John Zorn - Reflection

John Zorn - Reflection

From a distance, John Zorn sounds like one of those very successful people in the world who has figured a lot of stuff out, and has no problem “enlightening” everyone around them, like they alone have any answers. Especially looking back at my notes from his visit to class, and seeing quotes like “limitations are liberating” and “I don’t play the sax—I play the room”, it really feels like he should’ve been an insufferable guest to host. However, I can honestly say that I never got that impression the whole time he was visiting, even when he would bite back at students’ questions, or challenge Julie herself every now and then. 

The vibe that I did get from him was brutal honesty, with other musicians, with other people and with his own experience. The advice he gave—which also included things like “balance challenge with ability” and “with every piece I write, the first thing I ask is ‘Does the world need this?’”—seemed to stem from his own inability to settle for less, and his disgust for anything fake or inauthentic. Not that he himself claimed to know everything about what makes something fake or inauthentic—he is a person who completely trusts his instincts, and has very strong ones at that (unsurprising given his dedication to jazz and improvised music). But I appreciated that he saw the world as one big puzzle, and was constantly setting his brain to work on it.

One thing I found most fascinating, and that I appreciated the most, about him is that he said he doesn’t write all the time, and in fact will go months sometimes without setting foot into his writing room, and that he is perfectly okay with it. I guess it all goes back to his incredible trust in himself to find something interesting to say before he says anything at all, but it really helped me to learn that for him there was no such thing as a “writer’s block”, and that even when he wasn’t writing, he was always thinking about anything and everything, especially things that may not even be related to music. There was a certain rawness to the way he described approaching the art, where he had built a certain level of musicianship up within himself, and just stored it in his brain until something in his everyday life gave him an epiphany. His experience was a great reminder that music, or any art, can’t live in isolation, and that it draws its strength directly from the world around it.

I really enjoyed his visit to Forum, and felt like I left the room with a handbook on how to be a great musician, just from writing down things he said. I loved that his four pillars of music were “Honesty, Imagination, Craft, and Catharsis” (and that those four words seemed to describe Zorn himself quite accurately), and that he described communication as “speaking to someone in a [literal or figurative] language they understand”. I appreciated that he argued that “the music that has survived all of history has done so because musicians loved it”, and not because it was trying to be groundbreaking or intentionally different from everyone else. I think the most important lesson I took away from him, though, is that as a musician and as a person, you should trust yourself like you would trust other people.