BOREDOMS - SUPER COMING, SOUNDS JUST LIKE TOM WAITS!!

I am SCARED of Zorn.

I listened to Sun Ra's Heliocentric Worlds today and some of the trumpet on one song reminded me a lot of Yoshimi P-We's style. Also some of the percussion sounded like Flower with No Color.

Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote
From: [email protected] - Find messages by this author
Date: 1995/04/27
Subject: Re: Zorn's Cobra?
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[email protected] (Eric Schneider) writes:
>I just saw a cd of John Zorn's group Cobra at a local (Mpls.) music store.
>It had, well, a cobra on the cover and I think it was a live recording. Is
>Cobra worth picking up? Who's in the band? Is it anything like Naked City
>or Masada? (I've noticed I post a lot of Zorn questions, but it's hard to
>get info on his projects...unless you live in New York, of course.) - Eric

Cobra is a "game piece," i.e. the "score" has no notes in it, but rather,
a set of instructions for the musicians to respond to certain cues in
certain ways. Some of these things are easy: there's one cue that says
in essence: "Everybody now playing, stop on the downbeat; everyone who's
not now playing may start if he so chooses." But they get quite a bit
more complicated: there are cues involving "memory," as in, "What we're
doing right now is pretty cool, so remember your particular part of it--
because there's another cue that might be issued to start doing it again."
(These are not exact quotes, BTW.) Basically Cobra is the climax of the
whole development of Zorn's involvement with game and algorithmic scores,
which has been quite extensive-- Zorn himself has claimed to be less
interested in how things *sound* than in how things *work*, and it's
certainly true wrt this repertoire. So no, this doesn't sound much like
Naked City, except insofar as the very fast and drastic changes of mood
Zorn likes to commit constitute a style :-)

The Knitting Factory, which has been real supportive of Zorn's music,
hosted live Cobras on the last Sunday of the month for a few years.
If you saw the exact CD I think you saw, it's a compilation, drawing
from all the Cobra nights for all of one year-- 1992, I think. The
cast of characters was different every night, over a hundred downtown
names-- not a fixed band by any stretch of the imagination. To play
Cobra requires roughly a dozen musicians and one "prompter," who's
basically the conductor/umpire/authority figure, and every Sunday's
Cobra had a different prompter too (who among other things chose the
players he wanted in his Cobra). There were special purpose Cobras,
for example, one all-voice Cobra that included Jeff Buckley, and
Cobras concentrating on specific instruments; even one all-critic
Cobra (that didn't happen that year, and isn't on this CD.) Zorn
himself does not perform; I don't think he even attended any of the
Cobras captured herein, but trusted these prompters to do it right.
(This CD is on the Knitting Factory Works label, btw.)

There is sort of a core of Cobra-capable players. You have to undergo
a certain training process to remember these cues; I've heard some of
these people use the term "Cobra school." But there isn't a fixed band.
Anyone who wants to play Cobra, and can convince some prompter to let
him, can do so.

By chance I was just today discussing Cobra with Evan Ziporyn, who's
a bass clarinetist and composer (and professor of music at this august
institution that employs me), who said he had had one chance to play
Cobra with Zorn himself prompting-- except Zorn, as he walked in to
start rehearsing, said, "First thing, no reed players!"

Dunno, but AaronHZ in LAYTONVILLE does. I like "Super Are You" the best, but I definitely hear the Waits/Beefheart thing in Super Coming.

Funny someone brings up Beefheart, I'm downloading "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" tonight...

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