THE BIG GUNDOWN john zorn plays the music of ennio morricone (15th Anniversary Edition)

by

John Zorn

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I just recently took the plunge on this reissue of the Big Gundown, comparing it to my original Nonesuch CD, and the new one is a winner. The music is obviously the same, and great it still is, but I always regretted the thickness of sound and low-level mastering of the original CD. The reissue has cleaned, brightened and polished the sound to a much higher level, it blossoms immediately in the ears and is now superb. The additional tracks are a treat too, Chi Mai is one of Morricone's greatest and pithiest themes, although the manner of the new material is fairly straight-ahead. Also nice is the extensive liner notes, an addition from the original release and a departure for many other Tzadik-Zorn recordings. Zorn fans should go for this in an instant, as should the Zorn-curious. This is his single greatest and most important record.

Morricone fans, you should give this a try too! This will challenge your ears and your notions of one of your favorites, and that's a good thing. Zorn is always true both to the themes from the movies and the context of those movies, which is the most remarkable thing. But for those only used to straight renditions of the music, this CD will shock, because the music is put through a cut-and-paste technique that owes much to cartoon music, and a recontextualization that owes is all to a free-improvisation aesthetic. Don't let those ears and minds get flaccid, folks!

3 1/2

Marking a noticeable evolution in this radical composer's one-of-a-kind-career, 1984's early breakthrough interpretations of the spaghetti western king proved a worthy and memorable endeavor. Through Zorn's typically cracked lens Morricone's dusty constructs are given a whole new, usually quite darkened reworking. More traditional fans of these original compositions may initially be turned off with the expansive and distorted liberties taken to resurrect these themes (as compositionally sound as much of the recording is, of course this long album comes with quite a few unsettling, anti-musical audio adventures) but any Zorn fan would be remiss not to own what would start out a long tradition of these fractured, often rewarding tributes.