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Rating: Take a slice of music in the style of Naked City, with its schizophrenic mix of genres. Place them in the reality of a kindergarten. With all the characteristics of children, who can often be extremely cruel. Imagine our kids in a Warner cartoon, with sticks of dynamite exploding, leaving Wile E. Coyote plummeting to the bottom of the canyon.
Take some individuals like Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot, Robert Quine (the punk guitarist, indeed), Bobby Previte, Cyro Baptista and Wayn Horvitz and hire them all to record the soundtrack for a short series of Japanese cartoons. A bit like in Italy for the theme song of "Ufo Robot," written by Tavolazzi.
It seems a bit like an elephant has given birth to a mouse, because ultimately what we have is a mere half-hour of music, divided into 24 small tracks of just over a minute each. Punk rock riffs, small sambas, country musical phrases emerging from the noise. When we talk about experimentation, but everything has a certain cool factor to it, you can feel that these are not wild experiments. Almost an attempt to bring musical experimentation into a context digestible by the average listener.
The primary influence can only be Carl Starling (a minor Zorn obsession alongside Morricone). Dynamic music that accompanies a narrative sequence, that in a way tells a story, changing abruptly at every turn, at any moment if one falls into a manhole, we can easily find ourselves on the other side of the globe.
Wanting to be a bit descriptive: fascinating the banjo solos by Frisell in "Yakisoba" and by Ribot in "Tsunta Theme"; in "Punk Rock Hero" you can hear Quine and Ribot playing punk together (the two have also played together in Waits' "Rain Dogs"); the fantastic Brazilian percussion by Cyro Baptista in "Surfing Samba". But enough with piece-by-piece reviews, otherwise I'll bore you.
Recommended as usual if you love quirky and moody music, if you love channel surfing with the remote (here it even beats the Fantozzi record...), if you hate 60-minute albums that all sound the same, if you want to amaze or be amazed. If nuclear scientists who write "1+1=3" make you smile. If you have no musical prejudices and try to listen to and mix a bit of everything. If you don't mind paying 15 bucks for an album of less than half an hour. Don't feel cheated, the music here is concentrated, duration doesn't matter, it's a matter of intensity.
Zorn himself, I believe, is particularly proud of it, the rights of the album were owned by Sony music, which kept it in its catalog for only six months and only for the Japanese market. Fortunately, he later managed to reissue it on Tzadik.
The cartoon in question seems more like a Japanese version of Peanuts (see the dedicated link). The illustrator, Kiriko Kubo, also sings here and there.
Tracklist
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