No surprise an album about Baruch Spinoza sounds nerdy as hell given Spinoza was the consummate nerd, grinding glass lenses for a career and making spiders fight for fun in his goon cave and also writing the greatest post-Aquinas pre-Kant philosophical work while the entirety of Amsterdam was telling him what a nerd he was and that he should stop being a nerd if he didn’t want to have a debate about monism in which his head’s substance and extension were separated from his body’s substance and extension. Of course, this would be a fallacious argument since for Spinoza substance is essentially the causa sui, both the basis for the physical world and an attribute of God, and to separate his head from his shoulders would no more impact its substance than having your brain blasted to shreds by a John Zorn album would, but we’re talking about Calvinist debating tactics here don’t know how much good faith you were expecting.
So, when one listens to John Zorn’s prog-jazz tribute to this most iconoclastic of Jewish philosophers, which, incidentally, is the latest in a number of Zorn’s recent sonic explorations built around themes of Jewish culture, history and identity, one is struck by how little this actually evokes the philosophy of Spinoza, beyond the above glib connection to prog nerdiness and philosophy nerdiness. The album’s technically impressive certainly, and there’s a solid enough balance of proggy, mathy woo-woo and concrete, elegantly structured songwriting to keep the whole thing from descending into wank for the most part, and happily, Zorn’s inimitable saxophone SKRONK makes an always welcome return, blaring on the title track over a sludgy breakdown in that mad, manic fashion Zorn just has a way with. But the overarching theme of Spinoza’s practical philosophy, to very broadly paraphrase, is equanimity in the face of life’s vicissitudes: we all come from the substance that is god, we are all still that substance, and to that substance we return, and so life is to be faced with both joy and acceptance. And frankly, I am just not seeing any of that in the exuberant bursts of free-jazz, the frantic tempo-shifts, the extended, and frankly flabby jamming on the first half of Immanence, I’m just not seeing it.
So, maybe the music isn’t quite in tune to the concept, at least to my philistine ears. And maybe the liner notes of the album give some explanation, elucidate the thematic connection between the music and the philosopher. Either way, it would be foolish to dismiss the music within because it doesn’t live up to what my preconceptions about what it should sound like. And Spinoza, is, much moreso on the back half of the album, up there with the strongest of Zorn’s output, displaying all his affinity for eclecticism and mania with all the vitality of his Naked City days, tempered with a sober ear for arrangement and composition that heightens the effectiveness of all the blare and squeal. That moment, in the first few minutes of the title track in which Zorn’s sax SCREAMS over a meaty metal riff is bliss, the following bursts of berserk free jazz duelling with frantic stabs of Hammond organ and athletic prog-metal guitar riffing all showcasing the best of Zorn’s overtures to the underbelly of modern American Music. The 20 minute track is no doubt a marathon, but one that goes quickly, given the exhilarating whirl of structure and sonic diversity.
But it’s the aforementioned flabbiness of Immanence that bogs down the overall experience of the album, to a degree that one is struck by the difference in quality of the anemic jamminess of the former track compared to the immediate thrill of the eruptive latter. And maybe that’s too harsh towards Immanence, after all, there’s chaos and dynamicism a-plenty there, and many a moment that lives up to Zorn’s potential, especially in the final six minutes, but it was perhaps on the third multi-minute stretch of clean mezzopiano jazz guitar noodling that I really started to check my watch in earnest. The difference in focus, vigor and structure between the two tracks is that of night and day, so much so that it's very possible that the contrast is intentional. But even if this is the case, more effort really could have been made to make that contrast a little less hollow, a little less self-indulgent.
All life takes part in action, striving towards a sort of proto-will to power best fulfilled by a knowledge of and participation with the god-that-comprises-the-universe through knowledge and thought, which is the other knowable attribute of god. Again, a broad, clumsy paraphrase of Spinoza’s thought that has so little to do with the content of this album that I’m not sure what bearing it should have, if any, on its assessment. But conceptual disjuncture aside, Spinoza frustratingly showcases both the best and the wankiest aspects of Zorn’s output up to the present day. That it still shows that Zorn and company can still wild out with the best of them is no doubt impressive, more than 30 years after Naked City. And the sheer exhilaration of the title track is more than worth the price of admission. Just try to have the patience to get there.
