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Maestro M

This week Ennio Morricone headed to a better place.

Morricone, who’s music almost everyone can recognize from his multiple movie scores.

Today we bow down to his work, through the eyes of another grand maestro (as said by Morricone himself) - John Zorn.

In 1985, John Zorn recorded the album THE BIG GUNDOWN John Zorn Plays the Music of Ennio Morricone (Nonesuch Records) with covers of famous movie scores by Morricone. The album was a bit of a sidetrack from the direction in which Zorn was in moving at the time, and it immediately grabbed the critics and the public’s attention. 35 years later, it is still described as one of his most interesting and innovative projects. Of course, the recordings include a handful of a-list musicians, such as Cyro Baptista, Joey Baron, and Bobby Previte on drums and percussions; Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot on guitars, Greg Cohen and Trevor Dunn on bass, Carol Emanuel and her harp, Jamie Saft and Anthony Coleman on key, and vocals by Mike Patton and others. All together almost 40 musicians took part in the first recording from 1985 and the remastered version from 2000 (Tzadik Records), which includes six more songs.

The words John Zorn describes Ennio Morricone’s music: "Ennio brought all of the elements of postmodernism together into a personal language decades before the term was even invented. He is one of the original genre-busters, and one of the first composers to blend the avant-garde with popular music in a seamless, successful aggregate."

Here is where we give you Ennio Morricone’s response to Zorn’s experiment: "This is a record that has fresh, good and intelligent ideas. It is a realization on a high level, a work done by a maestro with great science-fantasy and creativity. My ideas have been realized not in a passive manner, but in an active manner which has recreated and reinvented what I have done previously for films. At times my works have been varied from but it doesn't change anything because the pieces are still recognizable. Many people have done versions of my pieces, but no one else has done them like this."

Today we listen to a couple of pieces from this album, that to this day separates the fans of both maestros to extreme apologists and extreme sceptics. According to some, Zorn has twisted the music to an unbelievable degree, according to others - his approach is creative and he has given a new life to painfully familiar songs.

So we listen to maestro Morricone’s music through the eyes and ears of John Zorn and co.

The Sicilian Clan
Chi Mai
The Ballad of Hank McCain.

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