John Zorn

In 1987 John Zorn, George Lewis, and Bill Frisell were all members of New York’s thriving, conceptually-minded downtown scene. They approached the Blue Note material with a considered artistic agenda — to test its capacity for tolerance of outside techniques, and to critique bop’s ethos of individuality, which required many of its practitioners to trade a life of penury and exploitation for the chance to attain individual expression on the bandstand. — Bill Meyer