As part of the Research Training for Practitioners module on my Master's at Surrey I've been asked to write about an "epiphany" I've had at some point in my life. The last decade or so has actually seen many of 'em, surprisingly coming in at ever greater frequency. But I thought I'd talk about a real life changer from much earlier...
The time: November 1988. The place: The Royalty Theatre, London. John Zorn's Naked City are on stage; at some point in the show, Zorn snarls into the microphone: "This one goes out to Wynton Marsalis: it's called Jazz Snob Eat Shit", and a sub-one minute mash-up of funk and screaming free jazz ensues. I am a jazz snob, I am eating shit, and I'm grinning from ear to ear. This is one of the greatest nights of my life.
Let's rewind a tad. I started listening to music in earnest at around the age of nine, and for reasons that still elude me, my tastes were from that point onwards deeply uncool. The first records I owned (and pretty much wore down - these were post-Oil Shock days of very poor vinyl quality, after all) were the Hallé's recording of the Planets Suite and a Tangerine Dream Live album. And in terms of coolness, it was downhill from an already shaky start.
I'm not sure there was a strict linearity to how my tastes developed over the following years, but all through the years of punk, post-punk and New Romantic I was on a very different path: prog and psych rock, the NWOBHM, blues, jazz (even worse: the fusion end of it, truth be told), and increasingly, classical. I honestly wasn't trying to be different; I was just following my nose musically, and my nose led me to places that were broadly considered utterly risible. This was the early 80s, after all, and essentially I was behaving like I wanted it to be 1970. (In many ways I still do, of course, but that's the subject of another post.)
(An aside for younger readers who might be confused by why this was such a big deal. Every generation has its culture wars, I guess, and in many ways, I'm glad those of my youth were more strictly, well, "cultural". Pretty much exclusively about music, actually. The cool kids read NME and listened to John Peel and derided any music that came in supra-3 minute form. Most of the "songs" I liked seem to take up the entire side of an LP. Honestly, to young people who wear Ramones t-shirts and are yet happy to listen to Genesis, I have to tell you: these were different times. At the time I felt on the wrong side of history. As it turns out I wasn't, much to the chagrin and/or consternation of my old punk mates down here in Brighton.)
Then the confusion set in. In 1987 I started working in a warehouse run by G, who seemed unbelievably old to me at the time but in retrospect was probably in his late 20s. G was, I realised immediately, the epitome of cool: cropped hair, black 501s, DMs. I had back-length, Peter Frampton golden locks, and wore stonewashed jeans and white trainers, at least two fashion cycles too soon. G espoused leftist politics, smoked weed seemingly every minute of the working day, and, crucially, played the ugliest music I'd ever heard. Seriously, if I think back now, it's like a roll call of late 80s hardcore and noise music: Swans, Butthole Surfers, Einstürzende Neubauten, Big Black, Sonic Youth, Slint, The Minutemen. With a bit of dub reggae thrown in for good measure. I hated it.
And then, I sort of didn't. And then I almost liked it. I mean, I'd still go home and listen to Pat Metheny or Jan Garbarek, but this apparently artless, noisy crap was beginning to work its charm on me. So by the time I was at the Naked City Show, I was a very confused young man (although true to the rest of my life, not even my confusion was a fashionable or even very interesting one). I was captured by my own internal culture war: I couldn't allow myself to like Miles Davis and Sonic Youth, which as I write it now seems scarcely believable.
I was at that night in Holborn for two reasons. I was beginning to listen to more contemporary classical music, and the Kronos Quartet already had a massive rep in that area. But mostly I was keen to see Naked City's guitarist Bill Frisell, with whose playing I was totally besotted at the time. I'd heard about Zorn, but didn't know any of his work. In the event, I can remember little about the Kronos show. If memory serves they came on first despite being the headliners. Wise decision. Of course, I've seen them many times since and they are always stunning. But, but... the Zorn show stole the night.
I think it's safe to say now that Zorn is generally recognised as having changed the face of experimental music, but at the time even "cult status" would have been pushing it, at least in the UK. To this day I swear that most people in the audience were there for Kronos. But it was immediately apparent that something incredible was afoot here. I won't add to the reams that have been written about Zorn's genre-melding, his virtuosity, his relentless, often confrontational vision (indeed I've contributed to said reams). The point of these reminiscences is that the performance that night, as it crashed through barrier after barrier (between improvisation and composition, between genres, between noise and music even) made total sense to me and brought an end to my inner culture war. Of course I liked hardcore punk as well as free jazz, noir soundtracks as well as country music, the Beach Boys and Albert Ayler. It all made total sense; I had been given licence to enjoy whatever music I wanted to.
I had been to many great gigs before that night (I was lucky to have started early), and certainly many since. Some of them might even have been, well, "better". But no single musical perfromance I've ever seen has changed me so profoundly. Now, that's what I call an epiphany...
(To close out, here's a video of them on what I can only assume was the same tour. Watching it I am genuinely as excited now as as I was then.)
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