Over the course of the past three decades, saxophonist and composer John Zorn has amassed a staggering body of work. Starting with his early experiments in structured improvisation games, Zorn has taken an iconoclastic and omnivorous approach to music throughout his career, drawing elements of modern classical, free jazz and soundtrack music as well as sounds from the more extreme experimental fringes of hardcore punk, metal and industrial music.

Zorn first came to wider appreciation through his remarkable recorded tributes to Italian soundtrack maestro Ennio Morricone ('The Big Gundown,' released in 1985 on Nonesuch) and Ornette Coleman (the corrosive collection 'Spy vs Spy,' released in 1989 on Elektra Musician), but his own music soon came to the fore. The explosive jazz-punk of Naked City -- a super group featuring Zorn alongside such luminaries as guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Fred Frith, keyboard player Wayne Horovitz and drummer Joey Baron -- and the saxophonist's explorations of grindcore with Painkiller (a trio with bassist Bill Laswell and Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris) made Zorn a hero for fans of both experimental jazz and heavy music in the late '80s.

While Zorn has continued to record soundtrack music at a feverish rate, starting in the early '90s, he began to focus much of his attention on his Masada songbook project. A conscious attempt to push traditional Jewish music into the the modern era, the Masada songbook puts a 21st century twist on traditional sephardic scales of klezmer. Performing the music around the globe with his acoustic Masada Quartet (with includes drummer Baron, trumpet player Dave Douglas and bassist Greg Cohen), Zorn revealed a level of melodicism only hinted at by some of his soundtrack work. The prolific artist took time to talk to KTVU.com in advance of his six-day residency at Yoshi's in San Francisco largely dedicated to showcasing his Masada songbooks with performances by local avant-rock band Secret Chiefs 3, the Masada String Trio, both the acoustic Masada Quartet and the volcanic Electric Masada group and much more.

KTVU.com: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.

John Zorn: Glad to do it. I don't do it often, but I'm really excited about this run at Yoshi's…

KTVU.com: So am I! When I see all the shows you play in New York City, I get really sad that I'm not there and don't get to see what you're doing there. The last time you were in the Bay Area for more than a single show was Edgefest in Berkeley in 2004, from what I could tell…

John Zorn: Yeah. I have a lot of friends in the Bay Area and I go there quite often to hang with Willie Wynant, Larry Ochs, Mike Patton. And I have a lot of other friends there like Fred Frith, Henry Kaiser and Bruce Ackley. It really goes on and on, my connection to the Bay Area goes back to 1973. I do go there quite often. But when I've played - you're right - it's been a single one off or quick hit with Mike or the ROVA people or doing a game piece or what have you. This is the first chance that I've had to bring what I've been working on for the past some 20 years out to this beautiful city that I love so much.

I really want to thank Peter Williams at Yoshi's [the club's artistic director] for making it possible. He's really going out on a limb to do it. I hope that people come out to support it. Live music is a very important and special event. We have to make sure it survives and keeps going.

KTVU.com: With all the musicians in the area you've been associated with and worked with in the past, it seems like someone could have approached you to do a residency with just local collaborators…

John Zorn: This is something I've been doing more often in Europe. I got very tired of being on airplanes. You know a musician's life; to perform involves a lot of travel. And my body is just beginning to say 'Don't put me there again.' A typical tour for a musical group you hit 12 different cities; every day a different place. Some bands go out for a month or two months. By the time I was doing Naked City in the '80s, I was already restricting my touring to two weeks tops. Then it became one week tops. Then it became 'I'll go just for single hits, just for a couple of days and come back,' which is difficult.

So my new plan as of about a year or two ago, is instead of taking one band to 12 different cities, I take 12 bands to one city. Do a residency. Take one plane there, one plane home, and spend a week in a city. Get to know it and really get to present a wide variety of what I'm up to. That's been really satisfying and fulfilling to not just do one hit and split. To get some time to know the city. Because I'm involved in so many different things, it became absurd to just do one concert or one gig. I felt that was no longer a true presentation of what I'm about.

So I did a residency in Paris: 5 days at the Cite de la Musique and at the Salle Pleyel. I did many of the bands performing at Yoshi's in addition to some classical concert things and some of the rock bands like Moonchild and projects with Bill Laswell such as Painkiller. I did it in Italy as well. I'm going to be doing it at North Sea [Jazz Festival in the Netherlands] this year and am going back to Polermo [in Italy] to do it there. So I've been very fortunate to present this retrospective in a variety of cities around the world. It's delightful to do in SF, because it's really the only other city in the states that I've spent a lot of time in.

KTVU.com: Your output is so voluminous I have to admit it's kind of hard to keep up. When I was preparing to speak to you, I went out and bought a few albums to catch up. The band I was most curious about was Electric Masada since I'd seen you play several times with the Masada Quartet. I was just floored by the band's intensity. It's one of my favorite musical discoveries in ages…

John Zorn: That's a great band. It should be exciting to present that band again. It's hard for us to get together, but when we do, it really takes off.

KTVU.com: It touches on some of the noise aspects of Naked City, but it also to me echoes some of the music of one of my favorite groups ever, the mid-1970s electric group Miles Davis led. I was wondering what the genesis of electric band was and if you knew the direction you wanted to take the band?

John Zorn: The Electric Masada band came about in an interesting way. I was at a midnight show at Tonic [a now closed Manhattan club] some years back. It must have been six or seven years ago. It was a very fine presentation by a great musician doing really interesting music and there was nobody there. And I was like 'Man, this is great, but people just aren't coming out. What's going on? Why aren't they coming out? Why don't they care about this music that's happening?' So I scratching my head and trying to figure out 'Well, what would they be excited about? What would be very exciting for an audience to hear?' And that's where I came up with the Electric Masada Group.

I just put together a band that I thought was really wild and decided to take some of the Masada material and try to push the envelope. So we brought in some influences from Naked City and even from Cobra some of the downbeats and some of the spontaneous conduction techniques that are used in game pieces like Cobra are brought to the fore in the Electric Masada group. As well as the Masada music which, as you know now, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. So many different bands have been performing it.

KTVU.com: The breadth of your output over the past two decades has been impressive between the Masada songbook, your soundtrack work and a variety of other bands. When you started the Masada project, did have any inkling it would grow to this size?

John Zorn: You never know what's going to happen with a project. You begin it because it's interesting and you're passionate about it and it hits a lot of places that are meaningful to you and do the best you can with it. And how can you know what's going to happen? You never know. That's one of the beautiful things; I don't have those kinds of goals. I just kind of live my life a day at a time.

The project for Masada was to create something positive in the Jewish tradition something that maybe takes the idea of Jewish music into the 21st century the way jazz developed from the teens and 1920s into the '40s, the '50s, the '60s and on. That was something that was very inspiring. My idea was 'Well, can that happen with Jewish music as well?'

Why is Jewish music only considered cantorial and klezmer? Let's see if we can make some modern statements using new ideas and young imagination and new inst and create something positive. I began writing tunes. My initial plan was to write 100 tunes in a year that touched upon the Jewish tradition and that was an interesting challenge. It was really fun as a composer to come home and write a something that could be finished sometimes in 10 minutes, sometimes in an hour or sometimes an evening. I'd never worked that way before, although Naked City had some pieces that were kind of like that.

The Masada songbook was really something that was like the Irving Berlin songbook or the Burt Bacharach songbook or the Thelonius Monk songbook. Here's another lifetime for me. So when I look at what's been accomplished in the world of Masada, it's kind of unbelievable. Of course I had no idea at the times I started. My initial idea was to write a hundred tunes. And then I ended up writing over 200 for the first book and then performed it countless time for years.

After 10 years of performing the first book, I thought 'Maybe it'd be nice to write some more tunes.' And I wrote 300 more tunes. When I started writing those it was 'Let's see if I can write a hundred songs in a month this time.' I've been working on these scales and playing these tunes all this time. In the back of my head somewhere are lodged all kinds of new ideas. Let's see if I can come up with 100 tunes in a month instead of in a yr. So in the first month, I popped out a hundred tunes; the second month, another hundred; in the third month, a third 100 tunes. I had no idea that was going to happen.

And now there's already a third book, so you never really know what's going to happen next. At least in my life I don't know. That's one of the beautiful things. That's what makes me want to celebrate the joy of life. There's always a surprise and there's always something inspiring and challenging around the corner. If you just keep yourself involved and keep yourself focused and make sure that you're not distracted by everything that's around us, you can get a lot of work done.

KTVU.com: You've did a retrospective of first Masada songbook on the tenth anniversary of the project and looked back on a number of past bands for your 50th birthday celebration, playing with a different act each night for the month-long series of shows at Tonic in New York. You seem open to revisiting early music from your career. I was wondering if fans will have a chance to see Naked City again or would you would ever revisit the albums 'Spillane' or 'The Big Gundown' in a live format?

John Zorn: No, that's not so interesting. I don't thing that's going to happen. Naked City got together around my 50th birthday to do two performances in Europe. We did great shows and it was fun to see each other again and it was certainly a challenge to play the music. We'd listen to the tune and look at the charts and say "S--t! How did we ever do that s--t so fast?"

But slowly we tweaked it up and we managed to make it work. But it was very evident to all of us that this was really music form another part of our lives. And it's very important for me to present something onstage that's very honest and I don't know if I feel that music the way I felt it back then. So I don't feel like I can do that. I don't think Naked City will ever get together again. I mean you never say never. You never know what's going to happen, like I said. I don't know what the future has in store. But if you were to ask me right now is Naked City going to get together again, I'd say absolutely not. Forget it. That's the furthest thing from my mind. I have other things to do. I don't celebrate the past in that way.

As far as the Morricone record, I put in a lot of time doing other people's music and paying tribute to my heroes. That was mostly in the '80s that I did that. And it was very satisfying and exciting to do, both for the players and for the audience and for myself. But I think I've put my time in and I'm not interested in interpreting other people's works anymore.

KTVU.com: You have plenty of your own songs to work with, obviously…

John Zorn: I've got a lot on my plate, and I'm not one of these guys who wants to relive my days of beatnik glory. That's not my modus operandi. I want to keep moving forward come up w/ new ideas and try things out. I think my role in this society -- on the planet -- is to take some chances and to make some music and ask some questions. Some of what I do is entertaining and fun for people to listen to, but entertainment is not why I'm doing this. This is art music. This is music that in some ways can raise questions and can deal with consciousness and -- I honestly believe -- can make the world a better place.

[A discussion about John Zorn's label Tzadik -- which puts out his records as well as those of a myriad of other artists -- and his work ethic that followed at this point was unfortunately lost to a digital recorder malfunction.]

KTVU.com: You've been closely associated with a couple of New York City venues like the Knitting Factory and Tonic. I wanted to ask you about your current artist-focused performance space, the Stone. To what extent do you use that as a forum to workshop new material and how deep is your involvement?

John Zorn: Well that's how I started out. I mean I started playing in my living room, you know? In my little one room apartment and two people would come upstairs and I'd do a concert for them. That's like 1975. And actually, at that time, one of the two people listening to what I was doing was Kazunori Sugiyama, who helps me run Tzadik. So this is a tightly knit community and we've really stuck together.

I've always thought of what I do as concert music. We had to play in clubs and bars by default, because we had no other place to play. We did what we could where we could. And we worked in places like the Knitting Factory and Tonic because the people that ran those establishments appreciated we brought in a crowd. I wouldn't exactly say they were philanthropists; these are business people. As long as you brought in a crowd, you were fine. If you didn't bring in a crowd, then you were not fine. Business is business.

I've existed in the marketplace not in the ivory tower of asking Uncle Sam for grant money. Grants are problematic. Sometimes the money comes way late, where you're already on to another project when the money comes in for a project you wanted to do years back. It's all f----d up. I think grant money almost gets in the way of projects at times.

So I've never gone that route. We existed in the marketplace. We played in clubs because we had no other place to play. But this music was never meant for clubs. It was never meant for bars. It was never meant to be in the background of people drinking and picking each other up or talking. This is concert music. It's the concert music of the future. It's still not appreciated the way it should be. Lincoln Center? They're not going to call us. Carnegie Hall? They're not going to call us. Not even BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music ] would call us. So we had to do what we had to do.

The reality is this music has been written about for thirty years by generous, intelligent and like-minded people who were excited about what we're doing and maybe find a relation to it because of the improvisation involved, because of the creativity involved because of the imagination involved. But the reality is a lot of what we do and it's different for every person in the community does not relate to any specific genre. It's not rock, it's not really jazz, it's not really classical, it's not really world music. It's something that falls in the gaps. It's really something new and something different.

We haven't had a dedicated outlet, a magazine that can handle what it is that we do in the proper way. There are jazz magazines and people who write for jazz magazines and improvisation is involved and they're able to convince their editor 'Hey, I can place a piece about Wayne Horovitz or about Bill Frisell or about Elliot Sharp or about Fred Frith or about Bill Laswell or about Ikue Mori or about Sylvie Corvoisier or about myself because a little improvisation is involved. And they place the piece in a jazz magazine and it kind of creates a big misunderstanding because that's not where a lot of these people are coming from.

So, kind of a big roundabout answer to your question, we've played where we had to play. We've been represented and misrepresented in a variety of publications over the decades of doing what we do. The Stone is a place where we can do our music for people who want to hear the music and that's all they want to do. People that come to the Stone focus on the music. And everybody that's performed at the Stone all say the same thing: there's something unusual going on there there's a level of listening and a level of focus that they rarely get when they play out. And that's because most of the places we are forced to play in are bars and people are talking and distracted and this and that. The Stone is a concert venue. It's just a room with a sound system and some chairs and a piano. That's it. But that's all you need. That's a performance space. That's our Carnegie Hall, and we really enjoy playing at a venue with people that just want to focus on the music and nothing else. Long answer. Sorry.

KTVU.com: One last thing that I wanted to get your take on. Steven Colbert mentioned you on his show in a bit about the MacArthur Fellowship back in 2006…

John Zorn: Yeah, that was hilarious.

KTVU.com: I thought it was hysterical too. Colbert is known for setting up adversarial positions with people and then having them on his show. What are the chances of you playing some blowtorch alto sax on the Report in the future?

John Zorn: I have no idea. I don't know the man. It was a hilarious spot. I don't know what his commitments are to this kind of music or what would happen. TV is not something I'm really interested in. I don't own one, I don't look at it. I don't want to have anything to do with it. I'm not going to put myself in the position of ridicule on some comedy show. I wouldn't even go on any of these late night talk shows. That's not what I'm doing here. It really has nothing to do … in fact, it's almost antithetical. So I'd rather stay where I am, keep plugging away bit by bit. If someone's interested, that's great.

This music is for the world to enjoy. It's not elitist in any way. I want everyone to enjoy it. But I understand the reality that it's challenging music and not everybody can enjoy it or appreciate it. Not everybody has the time to do the thinking and do the work to unravel the mysteries that are being presented in these concerts and on these CDs. It's not an easy thing. And people have enough problems in their lives that they don't need further problems. But I do champion the fact that this music is important and that the world is better for its existence and that, in some small way, it represents a cry of freedom in the dark ages.