The band assembled by Zorn for this album later came to be known as Naked City, and released several more records.
The cover art is a 1940 photograph ‘Corpse With Revolver’ by press photographer Weegee, who’s famous for his coverage of 1930s-40s crime and urban life in New York City. The album’s name comes from Weegee’s 1945 photo book.
Members:
John Zorn: alto saxophone
Bill Frisell: guitar
Fred Frith: bass
Joey Baron: drums
Wayne Horvitz: keyboards
Yamatsuka Eye: vocals
Fred Frith was also in various experimental-rock and jazz-fusion collaborations with Bill Laswell and Zorn, mostly as a guitarist — including Massacre, The Golden Palominos, and his ‘solo’ recordings.
Yamatsuka Eye (later known as Yamantaka Eye) is a founder of Japanese noise-rock band Boredoms that is active since 1986. Among his numerous collaborations, he was in Laswell’s Painkiller and some releases of Praxis, and on several of Zorn’s records outside of Naked City.
A wild album. I’m a fan of Bill Frisell, who transcends genres, but this was still a bit unexpected.
‘Naked City’ is generally considered a landmark album in jazz-fusion. A key feature is the absence of transitions, the switch-ups are just dumped on the listener one after another. And they played this live too.
I’m not quite familiar with Frisell, more with Zorn and especially Bill Laswell, who also both trampled over genres and have often collaborated with each other and a bunch of frequently-appearing musicians. I’ve been posting various jazz-fusion and jazz-metal for the past two weeks — you might dig some of that too, e.g. Massacre’s ‘Killing Time’. Nothing so eclectic as this album, though, at least so far.
Thank you for posting it!
