Not sure if this was posted yet. Tom John Zorn's Electric Masada At the Vogue Theatre on Friday, November 8 • By Alexander Varty John Zorn's Electric Masada is likely the most conventional and least interesting project the New York City-based saxophonist has ever embarked upon. Ranked against any of his other bands, it comes up short: compared to the split-second transitions and live plunderphonics of Naked City, its music is undeveloped and predictable; compared to the telepathic chamber jazz of News for Lulu, it's self-indulgent and harmonically simple; compared to the original, acoustic Masada, it's ungainly and overamped. Compared to just about everything else out there, it's just fine. In a way, it's possible to peg Electric Masada as Zorn's reaction to the jam-band movement, although he would probably dismiss that as an overly easy analysis. Yet this group does display a lot of the traits of the genre: long guitar solos, Hammond organ, a bass player who's happy to hang onto a simple ostinato for hours on end, a double-drummer percussion attack. But the similarities to the Grateful Dead and their offspring end there. Rather than base his music on stretched-out rock-song structures, Zorn has opted to go back to one of the greatest jammers of the 20th century, Miles Davis, and pick up where the late trumpeter left off on classic albums like Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson. Sure, the melodies that Zorn's working with here are different from those employed by Miles and his in-house composers Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul, but not that different. For Friday's concert, Electric Masada investigated several of the more than 200 titles Zorn has composed based on traditional Jewish modes and scales. But Shorter was interested in Middle Eastern music and Zawinul drew on his own Eastern European heritage in his compositions; it's only a short jump from what they were writing to what Zorn is doing. And once the tunes are in place, the methodology and even the staging of the music are nearly identical. When Zorn turns his back on the crowd to conduct the band, one can't help but be reminded of Davis's self-contained—some might say antagonistic—stage presence. Roughly speaking, both Davis and Zorn build their electric music by piling up layer upon layer of sound; the geological notion of strata might be a useful metaphor. Starting with the bass guitar—a ploy Davis borrowed from James Brown's mid-'60s bands—they add drums, percussion, and keyboards, all of which play more or less continuously. Guitar and horns then solo over the top, or add contrasting bits of instrumental colour. Sometimes everything collapses into pointillistic abstraction; then the bass comes back in and the musicians are off and running again. The pace is generally speedy, but occasionally slows for dreamy, balladlike interludes. Within this context, bands succeed or fail based on their ability to communicate, and in that regard Electric Masada truly distinguished itself. All seven musicians proved such virtuoso listeners that it seems unfair to single any of them out for special praise. Unfair or not, percussionist Cyro Baptista deserves a bonus for his unflagging energy and keenly appropriate sense of timing; whenever the jamming threatened to slump into mere noodling, he was there to pick up the pace. But it likely didn't take much encouragement to get guitarist Marc Ribot, keyboardists John Medeski and Jamie Saft, bassist Trevor Dunn, and drummer Kenny Wollesen back in line. Compared to some of the high-concept situations these players have engaged in, Electric Masada must seem a bit of a holiday, and on Friday everyone certainly sounded like they were having fun.