John Zorn’s Bagatelles Vol. 5 documents a key chapter in Zorn’s late‑career songbook project, focusing an entire volume on one of the most incisive small groups in contemporary jazz: the Kris Davis Quartet. Between March and May 2015, Zorn wrote 300 compact pieces - “bagatelles” – collected into a book designed to be interpreted by a wide variety of improvisers. The resulting series, recorded over several years, showcases different ensembles reimagining this material. Volume 5 zeroes in on a single configuration: Kris Davis on piano, Mary Halvorsonon guitar, Drew Gress on bass and Kenny Wollesen on drums, a band capable of moving from crystalline counterpoint to controlled detonation in a heartbeat.
Rather than themed titles, the pieces are numbered, underlining their function as raw compositional cells. The album’s eight tracks – “Bagatelle #29,” “#50,” “#54,” “#59,” “#86,” “#88,” “#97” and “#226” – clock in at around 43 minutes and feel like eight different answers to the same provocation. Zorn’s writing here is typically angular and at times atonal, full of jagged intervals, criss‑crossing lines and sudden rhythmic feints, but it’s also laced with waltz‑like figures and balladic fragments that can turn unexpectedly tender. The quartet seizes on that range. Heads may start in a “fairly normal” post‑bop space, but quickly spiral into open improvisation where Davis’s dense, percussive harmonies, Halvorson’s elastic, pitch‑bent guitar, Gress’s grounded yet exploratory bass and Wollesen’s slyly shifting drums all tug the tunes into new shapes.
Davis, serving as producer and arranger, treats the bagatelles not as fixed etudes but as springboards, reshaping voicings and densities so that each piece has a distinct personality. At times the group hints at classic piano‑guitar quartets, only to fracture the line with abrupt metric displacements or dissonant clusters; elsewhere they lean into lyricism, letting Zorn’s more deceptively simple themes sing before pushing them toward the edge. Halvorson, in particular, acts as a wild card: she can shadow Davis with clean, “straight” lines or explode the texture with warped harmonics and time‑stretching effects, making the music feel, as one reviewer put it, joyously on the verge of coming apart.
Recorded and mixed by Ryan Streber at Oktaven Audio in Mount Vernon, NY, on July 10, 2020, the session captures the quartet with clarity and bite, giving equal weight to piano attack, guitar overtones and the supple engine room of bass and drums. The album was mastered by Scott Hull at Masterdisk, with design by Heung‑Heung “Chippy” Chin and photography by Caroline Mardok, and released on Tzadik under catalogue number TZ 5221 as part of the ongoing John Zorn’s Bagatelles series. Executive production is by John Zorn and longtime collaborator Kazunori Sugiyama, with Zorn credited as composer on all pieces.
Within the broader Bagatelles cycle, Vol. 5 forms part of a four‑disc block (Volumes 5–8) that leans into keyboard‑centred ensembles, alongside sets by Brian Marsella and John Medeski. What distinguishes this entry is the particular chemistry of Davis and Halvorson, who pull Zorn’s compact scores into a zone where free improvisation, knotty modern jazz and downtown “weirdo” energy coexist without hierarchy. For listeners, John Zorn’s Bagatelles Vol. 5 offers both a focused way into the vast Bagatelles project and a stand‑alone portrait of one of today’s most adventurous quartets engaging deeply with Zorn’s late‑style miniature forms.
