The Big Gundown. John Zorn. 1986. Nonesuch.

The film scores of Ennio Morricone are rich with a sense of destiny. Their sensuous details come at us ornately, baroquely, packaged with the falling domino assuredness of inevitability. Invariably, there are key moments in the films that Morricone scores when some terrible plot point befalls a character and the filmmakers will cue the Morricone score as if saying, “See! We told you so.” Fate, that grandiloquent fiction created by man to further rhapsodize his self-importance, had, in Morricone, found its songsmith. John Zorn’s starkly majestic Morricone tribute record The Big Gundown is made up of a series of juxtaposed random sound motifs associated with the history of cinema soundtracks. Its aim is to restore modernism as a cultural touchstone, a stabilizing power of shared associations based not so much in the language of film music as it is in our memory of the language of film music. Alternating between nonverbal and non-English recordings of the human voice and various forms of instrumental technology, Zorn and his collaborators track the restlessness of Morricone’s creative imagination, from his compositions of the pop operatic to his scores of sweeping big screen romanticism. What’s exciting about Zorn’s reinterpretation of Morricone is the alacrity with which Zorn locates the artistic vitality of the two decades old song and then, without hesitation, applies his peerless methods of modernization to it. Ironically, scrubbed of its mythic Western sentimentality, The Big Gundown heralds the dawn of our new, twenty-first century world, where mythologies and sentimentalities are the only forms of public discourse we allow ourselves to exchange. Lacking our tribal imprimatur, objective truths evade us, and yet they’re out there, clogging our environs and threatening to erode our mythologies of self like newsprint in fire.