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" It's a matter of keeping people on a spontaneous edge. "
John Zorn
Spontaneous
Matter
Edge
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" I have about two or three people, we don't have an office, we don't even have a dedicated phone line. We do it out of our own homes, and we make it work. "
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" The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive. "
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Will
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" When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way. "
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Sometimes
Place
" It's a blast to watch. It's a lot more interesting live than it is on record. I mean, it really is a theatrical event. It's a sporting event! Cause you never know what's gonna happen. "
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" I don't control it at all. It's all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are. "
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" You can't be idealistic in this world and not be crazy. "
John Zorn
Crazy
World
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" Anything that gets in the way of my focus to create gets cut out of my life. It's not easy. Sometimes it's family. Sometimes it's friends. Sometimes it's the ability to have a relationship. "
John Zorn
Relationship
Family
Easy
" Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don't want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance. "
John Zorn
Preparation
Performance
Good
" I have not practiced saxophone since 1980. I mean, not one note. I do not pick it up in my house, and that's the end of it. "
John Zorn
End
Pick
House
" That is a lot of the reason I do what I do, to really spread the word and spread information and turn people onto different things they may not be, y'know, aware of. That is what Naked City is certainly about. "
John Zorn
City
People
Reason
" I'm constantly tortured, and that's why I say happiness is irrelevant. Happiness is for children and yuppies. "
John Zorn
Why
Children
Tortured
" I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing. "
John Zorn
Down
Work
Person
" Man, Dick Dale shreds. He's welcomed to anybody's bar mitzvah. "
John Zorn
He
Man
Bar Mitzvah
" Great musicians accept everything that they hear and find something good. They take what they like and they throw away what they don't like. "
John Zorn
Good
Great
Musicians
" The magic that you find in surf music, I think, is really timeless. You know, when I was very young, I was in a surf band. Surf music is an instrumental music that still means a lot to me, not in an nostalgic way, but as something that really gets to the heart of the guitar itself. "
John Zorn
Know
Guitar
Heart
" I don't play favorites with people. My basic philosophy is that the only way to make the world a better place is by bringing something beautiful to every single person you run into at every moment of the day, so how can you play favorites with somebody? "
John Zorn
Moment
Day
Beautiful
" One of the reasons I started Tzadik, which is my own label, is to keep things in print. I got tired of labels dropping things out of print when they don't sell. "
John Zorn
Started
Tired
Things
" Like you have seven people with their hands up. I gotta make a choice. Y'know, that's tough. Sometimes I gotta go with someone that has an idea and make several calls in a row, because they got an idea. "
John Zorn
Choice
Hands
You
" I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way. "
John Zorn
Irony
Humor
Sense Of Humor
" People sometimes have a very hard time accepting change. "
John Zorn
Hard
Time
Change
" That's where I began to ask questions that maybe don't have one specific answer. And the more people you get answers from, the richer the environment becomes. "
John Zorn
Questions
You
Environment
" Well, in Japan, I have got a group of musicians that I have worked with a lot, that concentrate just on the hardcore stuff, say, that Naked City has been working on. We have like a repertoire of sixty songs now. "
John Zorn
Now
City
Say
" I'm getting ready to write a piece now, and it's been six months thinking about it, changing the instrumentation, changing the name, doing more reading. "
John Zorn
Doing
Thinking
Name
" And I try to be as diplomatic as I can, but it always ends up being a psychodrama up there on stage. "
John Zorn
I Can
Always
Up
" I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages. "
John Zorn
Me
See
Myself
" I create work, and I devote myself to the creative process, and I try to, you know, stay pure in that process and be worthy of the messages that I receive. "
John Zorn
Work
Myself
Process
" That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year. "
John Zorn
Challenge
You
Yourself
" Music is about people for me. It's not about sounds. It's about people; it's about putting people into challenging situations. And for me, challenges are opportunities. "
John Zorn
Music
Challenges
People
" If someone is a straight jazzhead, or a straight metalhead, or straight classical, they have a very narrow range of what they allow into their lives. But the people who listen to what we put out into the world have to be open-minded. Because we're so pluralist. "
John Zorn
Listen
World
People
" Eye was a great discovery. He is one of the great vocalists of all time. "
John Zorn
Great
Eye
He