Cat O' Nine Tails (Tex Avery Directs the Marquis de Sade)

Turning a self-described short attention span into a creative asset, the ever daring composer, saxophonist, and New York "Downtown" music czar John Zorn developed a unique approach to composition in the 1980s and early '90s. Starting with discrete musical ideas—or "moments"—jotted down on file cards whenever inspiration struck, Zorn would create a new work by assembling the cards in a specific order. The resulting music is both endlessly surprising and relentlessly pulse-quickening—an experience often compared to rapidly pushing the pre-set buttons on a car radio, or to the constantly shifting, "jump cut" imagery of modern films and music videos.

Cat O' Nine Tails, commissioned by Kronos and featured on the 1993 Short Stories album, is a perfect example of the form. In under 15 minutes, the piece brings together 51 distinct moments, from gently plucked tones to razor-sharp dissonance, and from stately classicism to country hoe-down to cartoon zaniness—with few passages daring to challenge the 10-second barrier.

"It's a fun piece to play and a fun one to listen to," Zorn says. "A piece with a lot of drama and humor and many musical games hidden in the web of its inner details. Sly quotes and secret codes are scattered throughout my classical repertory, serving as both special tributes to the composers and compositions that feed my inspirations and, more importantly, as unifying devices to create structural integrity.…This piece is subtitled 'Tex Avery Directs the Marquis de Sade,' for obvious reasons."

Beyond finding an echo of the infamous 18th-century author in the gleeful violence of the classic Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1940s and '50s, Zorn has long drawn stylistic inspiration from the soundtracks of composers like Avery's partner in 'toons, Carl Stallings. As Zorn describes it, when you listen to Stallings' music apart from the animated visuals, you "enter a completely new dimension: you are constantly being thrown off balance, yet there is something strangely familiar about it all."

Zorn's own résumé would seem decidedly off balance, if there weren't something so strangely ingenious about it all. Already a budding composer of contemporary classical music by his mid-teens, Zorn dropped out of Webster College in St. Louis, inspired to pursue avant-garde jazz improvisation by the likes of saxophonist Anthony Braxton and other members of Chicago's influential Assocation for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. By the early 1970s, he had settled in Greenwich Village, performing solo sax concerts and beginning to compose the structured improvisations he called “game pieces.” From early works like Lacrosse (1977) and Hockey (1978) to 1984's Cobra, widely considered the ultimate game piece, Zorn perfected a process of cueing musical events according to ever more sophisticated sets of improvisational rules. In keeping with sporting events, while the rules of a game piece remain the same over time, no two performances of a Zorn game piece ever sound alike.

Beyond creating and directing (or "prompting") the game-pieces and composing and recording other noted file-card works like Godard (1985) and Spillane (1986), Zorn has led and written for a number of his own ensembles, including the Noir-infused Naked City and the hardcore improvisational trio Painkiller. Beginning with his 1992, album-length composition Kristallnacht, Zorn embarked on an exploration of his Jewish identity. This work has reached its fullest expression in the 10-year-old performing quartet and book of compositions called Masada—a project that weds traditional Jewish scales to a brash style of jazz reminiscent of Zorn’s saxophone hero Ornette Coleman. Since the mid-’80s, following in the tradition of composers such as Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, Zorn has also been a frequent and typically eclectic composer for film. To date, he numbers 13 volumes of Film Works releases on his own Tzadik record label, with styles ranging from rambunctious cartoon music to elegiac strings to bossa nova riffs traded between guitar and Chinese pipa—often, of course, all on the same album.

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