Naked City (band)

This article is about the band. For the American TV series of the 1960s, see Naked City (TV series).

Naked City was a John Zorn-led avant-garde music group that incorporated recognizable elements of jazz, grindcore, surf music, metal, punk rock and literally dozens of other music genres. Naked City were active primarily in New York City in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The project was initiated by Zorn as a "composition workshop"[1] to test the limits of composition (and improvisation) in a traditional rock band lineup. Efforts were discontinued when Zorn stopped "thinking in terms of" the band. A brief reunion occurred in 2003 for a few shows at European jazz festivals.

In Naked City's characteristic early style, songs were often performed at astonishingly fast tempi (drawing heavily on thrash metal and hardcore punk's emphasis on extreme speed). Many songs were quite brief, and typically switched musical genres every few measures, compared to spinning a radio dial at random and hearing the same band performing on every station. One critic described Naked City's music as "jump-cutting micro-collages of hardcore, Country, sleazy jazz, covers of John Barry and Ornette Coleman, brief abstract tussles — a whole city crammed into two or three minute bursts." [2] This fast-change tendency was inspired in part by Carl Stalling — a Zorn favorite — who wrote music for many Warner Brothers cartoons (featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and others); music that featured frequent shifts in tempo, theme and style.

They varied their stylistic approach on later releases. The cover repertoire was expanded to include various modern classical composers, like Alexander Scriabin, Claude Debussy, Charles Ives, and Olivier Messiaen. Leng T'che featured a single piece, over 31 minutes in length, of slow heavy metal. Torture Garden was made up of several "BDSM miniatures," and Absinthe was all ambient textures.

Naked City found perhaps their greatest following among the fans of the many death metal, metal and grindcore bands with which they performed, such as Blind Idiot God, Napalm Death, Carcass and Live Skull.

Naked City's recordings were originally distributed by Elektra Nonesuch, and their first album for Elektra featured a Weegee photo. There was, however, disagreement over cover art: Zorn wanted to use explicit S&M, graphic crime scene and execution photos, most notoriously of a Leng Tch'e victim; Elektra Nonesuch refused. Zorn ended his relationship with Elektra, releasing subsequent Naked City albums on Shimmy Disc or his own Avant or Tzadik records.

Band members

• John Zorn: saxophone, composer, bandleader.
• Bill Frisell: guitar
• Wayne Horvitz: synthesizer, piano
• Fred Frith: bass guitar
• Joey Baron : drums

with:

• Yamatsuka Eye: vocals.