You have to admit that consistently doing this to critics and fans for almost 50 years is a feat.

“If you don’t think this is music, you can get the fuck out of here.” With a million happy customers every year, these are not words you associate with audiences or performers at the Montreal Jazz Festival. But John Zorn’s F-bomb from the stage was aimed at one of many agitated audience members who expressed their displeasure over the evening’s all-star trio of himself, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. No doubt a large part of the audience was expecting “Sweet Jane,” “Walk on the Wild Side,” or even Anderson’s “O Superman.” Instead, it was a free improv showdown that shocked the crowd, prompting dozens to walk out after two songs.

Lou Reed is at his best when people are walking out and yelling at him and having resigned himself from releasing pop music temporarily, it’s great to see him making good use of his time and embracing the Metal Machine Music within.

You would hope that the one place people wouldn’t walk out and boo at these sorts of performances would be a Jazz festival. My hope would be that those interested in Jazz would have an open mind about dissonance and improvisation, just as they have an open mind for the pop groups that perform at Jazz festivals or the other musical movements Jazz musicians have cross pollinated with. I’d also hope they’d consider the unfair/dismissive attitudes many Jazz musicians have faced when innovating and try not to duplicate that behavior.

But, you ask, “Does it meet a definition of Jazz?”

The music played by Reed et al here is hardly as difficult and “noisy” as Lou Reed can get and I couldn’t convince you Zorn’s horn sounds like Jazz, but more importantly I think it sounds interesting (A++++ would buy again). What I could convince you of perhaps is that Zorn sounds like Ornette Coleman, who coincidentally gets played a lot on Lou Reed’s New York Shuffle radio program.

In 1989, Zorn recorded Spy vs Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman, a hardcore punk collection of Ornette Coleman compositions that sounded like this… well it’s not on youtube, so forget it. Maybe I’ll find it later.

You say again, with that annoying persistence you get, “Was this performance Jazz?” To me that’s a boring question and echoes the ever-present “is this art?” question you’d likely hear in a freshman seminar. Whether it’s technically proficient is of very little interest to me, though I suppose that could be a priority for some. Personally, I can think of few things less exciting than virtuosity. Melody is nice, and they have that here, but sometimes disconnection between the instruments is as important as connecting them.

I prefer to ask the following when faced with a work:

“Is this interesting?”

“Does it move me?”

“What is it saying?”

“Why is it happening?”

So here’s the Thing: