John Zorn - Spy Vs. Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman

Audio caffeine

This album is simply audio caffeine! If you play this album on your way to work, or while you're getting dressed, you will have no need for any coffee.
If you looking for the album that gives you the most notes per dollar, you have found the bargain you seek. If you want to laugh because musicians are playing with such insanity that it's funny, prepare to be highly amused. I have no idea what the original pieces sound like, but it hardly matters. This album is its own thing. They could be playing any tune like this, and it would still be intense and amazing. August 2, 2007

hardcorebaroquethrashjazz

Ornette Coleman's music is such an enigma because of its inability to fit to any one style of music...or because of its amorphous nature that lets it connect to so many other styles of music. This disc takes some acclimation, but its severe bombasity (even in the 'slower' tracks of the second half) is rewarding if your ears can live through the initial assault.

But that IS John Zorn's way, isn't it? At least in some of these early recordings...he slaps you upside the head with quick changes and Napalm Death speed and an onslaught that he used to carpet bomb himself an area of music that he could then go back to and refine a little. In the end, I think Zorn overevolved a bit and became a dinosaur whose carapace was too thorny to lift, but these earlier recordings have an intense sense of exploration about them, of wanting to find out where he could go and, I think, how far up the wall he could drive others.

And all this is why Coleman's music is so fitting to this spirit. Ornette Coleman has branched out his own music into multimedia explorations and different combinations, including orchestra. But it took Zorn to bring this music into a mosh pit to ironically bring out the baroque elements of the music--the precision of the cascades and the sudden, but fitting endings. This disc is worth a few listens, even if those around you are cursing their names under their breath.
December 12, 2006

Cutting-edge boredom...

A recording that's more "interesting" than enjoyable or moving, more agenda/theory driven than ear/heart driven.Much could be said both for and against this,but after over a century the moves and counter-moves of musical avant-gardes and their detractors of the moment are so predictable and stylized on both sides as to be tedious and pointless.

Some good things.The two altoists know their instruments and are masters of an admirable range of effects those instruments can be made to produce. Ornette's writing is strong enough to at least partly overcome versions of it which are not much interested in either its letter or its spirit. There are moments when the horns catch the sonorities of OC's early days wonderfully well. And in the final four or five selections, when the horn players don't step on each other's toes quite so much and the aggressive sonic assault from the drums quiets down a little bit, there's some playing which I enjoyed. Those in a position to know tell me that the violent, high-volume/high-speed,indecipherably dense sound environment of most of the album comes mostly from a certain kind of rock, and if that's so then perhaps fans of that sort of thing might find here an entry into jazz.

But for the most part this struck me as undifferentiated roaring and squalling overlain with unceasing wrath-of-Jehovah drum clatter.Not shocking, transgressive, or upsetting, but just boring,reminding me of the sort of complete dead end which Coltrane found himself in the year or two before he died. I know there are other points of view on this, but to my ear music is boring when it doesn't,in some way and at some level,involve the making and breaking of sound patterns in turn.Without some initial pattern--it doesn't have to be a pattern present in the piece itself--the absence of pattern has no force.You're left with the sort of complexity-issuing-in-monotony of a conversation in which everyone is talking at once,or, better, the steady hum that comes off a crowd. But if you find yourself stimulated or at least profitably challenged by someone screaming the same things in your face over and over, you may well find something here worth your while. One piece of good advice to prospective buyers: unless money is no problem, arrange to hear some of this CD before you buy it. If it still pleases or intrigues you after that,purchase with confidence! And if you really do enjoy this music,more power to you--after all,there's a lot of jazz that I love to listen to which seems to others to be "just chaotic noise"... May 8, 2006

I love this s&*t.

Dude, this is jazz for metalheads, which is why I love it. Having recently yearned for aggression in other forms, I have discovered the powerful majesty of Coltranes' later recordings, and upon studying up on the "avant-garde" jazz scene of the 60's, the name Ornette Coleman obviously comes up time and again....and to hear his works through the John Zorn filter is a thrashin good time. Recommended for those who wonder what Napalm Death would sound like as an instrumental jazz unit...a small group indeed, but one I count myself in. November 7, 2005

Apoplexy Now

Sheer bombast. Zorn and company play with a ferocity that is nothing short of breathtaking, but these aren't pyrotechnics for the hell of it. You can feel the artists' deep love and respect for the material chosen, and the listener comes away feeling that the intensity, the euphoria, has been drawn from the musicians via something bordering on divine inspiration. July 10, 2005

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