Best of 2009 Pt. II: Alhambra Love Songs by John Zorn

This is the second in a series of blurbs about my favorite albums from the first half of 2009.

Alhambra Love Songs
John Zorn

If I didn't know John Zorn's catalog better, I'd think he was being ironic. The guy who made Naked City, who appropriated punk rock and death metal within his schizophrenic, manic, avant-jazz, cut-and-paste compositions; the guy who used Mike Patton - one of the smoothest vocalists in rock music - almost entirely for his screaming and other non-melodic vocal noises; the guy who seemingly never met a genre he didn't like for at least 15 seconds - has made an album of nothing but jazz-based piano-trio compositions, an album so genteel and free from chaos or noise that it would upset no one.

In reality of course, this isn't as shocking as my silly lead-in makes it seem. There is plenty of precedent in Zorn's prior work for the kind of beautiful calm espoused in these gem-like pieces. However, I believe this is the first time he's delivered an album this thoroughly chilled-out. Like the eye in the center of a hurricane, Alhambra Love Songs is eerily calm. Not all of the songs are equally placid, but even the more uptempo numbers like "Moraga" and "Larkspur" don't feature any jarring sounds or off-putting harmonies.

My first impression of this album was that, while it was superficially appealing, there was not a lot to distinguish one track from another. Boy is that wrong. The diversity of this music is in its melodic composition, not in its instrumentation. If you think about it, that's much harder to do than simply dazzling the listener with lots of exotic "weird" instruments or effects. Over and over again, Zorn impresses with the depth and beauty of the melodies he has composed for this album. Some of the tracks touch on Latin jazz; others seem to draw on Zorn's wealth of Masada material. Each one is a self-contained world.

Considering the sheer mass of Zorn's output, it's hard to assess his work as a whole. I'm certainly not going to try. But I will say that of the several dozen Zorn albums I've heard, this one strikes me as one of the most successful and fully realized.