Naked City
recorded 1989
released 1990
ONE DISC: twenty-six tracks, 55 minutes

This is the first Naked City album. I'd say it's the best one, but then I'm biased — this is the first Zorn album I bought, back in 1996.

If They Might Be Giants hired the best jazz players in New York to make a heavy metal album, it would sound like this. (The major difference is the sense of humor. Zorn's sense of humor is more subtle than TMBGs.)
From The Wire:

Zorn debuted Naked City on Nonesuch in 1989. He denied that it was a supergroup, citing The Golden Palominos as an example of why supergroups never really work. But as ad hoc groupings of musicians go this pretty much brought together the cream of the 80s NYC downtown set. Naked City marks out the group's territory: jump-cutting micro-collages of hardcore, Country, sleazy jazz, covers of John Barry and Ornette Coleman, brief abstract tussles — a whole city crammed into two or three minute bursts.

The album's poles are its finest moments and somehow sum up all that the group seemed to do best: a 'suite' of ultra-brief thrashes which still manage to jump genres two or three times in the space of a couple of bars, and a gorgeous rendering of Jerry Goldsmith's untouched theme from Chinatown, which emerges magically from a haze of free improvisation.

The cover is a famous photograph by Weegee. Some record stores carry the album with the back of the CD booklet as the cover: an illustration of a Japanese girl with a snake slithering through her face. Apparently, this is considered less disturbing than the photo of a man laying on the sidewalk with a bullet wound in his face.



Zorn: The music I wrote for Naked City is the kind of music that gets better the more it is played. I wanted to improve the quality of my live performances and using the same musicians served precisely this end.

The Naked City project (which, compared to the completely improvised ones, is based on composition) was to see how many kinds of music can be made with the same ensemble, to write very different things for the same group.

Nineteen of the 26 songs were written by Zorn. The others were written by John Barry, Ennio Morricone, Henry Mancini, Johnny Mandel, Ornette Colman, Georges Delerue, and Jerry Goldsmith.