Arranged By : John Zorn,Naked City
Bass : Fred Frith
Drums : Joey Baron
Guitar : Bill Frisell
Keyboards : Wayne Horvitz
Mastered By : Bob Ludwig
Mixed By : Roger Moutenot
Recorded By : Roger Moutenot
Vocals : Yamatsuka Eye
Written-By : John Zorn
Tracks 1,3,4,6,7,10 to 21,23,25,26 writen by John Zorn
INFO / BIO
Naked City is an album by John Zorn , originally released on Nonesuch Records in 1990. The band which would become known under the same name included Zorn on alto saxophone with Bill Frisell on guitar, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, Fred Frith on bass and Joey Baron on drums, and was established in 1988
as a "compositional workshop" to test the limitations of a rock band format
.
The Allmusic review by Scott Yanow awarded the album 5 stars stating "The stimulating music rewards repeated listenings by more open-minded listeners". Guy Peters stated "John Zorn’s Naked City-project was about the most far out you could get, and Zorn’s exploration of what he “could come up with given the limitations of the simple sax, guitar, keyboard, bass, drums-format” became the pinnacle of avant coolness... The result was a post-modern hybrid that cut up sequences as he saw fit and treated all genres equally: jazz, grindcore and country & western, were allowed to coexist, even in the same song ".
Pitchfork Media ranked this album at 47 on their Top 100 Albums of the 1980s list . Their review of The Complete Studio Recordings stated "On Naked City, Zorn introduced an amped-up surf/lounge/punk band featuring downtown New York's biggest talents, who blast and din through the 'James Bond' theme song, the theme to Chinatown, and a sound portrait of New Orleans' Latin Quarter-- and then right when they slip into a groove, out of nowhere,
the band launches punishing blasts of noise and catastrophe, flaming wreckage that blows up and collapses on a dime
