John Zorn & Friends Will Play Next Year’s Adelaide Festival

3 September 2013 | 5:30 pm | Staff Writer

It will be the avant-garde legend’s first ever visit and he’s bringing seriously famous friends (including Mike Patton).

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We can reveal this evening that the legendary John Zorn will be in Australia for the very first time in 2014 to play a number of shows as a part of the Adelaide Festival.

Zorn is one of the most revered composers and saxophonists of the modern day, with an insanely diverse range of musical styles covered in his output. As the press release announcing his first visit to Australia states, “conventional categorisation of his music is meaningless.”

If you'd like us to go through his discography with you then we'd like to politely ask you to go and get fucked; have a look at how many records he has made over the years. We love the guy but not even we can keep up…

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The 60-year-old musician has never been to Australia, but he is making his first visit to our country a worthwhile one, bringing with him a heap of friends. Who? Gee, we're glad you asked.

Mike Patton, Marc Ribot, John Medeski, Milford Graves, Bill Laswell and Joey Baron are among his international guests, while Australians like the Elision Ensemble and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra will also collaborate with the legendary musician.

He plays six completely different shows at Adelaide Festival in 2014 and four of them are over three hours long; this is a feast of John Zorn for fans who have been starved of his live performances and it's all very exciting.

Also announced tonight as a part of the Adelaide Festival is the Australian premiere of the epic political drama Roman Tragedies, an immersive retelling of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony & Cleopatra that goes for six hours and allows audiences to wander around the theatre as it is performed. Artistic director David Sefton ought to be congratulated for his forward-thinking approach to the festival and his ability to secure such exciting acts.

The festival runs from Friday 28 February through to Sunday 16 March, 2014. Roman Tragedies plays at the Festival Theatre from Friday 28 February to Sunday 2 March, while Zorn plays the same venue from Tuesday 11 March til Friday 14.

A full run down of the shows are below:

Tuesday 11 March: Masada Marathon
Wednesday 12 March: Classical Marathon
Thursday 13 March: Cobra (6pm), Essential Cinema (8pm) and Zorn, Graves, Laswell (10pm)
Friday 14 March: Zorn @ 60