John Zorn — The Dreamers
Where his other album forays into more popular and approachable musically fields such as Taboo and Exile and The Gift have had either more fiery and avant tracks too, or had underling motives and commentary on the blandness of society. The Dreamers seems to focus purely on shaping, moulding and making dramatic, soothing and almost always tuneful tracks. On board we have long term Zorn players such as; Joey Baron on Drums, Marc Ribot on Guitars, Jamie Saft on Keyboards, Trevor Dunn on Bass. Along with Zorn’s sax playing on one track and Cyro Baptista on Percussion and Kenny Wollesen on Vibes.
The musical output here is an easy and never too jarring mix of exotica, surf rock, harmonic rock, jazz, funk, blues and cinematic moments. It feels often like a more open, varied and relaxed extension of the material on The Gift, but with a greater dominance of Marc Ribot's passionate and emotional electric guitar playing and soloing.One track in particular Mystic Circles sounding very much like a supped up, layered up and more percussive version of Samarkan from The Gift, but I guess we can allow him one clear nod back to The Gift as the rest of the material here is original and fresh
The packaging as often the way with Tzadik and Zorn releasers is worth a mention, It's a card gatefold cover with kids bedroom like wall paper covered with cartoon animal pictures, with a set of stickers of a few of the characters inside along with inlay notes on tracing paper like stock similar to what was used on the Naked City Box set book. A real pleasure of an album, played with great flare and passion- lets hope like The Gift Zorn decides to do some live shows with this material.