John Zorn Quotes

• No one sits in front of a drum set and thinks they invented it all out of whole cloth. The fact that the set is there means that you’ve got some dues to pay to Baby Dodds.

  John Zorn

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  Tags in Sits, Dues

• People sometimes have a very hard time accepting change.

  John Zorn

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  Tags in Accepting, Hard Times

• Classical stuff takes a lot of rehearsal time and preparation, but with stuff that involves improvisation, you can over-rehearse it and it gets stale. You don’t want it to be too comfortable. In fact, a good sound check, a good rehearsal usually means a bad performance.

  John Zorn

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  Tags in Improvisation, Preparation

• I don’t play favorites with people. My basic philosophy is that the only way to make the world a better place is by bringing something beautiful to every single person you run into at every moment of the day, so how can you play favorites with somebody?

  John Zorn

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  Tags in Bringing, Run

• I have not practiced saxophone since 1980. I mean, not one note. I do not pick it up in my house, and that’s the end of it.

  John Zorn

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  Tags in End, Note

• My solo music – I get up onstage, I improvise and it’s my improvisation. When I get up onstage with Fred Frith and Mike Patton, then we’re improvising together. Then it’s not my music; it’s our music.

  John Zorn

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Improvising, Fred

• You know, when we were kids, we had to go to a theater to see a movie. And then television came in and you had to wait until midnight to see the one you wanted to see. Now, all you’ve got to do is go to a store and buy it and you can watch it whenever you want!

  John Zorn

• You can’t be idealistic in this world and not be crazy.

  John Zorn

• When I’m writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I’m trying not to get in the way.

  John Zorn

• Well, in Japan, I have got a group of musicians that I have worked with a lot, that concentrate just on the hardcore stuff, say, that Naked City has been working on. We have like a repertoire of sixty songs now.

  John Zorn

• The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive.

  John Zorn

• That’s where I began to ask questions that maybe don’t have one specific answer. And the more people you get answers from, the richer the environment becomes.

  John Zorn

• That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I’ll try to write a hundred tunes in a year.

  John Zorn

• That is a lot of the reason I do what I do, to really spread the word and spread information and turn people onto different things they may not be, y’know, aware of. That is what Naked City is certainly about.

  John Zorn

• One of the reasons I started Tzadik, which is my own label, is to keep things in print. I got tired of labels dropping things out of print when they don’t sell.

  John Zorn

• Like you have seven people with their hands up. I gotta make a choice. Y’know, that’s tough. Sometimes I gotta go with someone that has an idea and make several calls in a row, because they got an idea.

  John Zorn

• It’s a matter of keeping people on a spontaneous edge.

  John Zorn

• It’s a blast to watch. It’s a lot more interesting live than it is on record. I mean, it really is a theatrical event. It’s a sporting event! Cause you never know what’s gonna happen.

  John Zorn

• It breaks even. We lose ten, twenty grand every year. But then the people who are working say, Look, I’ll kick this back in, I don’t need to take this profit share. It’s very cooperative.

  John Zorn

• I’m getting ready to write a piece now, and it’s been six months thinking about it, changing the instrumentation, changing the name, doing more reading.

  John Zorn

John Zorn (31)

Birth:	2nd September, 1953
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Composer, Saxophonist

About

John Zorn was born in New York City, New York, USA. He is an American composer and saxophonist with hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, and producer across a variety of genres, including jazz, rock, hardcore, classical, surf, metal, soundtrack, ambient, and improvised music. He incorporates diverse styles in his compositions which he identifies as avant-garde or experimental. He was described by Down Beat as "one of our most important composers".

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