John Zorn's Racket

Here's an abstract I recently submitted to a conference.

In 1984, avant-garde composer and saxophonist, John Zorn, teamed up with Japanese samishen player, Sato Michihiro, to create an album called Ganryu Island. Matching Zorn’s staccato attack with the Japanese master’s legendary shamisen, the forty-three minute, improvised sound explosion confronts listeners with a meditation on a legendary Samurai movie of the same name directed by Hiroshi Inagaki in 1956. This paper treats Ganryu Island, the album, as a strategic sound intervention that confronts the exoticized image of the East that circulates through the American imaginary in the form of the martial arts film. Whereas theoretical explorations of film scores may typically focus on the ways in which, on the one hand, they are able to add emphasis to or underscore the emotional movement of the plot and the development of characters, or, on the other hand, how the film score acts diagetically by entering the narrative sphere of the film to provide subtexts or alternate ways of understanding a film’s action, this paper takes another route. I suggest that, when the Zorn/Michihiro album meets the Inagaki film, there is a face-off between two types of racket: Zorn’s and Michihiro’s sonic racket forged by the hybrid saxophone-reed-shamisen—an arsenal of musical notes and percussive strikes—against the capitalist racket of the Samurai movie, which has formed a massive fan base since the introduction of Bruce Lee to Americans in the early 1970s. Through an in-depth examination of both Ganryu Islands, this paper highlights a specific mode of musical intervention. Ganryu Island, an entirely improvised musical work, does more than simply to underscore the emotional movement of the plot and the development of characters by engaging with qualities shared by music and martial arts: "Martial arts and music share the same principles. Both wrestle with complex harmonies and elusive melodies." The improvised playing of the instruments by two master musicians parallels the sword-fighting techniques employed by the samurai and thus, I believe, makes a move to reclaim the fighting style from the realm of the merely exotic. In doing this, Zorn’s and Michihiro’s film score challenges the view of the samurai tradition as something medieval, ancient, or outdated. Theorizing this album and this film in this way sheds light on a modernist and capitalist act of fetishizing the other, which is caught up in a greater paradigm of progress and Enlightenment epistemologies that are active in present-day American culture yet often remain invisible, disguised in the form of the “normal”. In this paper, I will draw specifically on theorists Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Michel Foucault to flesh out my argument and to examine the fascinating sound and film event that is Ganryu Island.