John Zorn
Kristallnacht

The search for roots, and reshaping them according to avant-garde criteria has been a leitmotif for many of the most brilliant musical minds of the last century. In this sense, few have managed to accomplish this mission as touchingly and inspiredly as John Zorn in "Kristallnacht".

In this case, the roots are rather painful: the Shoah is still an open wound for all Jews, and invoking its heartbreaking memory constitutes a fundamental exorcism, a tormented homecoming. The album's title indeed refers to the notorious "Night of Broken Glass", between November 9 and 10, 1938, when the anti-Semitic fury struck Germany. Various groups of nationalist fanatics, with the consent of Goebbels and Himmler, demolished, looted, and burned synagogues, shops, and Jewish homes, resulting in the death of about a hundred people. Although the harassment of Jews had begun earlier, it was from that day that the road to the Holocaust proceeded unhindered (after all, it was in '38 that Hitler's first foreign policy moves, with the Anschluss and the annexation of the Sudetenland, took place: the abyss was around the corner).

Zorn presented this concept album, centered on the lucid revisitation of the Nazi pogrom, in Germany in 1992, at the Munich Festival Art Project, and then published it the following year. The brilliant saxophonist appears only as a composer, leaving the stage to some of the best musicians of Jewish origin: Marc Ribot (guitar), Anthony Coleman (keyboards), David Krakauer (clarinet), Mark Feldman (violin), William Winant (percussion), Frank London (trumpets), and Mark Dresser (bass).
The intent of "Kristallnacht" was to distill the recovery of klezmer — that type of instrumental music developed within Eastern European Jewish communities — through the many facets of Zorn's avant-garde style. This challenge characterizes a good portion of John's production in the '90s, particularly with the sublime jazz vertigos of Masada. After all, the raw material was well-suited to such manipulations.

Klezmer is first and foremost deeply evocative as music of ritual and liturgical origin. Furthermore, it intrinsically lends itself to improvisation and hybridization, as already demonstrated by its intersections with Jazz in the '50s when many survivors from Europe brought it to light in the United States. The opening "Shtetl (Ghetto life)" is astonishing: a melancholic jazz set by the clarinet and trumpet on a classic klezmer melody. The almost dreamlike atmosphere, suspended between Weimar Berlin and arcane Semitic litanies, is soon marred by samples of a Nazi radio: an unsettling speech by the Führer ("Republiken, FALLEN!"), various dissonances, and snippets of Central European cabaret. With "Never again," one plunges directly into a sonic nightmare: noise lashings and noisy explosions recreate the effect of shattering glass on that night in '38, in which a significant piece of European civilization was also shattered. Eleven minutes whose listening is — in Zorn's intentions — deliberately unbearable, and in which fleeting violin flourishes are nothing but illusions. "Gahelet (Embers)" leads to murky and seemingly calm waters, but it's just a deception to contemplate horror calmly. With "Tikkun (Rectification)", a feverish script comes on stage, among sick yiddish melodies, violin clangs, free-jazz echoes, and opiate guitars.

"Tzfia (Looking ahead)" accentuates the finger in the wound, alternating deafening silences with a derailing fury, with sparse piano chords and abrasive guitar accelerations intent on drawing nightmares worthy of a Baudelaire poem. "Barzel (Iron fist)" is the sound of the battlefield, Hendrix's "Machine gun" layered in a wall of samples and noise. But it's with the monstrous "Gariin (Nucleus-the new settlement)" that the final act of the Zorn saga arrives. A roaring and martial percussionism dictates the rhythm (almost as if to mark the rhythms of the gas chambers), the bass plows a sumptuous groove while Marc Ribot's six-string designs magnificent and cacophonous trajectories.

If, in the almost 43 minutes in which "Kristallnacht" unfolds, the rare moments of faint melody seem to represent the hope in the future provided by the Promised Land, a shroud of feedback spreads salt on the wounds and recalls the intrinsic suffering of the Jewish condition in the naked city.