Songs like heavenly lights

The singer, songwriter, poet, and painter Billy Childish has made well over 100 albums. The composer, multi-instrumentalist, and Tzadik Records recording artist (and CEO) John Zorn is responsible for four times that amount.

Obviously, Childish and Zorn have the prolificity market cornered. Yet, despite being sexagenarians, they’re not slowing down. As of this writing, they’ve released at least four albums in 2022 apiece.

Childish’s most interesting new efforts—The Baptiser, Cowboys Are SQ, Paralysed by the Mountains—are credited to “the William Loveday Intention,” a Childish-led band that includes David Tattersall (guitar), ­Adolphus Havard (drums), J.W. Loveday (bass), Jim Riley (harmonica), Jon Barker (organ), and sometimes Richard Moore (violin). They share a sound rooted in the raw, undifferentiated density of ’60s garage rock and Childish’s love for emoting Beat-like lyrics.

A consequence of Childish’s abundance is that it tempts one to compile the strongest cuts of Baptiser, Cowboys, and Paralysed into one 10- to 12-track longplayer. Were one to do so, the results would have an unmistakably New Testament flavor.

Consider this couplet from the Cowboys’ blues song “Cave”: “From the heart of darkness Jesus can save, / like Lazarus stepping from a deep, dark cave.”

Then there’s The Baptiser’s title cut (about John the Baptist in case you wondered). Childish sometimes takes poetic license, but when he sings “I baptize you with water, / but One is coming who will baptize you with fire, / One whose sandal straps I’m not fit to kiss …,” he scores a bull’s-eye. He even works a “Jesus saves” into the refrain of the Paralysed centerpiece, “Joe Strummer’s Grave.”

Zorn’s most attention-getting recent releases are the spacey, prog-lite Perchance to Dream …, featuring Bill Frisell (guitar), Brian Marsella (keyboards), John Medeski (organ), and Kenny Wollesen (drums, chimes), and the jazz-metal improv fest Spinoza, featuring Frisell, Zorn (sax), Matt Hollenberg (guitar), John Medeski (keyboards), and Kenny Grohowski (drums).

Their titles suggest inspiration by Hamlet and a certain 17th-century philosopher respectively. But recognizing either in Zorn’s music is like seeing Orion the Hunter in a constellation: Unless you know what you’re looking for, you’ll miss the connections—assuming they aren’t just illusions conjured by titles supplied after the fact.

You won’t miss the breadth of Zorn’s imagination.

The static opening cut “Introit” aside, the songs on Perchance twinkle like heavenly lights in a clear night sky, creating a lovely nocturnal tapestry.

But while the first song on Spinoza, “Immanence,” has its twinkling moments, the 20-minute title cut revels in extremes, as if Zorn had said, “Let’s jam as hard and as loudly as we can, and if we start getting comfortable, zoom off into another direction.”