Trey Spruance on John Zorn.

John Zorn held a yellow card up in front of his school of avant-garde musicians: a ten piece group, consisting of two acoustic bass players, two drummers, two guitar players, two violins, a keyboardist and a vocalist-tape-looper. An electric and eclectic array of sounds, strictly governed by the rules of Zorn's ongoing musical gamepiece Cobra, spewed forth.

The sounds ranged from modern jazz, electronic tribal drumming, spacey ritualistic hymns, funk, an opera sample, a bluesy beat, an esoteric tangled tangent of looping tapes, and a couple of punky guitar twists. In the jazz tradition of Charles Mingus, a loosely structured and highly improvised workshop of difficult and beautiful music is born. The music breathes with textures, variety, constant changes in attitude, and a sense of fun from the musicians performing it.

Trey Spruance who performed with Cobra and is best known for his composing/guitar work with Mr. Bungle commented on the piece:

"It's a game and everybody plays with and against each other. Categories of calls (musical choices) can be made by each player, and they have to get the prompters attention, who in this case is Zorn. Then he holds up the card and everybody recognizes what the card is -- that card indicates what that person called, by pointing to his mouth and then holding up a corresponding number. Once you have Zorn's attention and you've made that call he'll grab the card, hold it up, and then you indicate to him which players you'd like to see do that, if it's a call that requires you to specify who's going to play. Once that's understood the music that's been going on gets cut off as soon as he brings the card down; then you embark on a new sound".

"There are six categories of calls that you can make: mouth, nose, eye, ear, head, palm, and those are the hand cues that you use. The mouth cues have four permutations for instance, and the a head cues have three permutations".

"There are different categories of sound instructions that are indicated by the first hand signal that you do -- you point to your eye, which is one category of four calls, your nose, which is a category of three calls or your mouth. There are five categories and then you can hold up one, two, or three, four, five fingers. Each one of those has one type of manipulation of the sound, Like one category has these things called events, where a number of events that will occur can be whatever you want . . ."

"There's nothing in Cobra that indicates stylistically what is going to come out -- except for in the complicated part of the piece which is called the "Guerrilla Systems." In which people put on the headbands, and whoever is wearing the headband is in control. In this part of the game there's one call that can be made in that's called "Sensing," which is where whoever makes the initial call has to start playing in a very recognizable musical style. Then his two spotters in the squadron he's signaled out of the group have play in a contrasting style -- a musical style that's recognizable and conflicts with the original style. But that's the only time where the kind of music to be played is specified".

"Some people misinterpret it and think this is a war game piece, and forget about the fact that you're supposed to be making music that's enjoyable to listen to. That luckily didn't happen this time. This is just a way to field a lot of different players with many different ways of playing".

"What I thought was the most interesting thing about the Cobra we did was the Sound Memory cues, which are head cues. When somebody calls Sound Memory -- a certain sound can be happening that's really amazing and you don't want to see it go away -- so you make the call "Sound Memory One" and that tells everybody to write down what they were doing at that moment, and you can bring that back at any point in the piece".

"There are three of those per piece that are available to you, and that is a compositional tool within Cobra. That's something players can use to keep them from hopping from lily pad to lily pad, new sound, new sound -- it's something you can do to bring a little bit of the compositional element back into the piece. There are compositional devices you can use if you're good at making calls."

He has also been a major influence on Mr. Bungle. Although they're reluctant to admit it, there's a huge difference between the cartoony eclectic rock band they used to be and the innovative movie soundtrack style composers they have become.

As Danny Heifetz, Mr. Bungle's drummer says, "We had the new album written before we even met John Zorn. Sure there was an impact in the group he had compositionally. Particularly on two people I have in mind, their manners in composition were changed. I can definitely hear some influences. Zorn's own compositional style is not completely his own, he borrows from so many people himself. He was a short cut to getting to all these other composers. I'm not knocking his style, but he not only opened people's ears to his work, but to where he borrows his compositional styles from."

With his influence spreading from New York to Japan (He spends six months of every year in Japan and has left a permanent imprint on the music of the Boredoms) one wonders is Zorn, like Mingus, developing his own school of sound?

Trey Spruance answers: "Zorn can do that because he's such a respectable player that he meets all these great musicians who will take his ideas to an interesting place. If you write music that's dependent on other people's good sense on where the music should go then you damn well better have people who can do it. I don't think it's going to be a music of the future because it's so hard to get in that position, but it is something that will be with us in a certain capacity."

"Other people are trying to do it and incorporate loose elements of noise and things, but for me it's getting really tired and boring. I'm not getting sick of "Cobra," but just jack-off improv music is really starting to bug me. Personally I'm fond of musical compositions and I definitely love Cobra and Zorn's way of composing, but there's a lot of loose improv shit that's going on that's really, really prevalent: "We can't have structure, that's old, blah, blah, blah." It gets so reduced. I want to put some constraints on everybody's freedom because I'm tired of hearing this shit. I'm hoping that people will put emphasis on composition in the future."