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" Man, Dick Dale shreds. He's welcomed to anybody's bar mitzvah. "
John Zorn
He
Man
Bar Mitzvah
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" I run around, I listen to a lot of music, go to a lot of concerts. And when I see someone that gases me, I try to go out of my way to involve them somehow in what I'm doing or get involved in what they're doing. "
John Zorn
Doing
Run
Someone
" 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
" 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
" For about seven years. I really like it there. There are a lot of great musicians. The scene is very open. A lot of stuff going on. People's ears are really open, they are not closed. A lot of scenes here, people just get tunnel vision and are into one thing. "
John Zorn
Musicians
People
Tunnel
" 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
" 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 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. "
John Zorn
See
Musicians
Me
" I started the label Tzadik to support an entire community of musicians, not just Jewish musicians. But the radical Jewish culture movement was begun in a lot of ways because I wanted to take the idea that Jewish music equals 'klezmer' and expand it to, 'Well, Jewish music could be a lot more than that.' "
John Zorn
Support
Music
More
" My solo music - I get up onstage, I improvise and it's my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we're improvising together. Then it's not my music; it's our music. "
John Zorn
Improvisation
Music
Solo
" I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together. "
John Zorn
My Life
Bach
Together
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" You can't sit down and write 300 compositions in a three-month period and think that you're doing it all by yourself. Obviously, there's something going on here. And whether you want to call it channeling or being connected to a creative force or knowing your history and knowing where you belong, that's, you know, maybe a personal thing. "
John Zorn
History
Yourself
Creative
" As soon as you get a certain amount of attention, then everybody kinda wants to start taking pot shots at you. All your old friends that supported you don't support you any more. "
John Zorn
Old Friends
Support
Start
" 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
" 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
" I'm not striving for happiness, I'm trying to get some work done. And sometimes the best work is done under doubt. Constantly rethinking and re-evaluating what you're doing, working and working until it's finished. "
John Zorn
You
Best
Doing
" 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. "
John Zorn
Office
Own
Three
" 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
" 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. "
John Zorn
Live
Interesting
Know
" 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
" It's a matter of keeping people on a spontaneous edge. "
John Zorn
Spontaneous
Matter
Edge
" People sometimes have a very hard time accepting change. "
John Zorn
Hard
Time
Change
" You know, when we were kids, we had to go to a theater to see a movie. And then television came in and you had to wait until midnight to see the one you wanted to see. Now, all you've got to do is go to a store and buy it and you can watch it whenever you want! "
John Zorn
Wait
Watch
You
" I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages. "
John Zorn
Me
See
Myself
" I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it's not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out. "
John Zorn
Problems
Music
Look
" No one sits in front of a drum set and thinks they invented it all out of whole cloth. The fact that the set is there means that you've got some dues to pay to Baby Dodds. "
John Zorn
You
Baby
Drum