John Zorn’s Masada Marathon is hands down the best way to experience his musical genius and compositional versatility. John is such a complete artist, incredible organizer and catalyst for the NYC downtown scene. The diversity of his body of work is incredible and ranges from classical to metal passing through jazz, klezmer, world music. With 12 bands, 15 min each, 11 stage changes, 4 hours of live music written by Zorn, the Masada Marathon is the best way to experience all of this and probably one of the harder gigs I’ve done as a live sound engineer. Took a couple of months of pre-production and setting up the stage at 8am to be ready for a 1pm soundcheck. Considerate how lively and washy Lincoln Center can be with loud music (which it obviously wasn’t designed for) I’m pretty happy with the outcome, sonically speaking, but I am of corse my harshest critic.
We’ve done this in Milan and Montreal before and I can’t wait for John to do it again somewhere else in the world. Audiences are always delighted and blown away, as they should! It’s a pretty spectacular and unique show!