Joey Baron / Live Beeroth x 2 in 1999 / Two solo performances

January 19, 2013 1:06 PM

The Masada track Beeroth with gusto live at Tonic 1999 and with duende at Warsaw Summer Jazz Days 1999 features Mr. Joey Baron. Perhaps Masada's Beeroth is not your thing but you are curious about how Mr. Baron might sound all on his own? Here is a solo at Mózg and on Roulette TV.
posted by safetyfork (7 comments total)

To have a third video of Beeroth live (in Vienna) might be too much for one post, but hopefully not for the comments. I have listened to all three of these countless times by now.

Also, for the deeply committed I recommend just listening to the Roulette TV piece: the A and the V are not seamlessly sync'd.
posted by safetyfork at 1:11 PM on January 19, 2013

Hooray for Masada!

There's a lot of great Zorn on YouTube. I'm awfully partial to this Marciac 2010 set with The Dreamers (playing some Dreamers & some Masada material). Again, Joey Baron. Less of Zorn's alto. But Marc Ribot more than makes up for that.
posted by .kobayashi. at 1:28 PM on January 19, 2013 [1 favorite]

So good.

Baron, Zorn, Cohen and Douglas are amazing together... Also all great on their own...
posted by PugAchev at 1:28 PM on January 19, 2013

I love that Marciac set! The house is crazy into Masada right now. I think I have heard a variant of the Masada constellation at least once a day for the last two months. Our kid is in deep --the Beeroth track really is his favorite which is the secret history of this post-- and he drives a lot of our shared listening. Here's the full Vienna set of acoustic Masada I referenced in my first comment.

I was just thinking today how 'best of the web' it is to see so much Zorn and Masada online. That project deserves a mega post of its own but all I could scrabble together in the time I had was the Beeroth tracks from the house playlist (that, and I was really feeling the magic of Joey Baron's drumming today).
posted by safetyfork at 2:05 PM on January 19, 2013

One of the greatest shows I ever saw was Naked City, John Zorn's band with Joey Baron, Fred Frith, Bill Frisell, and Wayne Horvitz, which would change styles on a dime. On record it sounded like Zorn took a bunch of radically different performances and spliced five-second excerpts of them together. Live you could see the "splicing" in real time, and it was clear that Baron was the guy driving all of the split-second changes. It was completely mesmerizing and literally kind of unbelievable.
posted by dfan at 6:35 PM on January 19, 2013

Joey is one hella drummer, no doubt about that. I had the good fortune to play with him on a couple of occasions, specifically, performances and a recording of John Zorn's piece for two drummers and Korean narration, called 'Hwang Chin-Ee'. It was part of a series of Zorn compositions that were grouped together as New Traditions in East Asian Bar Bands.

Other drummers I performed the piece with were the fabulous Bobby Previte (on one occasion) and funky groovemeister Yuval Gabay (on another occasion). Yuval is best known as the drummer for Soul Coughing. It was fun to do the piece (which is basically a loose structure and allows the drummers a lot of free range to work it on out!) with all those guys, but I think I enjoyed doing it with Joey the most.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:22 PM on January 19, 2013 [2 favorites]

The Roulette TV clip is mesmerizing.
He has such a connection to the esthetics of the drum.
A true artist.
posted by quazichimp at 2:06 AM on January 20, 2013