Latin Quarter

John Zorn (alto sax), Bill Frisell (electric guitar), Wayne Horvitz (piano), Fred Frith (bass) and Joey Baron (drums). From the album Naked City (1990).

Naked City was an avant-garde band led by saxophonist and composer John Zorn. It played from 1988 to 1993 in New York and was conceived to check the limits of the composition and improvisation in a rock group. Their music included elements of grindcore, classical music, punk rock, jazz, progressive rock, country, surf, heavy metal and other genres. Their songs were extremely fast, like in hardcore punk and thrash metal, brief and changed musical genre every few bars.

Later they changed their style and performed music by modern classical composers such as Charles Ives, Alexander Scriabin, Olivier Messiaen and Claude Debussy. Their first album, Naked City, was the best received by critics and consists of 26 tracks, most of them less than 1 minute long, and whose content is simply complete madness. I’m only going to publish the four most extensive ones, which are the easiest to listen to.

The introduction is played by Horvitz and the main melody consists in the group making a round of call and response with Horvitz and another with Frissel, and they repeat it again. On the bridge Horvitz intervenes briefly, then Frissel and finally Zorn, and then the rhythm changes, first very slow and then fast in AABA structure. To make the solos they take turns playing several phrases using the traditional blues harmony. The first one is Horvitz, next Zorn enters with a squeal and then plays conventional jazz. He is followed by Frisell interpreting some rock phrases and Horvitz, Zorn and Frissel participate again successively, ending in a short collective improvisation. After that the band play the two rounds of call and response from the beginning as a riff and suddenly the rhythm becomes frenetic for a few moments. In this way, every few seconds the musicians take turns with different rhythms and musical styles. The riff comes back to give way to a collective improvisation on a friendly setting and the composition ends with a half riff.