Masada

There's war again in the Middle East. As you undoubtedly know from the news, Hamas fighters have broken out from the Gaza strip and have captured some Israeli towns and settlements and hundreds have already died on both sides of the battlelines. Men, women, and children have ben taken hostage and at least 260 bodies were found after an attack on an Israeli music festival site alone. This is terrible and the news is telling us this is likely going to be a long and bloody war, probably the last thing the world needs right now.    

In the days immediately after 9/11, I started listening to a lot of Arabic music as an antidote to all of the Islamophobic propaganda coming from the mainstream news. Traditional Arabic music, modern interpreters like the singer Natasha Atlas, even electronic music like the provocateur Muslimgauze.  With the outbreak of the latest violence, I'm looking to Jewish music to sooth my soul in these difficult times.   

  

The composer John Zorn named his most long-lasting ensemble "Masada" for a fortress built in Israel on a high rock plateau south of what is now the West Bank. The fortress was first built by Herod the Great around the year 35 BCE, and according to legend Roman troops laid siege to Masada in the year 73 CE at the end of the First Jewish–Roman War. After two or three months, the Romans finally breached the walls and entered the fortress, only to discovered that its defenders had set all the buildings afire and had committed mass suicide, 960 men, women, and children in total.

All this month, well before the most recent world events, I've been intensively exploring the vast collection of music recently released by Zorn to Spotify and other streaming services from his label, Tzadik. That catalog includes a large number of studio and live recordings by Masada and its various offshoots, including Electric Masada, the Masada String Quartet, etc.    

I first became aware of John Zorn in 1991 through his production of the first Mr. Bungle album. Around the same time, MTV aired a video of a song called Batman by Zorn's Naked City on their 120 Minutes showcase of alternative music. I only saw the video once, but knew right away that I had to go out and buy the CD immediately.  Batman was an audacious mashup of jazz, punk, thrash metal, surf rock, noise, and film score, at times all played at the same time and at others lurching spastically from one genre to the next, all within 1:58. It was not a cover of the theme from the Batman television show, yet the title somehow seemed perfect for the composition.

The Naked City album was an even wilder ride. Batman was the first track and it only got crazier from there. It was hard to listen all the way through the first time, but was interesting enough that I kept returning, digesting it in chunks as I was able. I became a Zorn fan, and bought his Big Gundown album, a collection of songs from Ennio Morricone soundtracks, and Spy Vs. Spy, punk-jazz covers of Ornette Coleman tunes. 

A few years later, I heard somewhere that Zorn's latest project was an ensemble called Masada and that they played original compositions based on klezmer and other forms of traditional Jewish music. Albums and song titles all had Hebrew names.

I can't recall how I even learned about Masada back in those dark, pre-internet days. Masada's music wasn't played on MTV, 120 Minutes or otherwise, and wasn't on the radio, even the edgier college stations as far as I could tell. I had no idea what the music sounded like, and while I knew klezmer could be fast-paced and raucous and could imagine how a musician like Zorn could adapt to the form, it didn't sound inviting enough for me to spend my money on a Masada CD, sound unheard. 

Masada released some 10 LPs between 1994 and 1997 on the Japanese DIW label. For whatever reason, those LPs have never surfaced on Spotify - at least not anywhere I can find. There is another band called "Masada" with a couple of albums on Spotify, but they seem to be an American metal band completely unrelated to John Zorn.        

Zorn formed the Tzadik label in 1995 and released a series of live Masada shows recorded between 1994 and 2003 on the new label, as well as new studio recordings by Electric Masada and the Masada String Quartet. Those LPs are among the many albums recently released for streaming, allowing those of us who missed the first generation of Masada studio recordings to finally catch up. I still haven't heard the original ten Masada albums, but now that I can finally stream those excellent live recordings, I'm starting to catch up.  The song posted above is from a Masada concert in Jerusalem in 1994.

To make things even more complicated, after 2003, Zorn started a new project, Masada Book 2: The Book of Angels. Musicians contributing to the Book of Angels series include the Cracow Klezmer Band, Medeski Martin & Wood, Marc Ribot, and Pat Metheny, among many others. And then came Masada Book 3: The Book of Beriah.  The total number of Masada compositions is now 613, the same as the number of mitsvah or commandments in the Torah.

I guess what I'm trying to say in so many words is that for some 30 years, all I heard of Zorn's alluring music was a small handful of CDs, the odd YouTube video of a live performance or two, and a few albums on Spotify and YouTube that were released on labels that Zorn didn't control. But now in the last two weeks, I'm overwhelmed trying to catch up on some 30 years of a notably prolific composer and bandleader.  And all that prodigious Masada output is but one of several Zorn projects, which also include his bands Painkiller and Simulacrum, and a huge number of recordings by other ensembles performing his other composition projects.

The local rabbi may not recognize Jewish traditions in the Masada songbooks, but they are having the desired effect on me and turning my sympathies to the plight and suffering of the Israelis in these difficult times.  If you're at all intrigued by what you've heard and read here, I created a Masada playlist on Spotify.  It's a work in progress and I'm still futzing around adding some LPs and subtracting some others, but I invite you to come and check it out.