A guide to John Zorn's music
Anything and everything goes in Zorn's constantly evolving musical world: his pieces are a vision of what happens when postmodern practices become something much more meaningful

John Zorn. Finding any one label to define the man and his work is pretty well impossible, but that impossibility reveals just how important his music is. You'll see what I mean.

Perennially youthful – even though he's 60 next year – Zorn, who was born and lives in New York, is a Pulitzer-prize nominated composer of pieces for classical musicians, a saxophonist (he's one of the most thrillingly inventive improvising players out there), an impresario – founder of the Tzadik record label, he also runs a club – The Stone, for experimental and avant-garde music, and he has done more to support and sustain an entire generation of musicians in the downtown New York scene than anybody else.

Pause for breath, but there's much, much more. In the 70s, Zorn created a new kind of collaborative composition for supergroups of improvising musicians, his series of "game pieces", he's worked with everyone from Derek Bailey to Slayer's drummer Dave Lombardo, and ex-Faith No More and Fantômas vocalist Mike Patton, he has created a repertoire of what he calls "radical Jewish music", his ongoing Masada project, and has composed films for the ears, masterpieces of aural cinema, Godard and Spillane. And all that's just the tip of the Zornian musical iceberg. He was most famous in the 80s for his Ennio Morricone reworkings, The Big Gundown, and for founding the world's most avant-garde pop band, Naked City (with guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Fred Frith, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, and drummer Joey Baron) which took the world's collective ear by storm.

What looks on the surface like a bewildering array of forms and styles in his music is connected, Zorn says, by the way he deals with his material. That means that whether it's the high-concept grindcore of his trio Painkiller, the ferocious energy of the Game Pieces, or the apparently chaotic changeability of such music as his solo piano piece, Carny – one of the most important works for the instrument of recent decades, I think – there's something that makes you realise you can only be listening to music Zorn has created. This isn't a question of style – how can it be, when this is a musician who has written everything from a purely visual music he called the Theatre of Musical Optics to orchestral pieces? – it's a sense that Zorn is able to virtuosically inhabit the worlds of the musicians with whom he's working, whether they're string quartets, chamber ensembles, or experimental-metal combos, and at the same time to be critical, objective and creative about their conventions, to turn their usual ways of doing things on their heads. That means he can ask his musicians to go places they have never been before. Heavy metal never sounded like this – but then neither has the string quartet.

John Zorn performing in 1989
John Zorn performing in 1989. Photograph: Peter Williams/Corbis
The way Zorn works means he's often reusing music by Ornette Coleman, Ives, Stockhausen, or Bartók, and indeed any and all of the musical material he finds and hears, anywhere. His "file-card" pieces, like Carny or For Your Eyes Only for chamber orchestra, are made from fragments of found material, reorchestrated or set in a new context, but essentially based on music Zorn took from pre-existing sources, everything from cartoon scores to Boulez. But the effect is more than musical channel-surfing or a postmodern pig-out: these pieces are a vision of what happens when postmodern practices become something much more meaningful.

Zorn is always in charge of what you're hearing, even if he didn't write any of the original notes of these pieces. What he's doing is controlling what happens when, how long each fragment or musical file-card lasts, the music's flow of ideas, of textures. That's similar to what he's doing when he's leading one of his Game Pieces for a group of his favourite musicians: he's not controlling what sounds the musicians play, but their intensity, their character, how long they play for, and in what combination.

Zorn is an essential composer for me, because he is living proof of the truism that everything – every sound, every style, even, more controversially, every culture – is available to composers today to use as musical material. And he shows the wildness, weirdness and wonder of what's possible.

But as soon as you think you've managed to get a handle on what Zorn is up to, the next project will pull the rug out from your feet. Who else could have turned easy listening into something strangely seductive but disturbing with his album The Gift, or reconceived metal extremica as a route to occultist spirituality in the albums he made with Mike Patton, Joey Baron, and bassist Trevor Dunn since 2006's Moonchild? There are new classical pieces, new collaborations, new forms of musical expression that Zorn is inventing on an apparently monthly basis. Keeping up with Zorn may be a near-impossible task, but your musical life will be richer, stranger, and noisier, if you try. (The Guardian)