Grand Guignol

This is John Zorn's tribute to Grand Guignol, a theater and a theatrical form that thrived in Paris in the early decades of the 20th century. It created a style that depended on realistic makeup and grotesque violence to depict murder, rape, mutilation, and torture, to the delighted horror of its audience. A decidedly low form of public entertainment, it enjoyed its greatest popularity at the same time that France was home to the creation of modernist culture and the subtle beauties of French impressionism in music. That's a cultural contradiction--or perhaps an entranceway--that Zorn walks right into and explores on this CD with Naked City, a band that includes guitarist Bill Frisell, drummer Joey Baron, bassist Fred Frith, and keyboardist Wayne Horvitz--veterans of numerous projects in common--and the vocals of Yamatsuka Eye (of the acclaimed Boredoms).

Grand Guignol parallels the influence of cartoon composer Tex Avery on Zorn, whose penchant for oversized, exaggerated, even campy gestures is here given greater focus and intensity by Yamatsuka's curdling screams. Zorn joins this with his arrangements of a series of high modernist works by Debussy, Scriabin, Ives, and Messiaen, using an instrumentation of electric keyboards and guitars that lends them, among many other things, a low-budget, soundtrack quality. In a world where musicians often strive to be different in the same way, Zorn is a genuine original. The CD also includes 33 of the 42 tracks of Torture Garden--micropieces that fuse a host of genres from free jazz to ancient dance music by sheer violence. --Stuart Broomer