Photo by Scott Irvine, c. 2011

Jamie Saft: Jewish Heavy Metal Mountain Man

With a monstrous, flowing, godlike beard, multi-instrumental guru Jamie Saft resembles a Hasidic mountain man who should be jamming on meaty blues licks with his beloved ZZ Top instead of the downtown avant-gardist and John Zorn ensemble vet he is reputed to be. The catch is, dude actually makes his home upstate, living a lone wolf existence on top of a mountain upstate in the middle of fuckin' nowhere.

See also: Next Up on the Bad Brains Canonization Brigade: Shepard Fairey

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Thurston Moore (left); John Zorn.

Thurston Moore/John Zorn Duo
St. Mark's Church
Friday, May 4

Better than: Bumming about MCA alone.

Free improvisation always has religious overtones—the major free-jazzers of the '60s acknowledged this with album titles like Ascension and Spiritual Unity—so there is hardly a better space to experience it in than a church. On Friday night at St. Mark's, Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and saxophone-wielding downtown overlord John Zorn gathered congregants from rock and jazz circles to help them talk with the spirits. Outside in the East Village, NYU students and kids from New Jersey prowled the streets for a hookup; inside the more than two-century-old church, we testified.

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​The Round of 64 for Sound of the City's own version of March Madness—in which you, the Sound of the City voting public, help determine the quintessential New York musician—finishes this weekend, with the Round of 32 kicking off Monday. (The schedule and results so far are here; the full, updated bracket is here.) On our last day of first-round battles, we pit two titans of New York cool—John Zorn and Patti Smith—against one another. Check out the arguments in favor of each below, and vote at Facebook for the musician that you think should move on to the next round.

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This is the sixth year that the Killers have put out a Christmas song. Man, I feel old.

This week in the Voice I discussed The Little Drummer Boy Challenge, a sort of Frogger pitting your ears against "Christmas creep." The rules are simple: If you haven't heard "The Little Drummer Boy" in any form—including Justin Bieber's recent, Busta Rhymes-assisted update of the song—since midnight struck on Black Friday, you're in. Once you hear those rum-pa-pum-pums, though, you're out. It's a pretty maddening challenge, and Bieber's entrance into the holiday-album arena (which is only his second studio full-length!) only makes it more difficult. But there are plenty of other new holiday tunes that avoid the manger of "Drummer Boy" entirely. Four standouts below.

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Paula Court

Maybe Stockhausen next? Foreman and Zorn's "Astronome"

It's not exactly Tosca, but Astronome--a collaboration between MacArthur-genius director Richard Foreman and MacArthur-genius composer John Zorn--is an opera of sorts. In the piece, currently playing at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Foreman's funhouse mindscape animates Zorn's cacophonous, amusing, semi-headbanging score. Our reviewer, Tom Sellar, describes the production as "a head rush and a quick trip to the sublime." A compliment, indeed, so we thought we'd ask Foreman a few questions about his innovative new project.

How did your collaboration with John Zorn come about?

About four summers ago, turning the corner on Broadway and Houston, there's John. We greet each other (when John first appeared in New York, he used to spend lots of time hanging out at my loft theater at Broadway and Broome--even answering the phone!--so we've known each other for over 30 years). John says, "What are you up to," and I say, "I'm going to L.A. To do an opera with music by Michael Gordon (What to Wear)--but what about you, John, why don't you write me an opera?" And John says--"But I can't write music for words, the best I can do is an opera in Vocalise." "OK, do that. I'll stage it." John tells me he didn't believe me at first, but over the next two years I would ask him every couple of months, "Where's my opera?" So finally he calls me up one day, "Hey, Richard--I did the opera. We're doing a concert version in England. Then it'll come out as a CD on my Tzadik label and you can hear it."

So another couple of months, I get to hear it. It's very aggressive for much of its length, and I immediately think, "What the hell can I do with this unrelenting blast of music?" (John tells me recently he never expected me to agree to stage it after hearing it!)

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