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Who

Prolific saxophonist Zorn is known as the ringleader of the downtown avant-garde music scene.

Backstory

After briefly studying music in college, the Queens native dropped out and moved back to New York, where he began holding small concerts in his loft apartment in the early 1970s. Zorn's first major career success was the 1985 album The Big Gundown, a showcase of his idiosyncratic take on the music of the legendary spaghetti western composer Ennio Morricone. In the late 1980s Zorn came to further prominence as the leader of avant-garde jazz-rock supergroup Naked City. He founded his own record label, Tzadik, in 1995—it's known for releasing a wide range of genres, from jazz to classical to traditional Jewish music—and in 2005, he opened the Alphabet City performance space The Stone, which gives all ticket revenues to performers and subsists entirely on donations.

Of note

While generally classified as a jazz musician, Zorn has been influenced by everything from hardcore punk to classical to cartoon soundtracks. His fondness for experimentation can test the open-mindedness of listeners—some Zorn compositions feature musicians playing only their mouthpieces, and he's conducted performances by holding up a set of flashcards. More than anything, he's extraordinarily prolific; his outsized influence on the downtown music scene is partly due to his dizzying array of projects and collaborations. Zorn's contributions to music earned him a MacArthur "genius grant" in 2006.

For the record

Beginning in the 90s, Zorn became interested in his Jewish roots and began a fertile period of music-creation inspired by Jewish folk and klezmer, notably with his group Masada and as part of a larger project he dubbed Radical Jewish Culture. Although the critical reaction to Zorn's Jewish turn has been largely positive, he was recently the subject of a hit piece in The New Republic that called him "the living master of creative delusion" and mocked his attempts to launch a "Great Jewish Music" series around the goyish sounds of Burt Bacharach and Dave Brubeck.

Personal

The unmarried Zorn owns a trio of East Village apartments on East 7th Street that he's combined into one. (He claims to have removed the kitchen in order to cram more books and records into the space.) He spends up to six months each year in Tokyo.