John Zorn
Redbird

The term that almost always comes up to describe this kind of thing is "minimalist." So let's say, this is minimalist music, okay. Another term that's very trendy is "ambient." All right, then, this CD is ambient music. This way we've satisfied those who want to know something about the CD itself, about what we’re dealing with, basically.

But since Zorn writes practically unclassifiable music, all this collapses. The emotions, the distant sounds, the primal instincts it evokes cannot have a classification. The fact is that here it's difficult to even talk about music.

Sure, Zorn's vast production has albums that can be much more easily recognizable, and especially very "musical." Just think of all those works contaminated by jazz (okay, a sick jazz, but it's still jazz), the historic "Naked City" just to name one, or the sounds tending towards thrash, like the recent "Astronome" or the splendid "Six Litanies For Heliogabalus," and albums more inclined towards classical (which, again, is not really classical, right?).
All right, but in the face of works like "Redbird," what do we say? What can be said of Dark River, a 9-minute piece of just, extremely low, percussions? This is not music. This is a return to the origins, it belongs to a context far preceding "music." The sense of rhythm, the quest for pure emotion. It's a light and dramatic heartbeat, a palpitation that sounds familiar to us. It's that of our heart. Which equally dramatically marks the moments before it stops.

And then the title track, Redbird. What track, what title, they don't matter. Try listening to it. But just to that. Yes, it's 40 minutes. 40 minutes that manage to keep you suspended, to make you sway among those "minimalist" notes that apparently remain the same for the whole duration. At the end of the track, you'll find yourself exactly there, where you started it, with the same expression as before. But with open eyes, moved by an alarming unrest.

What does minimal mean? What does ambient mean? I prefer to describe it as an essential album. Essential in its construction, two tracks and few, very few notes. Essential for those who do not see Zorn as a failed writer lost in experimentation but rather as a kind of genius. Essential to rediscover human roots and the first emotion that man felt, fear.