Tzadik
2001
Madness, Love And Mysticism
About This Album
John Zorn's chamber pieces are now becoming as much the rule as they are the exception in his ever-expanding catalog of works. This trio of pieces is -- even for him -- among his most provocative and most musically noteworthy. The contents are "Le Mômo," for violin (Jennifer Choi) and piano (Stephen Drury); an untitled cello sonata (featuring cellist Erik Friedlander); and "Amour Fou" for the entire trio. First up is "Le Mômo," named after French poet and dramatist Antonin Artaud's own work, Artaud, le Mômo. The musical palette that Zorn assembles for this work is deceptive at first, as both pitch and tonal interactions between the two instruments speak in a limited vocabulary, but only for the first three minutes where the harmonic range expands across the entire tonal scale. There are passages of stark, brooding beauty where Drury plays alone, juxtaposed with dynamic shifts in color and texture where Choi is in full-challenge assault mode on harmony. In fact, Zorn largely does away with it with few exceptions. The dizzying array of changes in tempo, mode, tonality, and timbre are staggering, and the piece seems as full of anarchy as one of Artaud's own fragmentary poems.
Track List (try tracks 1 and 2)

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