| Liner Notes to The Big Gundown Notes on Ennio Morricone Ennio Morricone was born in Rome in 1928. After graduating from the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, he operated as a "hired gun" in the Italian Cinema, playing the trumpet, stitching together arrangements, or assisting the conductor in a Sisyphean round of dubbing sessions, until he began composing regularly in the early 1960s. By his own reckoning, Morricone has scored over 300 movies. As versatile as he's prolific, he has composed for thrillers, comedies, horror movies, and Biblical epics. Some of his most resourceful, dashing, and touching music was written for Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, for Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and The Working Class Goes to Heaven, and for Gilberto Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers and Quiemada [Burn]. A character modeled on Morricone was played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Claude Lelouch's Un Homme qui me plait [Love Is a Funny Thing]. Morricone had already scored two westerns [Ricardo Blanco's Gunfight at Red Sands and Mario Caiano's Pistols Don't Argue ] before he hooked up with Sergio Leone in 1964 for A Fistful of Dollars. Leone had been unaffected by Morricone's early soundtracks, which he regarded as indistinguishable from routine Hollywood patchwork- and he was surprised to hear that the composer agreed with him; but an odd discordant reworking of the American folk tune "Pastures of Plenty" that Morricone had produced the previous year impressed the director as a daring and startling musical analogue to the crafty, subversive, revisionist westerns that he was interested in making. Yet, even later, when they were well into the Dollars trilogy, Leone still found Morricone a tricky, unsettling presence. He's recounted to more than one interviewer how "unnerving" it was to sit next to Morricone in the viewing theater: it seems that he laughed at everything, roaring and sniggering through gunfights, love scenes, and location shots, as well as at the calculated comic passages. Morricone's resplendent horse operas sound and function unlike any previous film music. Like Bernard Herrmann's work for Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, Nino Rota's for the Fellini films, or John Barry's for the James Bond movies, Morricone's writing for Leone marks one of the pre-eminent composer-director collaborations in which the music does not so much follow and illustrate the filmed sequences as explain, expand, and comment on them. And more actively and closely than any of his distinguished colleagues, Morricone shaped the final outcome of both the shooting and the editing process. Often Morricone mocks the action- In A Fistfull of Dollars, the Man's laconic, hard-boiled patter is punctuated by high-pitched trills; jubilant bullfight music accompanies the exchange of hostages; or, in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, there's a psychedelic whirr each time Indio fires up a joint. And sometimes the soundtrack provides the only clue to what these enigmatic characters are really up to- the twittering trill that cues us that the Man isn't drunk in A Fistfull of Dollars; the grating harmonica and electric guitar that in Once Upon a Time in the West discover Charles Bronson in Jill's barn long before we actually see him. Electronic "concrete" sounds and amplified background noises [dripping water, buzzing flies, gyrating water wheels] frequently bridge otherwise discontinuous episodes and substitute for dialogue in the marathon tracking sequences and extreme close-ups that are among Leone's most disconcerting gestures. Once Upon a Time in the West pivots on a brazen inversion, in that Morricone's score, based on an ultimately discarded scenario by Bertolucci, was completed before any footage was filmed. As Leone recalls, "throughout the shooting schedule, we listend to the recordings. Everyone acted with the music, followed its rhythms, and suffered with its 'aggravating' qualities, which grind the nerves." Leone's masterpiece is a fitful ballet de mort, choreographed to Morricone's pestilent maelstrom. Each character glides by on a leitmotif. And the music at once mimics the quasi-parodic exchanges and matches the iconographic, screen-filling faces of Bronson, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, and Claudia Cardinale. John Zorn's foxy, intrepid arrangements latch onto these soundtracks only to crack them open. Zorn never merely embellishes or fleshes out the originals; instead, he engages them in a careening, whiz-bang conversation whose tone is sometimes sportive and mischievous, at other times inquisitive and skeptical, but which always resists condescension and mockery. Although Zorn is too savvy to settle for parody here, his music bristles with wit- the chorus from TV's Rawhide ropes Clint Eastwood, the brightest star of the spaghetti westerns, and drags him into "The Big Gundown." Zorn zooms in on the hints of Burt Bacharach in the soundtrack of Giu la Testa [aka Duck, You Sucker! ] and giddily supplant the mournful vocal, "Sean, Sean...Sean, Sean" with an effervescent, light-classical refrain, "shoop shoop." If Morricone's "Milano Odea" sashays like a mechanical horse, Zorn carefully dismantles the mechanism and redesigns it so that all of the parts don't quite fit together- his light touches are prodded by shrewd calculations. On "Giu la Testa" the Japanese shakuhachi and Tsugaru shamisen underscore Kurosawa's Yojimbo as the eminent ur-text behind all of Leone's movies; and the instrumentation on "Once Upon a Time an America" tantalizingly investigates wrinkles in that quirky, hybrid film as an "American" harmonica is pitted against a grinding "Italian" accordian. Often Zorn intensifies aggressions in Morricone's already contentious scores. In the original "Metamorfosi" [from The Working Class Goes to Heaven] harsh squawk and squeals, suggestive of a factory or a slaughterhous, alternate with moody chamber music and spectral moans; and both strands ultimately are woven into a somber "Sinfonia." Zorn's adaptation is all abrasive, ominous rhythms and chilling banshee wails; it's as if his workers wake up in hell. For the "Battle of Algiers" Zorn double-times Morricone's martial drumming and undermines his heroic theme with agonized bursts of orchestrated noise and scattershot effects- screams, whistles, chants, cavalry calls; this is history as James Joyce saw it, "a shout in the street." In Morricone's soundtrack for Henri Verneuil's Peur sur la Ville [released in the U.S. as The Night Caller, the film focuses on a psychopath who calls up women on the telephone and then throttles them in person], a sweet airy melody is gradually choked off, as it were, by tightening bands of dissonance- gurgling strings, twisted horns, what appears to be an orchestra tuning up or clearing its throat. What Morricone accomplished horizontally, Zorn acts out vertically, piling up his manically constricted guitars, saxes and vocals in a full tilt heavymetal stranglehold. Astonishing clusters of sounds also galvanize the amibitious suite that he has concocted from the score to Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown, as Zorn enterprisingly translates Morricone's references into his own idioms. The inspiration for this track actually came from a dream. Zorn initially envisioned a Brazilian rendition with a layer of surf guitars for added flavor. Before recording, however, he had the first dream in his life that was pure music. He woke in the middle of the night and wrote down the music he had heard, and it became the introduction not only to the song but also to the entire record. Here, among other dramatis personae, a Brazilian batucada ensemble dodges bullets and play leapfrog with chopped-up phrases from Beethoven's Für Elise and peppery guitar squalls. Not only does he toughen the original [as cooing mourning doves become clanging bells, and snare drums change into bass thunderclaps], he deepens its mood of frustration and menace by discharging the main theme in tense, spasmodic fragments that, by turns, seem mocking and desperate. Yet Zorn also stakes ou more plaintive, elegaic terrain. He frames his account of the confrontation between Frand and Harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West such that the epic space of Leone's camera work is invoked continuously in the music; this seems to distance them in time as well, and the two mythic super-warriors fade away like the last of their "ancient race." Leone once told and interviewer, "You had there the end of the world." And in Zorn's mournful, brooding chronicle, that's exactly what we hear. Perhaps the surest index to the authority and verve of Zorn's achievement in The Big Gundown is "Tre Nel 5000," his original composition that steams along as a score Morricone might have written, not like a pastiche of those he's already composed. The piece echoes the restless, probing temper of Morricone's work without aping his specific tricks and flourishes. "Tre Nel 5000" convenes its sources only to transcend them. Zorn understands that there's nothing innovative about re-enacting the triumphs of another generation's avant garde. Zorn catches the vitality of Morricone's music because, finally, he's at the center of every performance. -Robert Polito Notes on John Zorn In the beginning, John Zorn did not want to make this record. First of all, Zorn is a composer and an improviser, not an interpreter. Second, Zorn remembers, "I kept thinking, 'I can't do it. Morricone's music is too perfect.'" But in many ways the project was ideal for Zorn. He credits Morricone as a primary musical influence and, as producer Yale Evelev, who first suggested the idea to Zorn, knew, "John's own stuff was so free that there was no chance he was going to put all his people together and have them stay within the originals. He would be a catalyst to change things." Born in New York in 1953 and raised there, Zorn has developed his own performance spaces and worked with a wide range of musicians on the Lower East Side since 1974 [it was at one point suggested that this album be called Once Upon a Time in the East Village]. Though his background encompasses classical, jazz and rock, his primary focus has been a series of compositional experiments based on game theories in which the content of his pieces is improvised according to complex instructions. The "rules" of such works as Lacrosse, Pool and Archery establish structures without dictating outcomes, much as the rules of baseball determine the conduct of the game but not its final score. It is Zorn's choice of musicians that decides the actual sound of his pieces. In any given performance, blocks of cacophonous free improvising, horror movie themes, bucolic Japanese folk melodies, bebop jazz lines, squealing duck calls or roaring metal guitars might hurtle past. The effect is like watching a chameleon rece through a paint box. "That style of improvisation is a true American hybrid music, like rock was a hybrid music," says Zorn. "No generation of composers has been exposed to as much different music as we have, thanks to the technology of recording and the resulting boom in the quantity of music available." Zorn has a gigantic record collection, and everything he has been exposed to has contributed to his style. "Twenty or thirty years ago you had to bend over backward to find a record from Bali," he says. "Today, media's gone nuts. We're just trying to incorporate all these different elements that are available to us." Zorn's compositional structures grew ever more elaborate and his pool of players expanded. His collaborators play traditional instruments in unconventional ways and adapted tape processors, microcomputers and even turntables to produce music they carried in their heads. As a result, Zorn not only developed new methods of composing but also assembled kaleidoscopic palette of musical materials: he knew where to get virtually any sound he could imagine. In 1983, Zorn was asked to contribute a piece to producer Hal Willner's recorded tribute to Thelonious Monk in which a diverse group of musicians re-interpreted Monk's music in an eclectic variety of styles. He agreed to arrange a relatively obscure Monk tune, "Shuffle Boil." "Monk always meant a lot to me and it was kind of an improvised situation anyway, not like Morricone, which would have to be written and arranged," Zorn says. "I make a list of the things that Monk meant to me: humor, outrageousness, the blues, timing, his use of space and silence, and I used those themes to guide my arrangement of the music." The experience paid unexpected dividends. "I got to spend time in a good studio, and it was a pleasure," Zorn says. "That process of getting everything so perfect, being able to overdub- even in the improvisation, we could layer the sound." This method of working, so common in pop music, was a revelation to Zorn, who had been creating one-take improvisational structures that were performed and recorded in real time. "I realized, here were all these incredible musicians I'd been working with, and I'd been using one-tenth of their capabilities by restricting the music to whatever was happening in that one hour the tape was rolling." Zorn's success with "Shuffle Boil" revived earlier discussions regarding the Morricone project for several reasons. It enabled Zorn to think seriously about the interpretive process: "I was totally happy in that 'Shuffle Boil' was faithful to Monk but faithful to me at the same time. And it was a way into my music for an audience I'd never had, a way for them to approach me, to see how I would deal with this subject. It was like a dictionary: people could see my definition of words they already knew." But most important was the fact that the Morricone project would enable Zorn to return to the recording studio. For Zorn, the Monk sessions "were like learning to play the piano all over again. The studio is that kind of tool now," he says, "a way of composing, of documenting music on tape rather than score paper. It is the twentieth century's notational revolution. With all the graphic notation of the sixties and all the other alternative notations, including my own game scores, the most revolutionary idea is being able to get these musicians, whose sounds cannot be written down, notated on tape. For me, that idea was totally new, and tremendously exciting." During the recording of The Big Gundown, Zorn was again asked to contribute a track to a tribute album, this time honoring Kurt Weill. His interpretation of Weill's "Der kleine Leutnant des lieben Gottes" distilled all he had learned about the studio and displayed his new compositional ideas, his ability to "hear vertically" and orchestrate the sounds of the musicians he had worked with and listened to for so many years. It influenced everything yeat to come on The Big Gundown, especially the title track. The cast of musicians assembled for The Big Gundown represents the adventurous edge of New York's new music community. "I wanted each track to be very different and one of the things that made that possible was the people that play on the record," Zorn says. Many of the musicians have played with Zorn for years, though most are also composers and group leaders in their own right. Violinist Polly Bradfield, drummer Mark Miller and keyboard player Wayne Horvitz can probably claim to have worked with Zorn longest, but others, including Anthony Coleman [keyboards], Christian Marclay [turntables], Carol Emanuel [harp], Bobby Previte [drums], David Weinstein [sampling keyboard], Bob James [tapes], Michihiro Sato [Tsugaru shamisen], Guy Klucevsek [accordian], Jim Staley [trombone], Luli Shioi [voice], and Vicki Bodner [oboe] have been indispensible participants in Zorn's recent projects. One of Morricone's most prescient innovations was his use of the electric guitar on his spaghetti western soundtracks in the early sixties. Appropriately, The Big Gundown features six of the most heralded guitarists in new music: Bill Frisell, Fred Frith, Jody Harris, Arto Lindsay, Robert Quine, and Vernon Reid. They scrape and scream and whine their way through "Milano Odea," "Once Upon a Time in the West," and "Metamorfosi" in ways that might even make Morricone nervous. Other downtown musicians include drummer Anton Fier of the Golden Palominos; possessed vocalist Diamanda Galas; Ned Rothenberg [ocarina, shakuhachi and Jew's harp]; Shelly Hirsch [voice]; Melvin Gibbs [bass]; Tim Bern [saxophone]; and the batucada ensemble employed on the title track. Those familar with Zorn's work may be surprised to find Blue Note-era organist Big John Patton on the aptly-named "Erotico," while legendary harmonica player Toots Thielmans makes an appearance as the harmonica soloist and whister on "Poverty," from the most recent Morricone/Sergio Leone collaboration, Once Upon a Time in America. On the other hand, those familiar with Zorn shouldn't be surprised at anything that happens on one of his records. Near the end of Zorn's work on The Big Gundown, he created one more tribute piece, for a compilation album released in France. This time it was a composition of his own, inspired by the films of French director Jean-Luc Godard. Its impressionistic narrative structure, carefully composed and remniscent of Zorn's arrangements for The Big Gundown, suggests that he has found a new method for creating his music. "I hadn't been hearing written music. I was hearing something else," Zorn says. "I had to improvise to find out exactly how to do it. Now I have all these sounds floating around in my head and I think I can move forward using that vocabulary. It's very clear that this is the way I'm going to be working for a long time." -David Bither |