a plan behind it. Now you hear voices, the electronically distorted remixes of the Nazi speeches that infested the previous movement, degrading ever further in disturbing parody. Okay, these elements are clearly intentionally introduced, so we have further evidence of a dark and disturbing plan. Except you revisit it at the end of the eleven minutes and all you've heard is eleven minutes of incomprehensible noise.
Which is to say, among all the other things it does, "Never Again" induces a powerful examination of that core question of the Holocaust as systematic or senseless.
