on 12/5/02 5:00 PM, Herb Levy at herb@eskimo.com wrote:
Skip & all,
I'm not trying to defend the all-too-often one-dimensional nature of most identity politics, & I'm not denying there are lots of fools who'll believe just about anything somewhere. But I'm also not writing about Frank London (who wasn't mentioned in the post I was replying to).
No, you weren't. But Frank -- and I like Frank personally -- really flies the flag in interviews A LOT, and he and several other people have really promoted this adgenda of Radical Jewish Music and/or Jewish Alternative Music.
Zorn just seems to have a lot more complex agenda re: RJC than a merely essentialist political "movement." If he didn't, there's really very little explanation for many of the more abstract CDs to be included in the series. (& if he didn't, it MIGHT make sense to assume that he thinks the discs he's released in this series should be the backbone of a new book for bar mitzvah bands). But that really doesn't seem to be a plausible explanation for the full range of what he's presented under the rubric of RJC.
My theory is that he's really just trying to document every possible aspect of (what he feels is) Jewish music.
I can think of plenty of reasons to criticize aspects of what Zorn has tried to do over the years, but this analysis puts far too much emphasis on one possible reading of a single word, ignoring a lot of what he's done & reductively lumping him together with musicians (& others) who have a far less nuanced sense of what they're up to.
Which word -- "radical" or "Jewish"? And I'm not being glib. I agree with you on the level where we're talking but Zorn. But with other musicians who have decided to get under that banner, play festivals devoted to this vein of music. I'm not criticizing Zorn at all on this level, because he really backs up his words with compositions that immediately reflect what he's talking about. I thought I was pretty clear about separating him, Krakauer, and Goldberg from the pack. Why I am dissing is a lot of sky-high rhetoric from people who are obviosuly using this banner to get gigs and make records. You're being too charitable to call these people "less nuanced". I am not exactly burdened by such good manners. sh