Brooklyn’s Roulette Room hosts two concerts featuring John Zorn on the occasion of his 70th birthday.
September 2nd marks the 70th birthday of New York composer and saxophonist John Zorn. In anticipation of the event, Brooklyn’s Roulette Hall began programming a series of concerts featuring Zorn on 26 March to mark his birthday. If that spring day served as the first part of the event christened Zorn@70, with the presentation of The New Masada Quartet, this coming Sunday, 13 August, the second of the four Zorn@70 concerts will take place, in which Zorn will perform one of his most celebrated pieces, Cobra, which he premiered in 1984 precisely at Roulette. Cobra has been performed on numerous occasions, but Zorn deliberately decided never to publish the piece, conceptually conceived as an experimental game peace, improvised, but with fixed rules, which will feature guitarists Wendy Eisenberg and Taylor Levine, bassist Trevor Dunn, double bassist Jorge Roeder, violist Alexandra Simpson, cellist Michael Nicolas, pianist Brian Marsella, keyboardist Ikue Mori and percussionists Kenny Wollesen, Sae Hashimoto and Ches Smith drums, with Zorn as conductor and a special guest on violin still to be announced…
A few days later, on Sunday 27 August, John Zorn will return to the Roulette’s stage in a trio formation, with Laurie Anderson and Sean Ono Lennon, a line-up that first came into being as part of the Benefit for Disaster Aid in Turkey and Syria following the earthquake of 6 February, organised by Zorn himself and Roulette twenty days after the event.
The fourth and last of the Zorn@70 concerts will take place on 14 September, days after his birthday, and will consist of four world premieres of works by Zorn – Circe, for two trumpets; Philosophical Investigations, for The Junction Trio; Partita for the Firebird, for violin, and I Am your Labyrinth… – performed by some of the most important musicians of the international avant-garde: pianist Conrad Tao, violinists Stefan Jackiw and Jennifer Choi, cellist Jay Campbell, bassist Jorge Roeder, percussionist Ches Smith and trumpeters Peter Evans and Sam Jones.