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When Zorn comes to town, he
easily draws an audience of Zorn advantage =
thousands willing to pay
twice as much (or more) as (Audience Z) * (Ticket price Z)
the typical local improv -------------------------------
show. (Audience L) * (Ticket price L)
Zorn is certainly really good, he
may even be better than a lot of 2000 * $15
the local performers, but I think ------------ = 250
we can take it as a given that he's 20 * $6
not 250 times better.
Though... this
Part of the "Zorn advantage" presumes no heavy
is the touring advantage, non-linearities.
the harnesed power
of human laziness. A big presumption.
People always put off
doing anything until In any case, there appears
they absolutely have to be a fairly sizeable
to, and that includes audience out there that
going to see some neat appeciates (or just
band that they've tolerates?) some fairly
heard about. challenging music.
Someone on tour is only It's much larger
going to be around for a than you'd think
few days so there's a from the attendance
feeling of "If I'm gonna at a typical
see them, I gotta see local event.
them NOW." Though
really, if they came
over here once, they'll
probably come over here
again in 6 months or a
year.
This effect works a similar
magic on the local press
("Gotta write about them
now")... and it is, after
all, news of a sort. You can see the same effect
in "farewell performances".
When a band with any name
recognition at all announces
that they're going to split
and do just one more show,
it multiplies the audience
size by a factor of ten or more.
But there are quirks of
name-recognition
publicity going on here
that I don't entirely
understand...
There's the name "Zorn" itself Doesn't it seem like
(unusual enough to catch your he's got a genius for
attention, simple enough to be changing directions at
hard to forget). It probably just the right time?
doesn't hurt that he lives in He's always riding a
New York, where it seems like trend of sorts, but
it's hard not to get splashed not a trend that's so
with national ink. big that he looks like
a mindless pop
musician.
For a lot of people John Zorn's Zorn: the Madonna of new music
name is practically synonymous
with any kind of post-jazz
experimental music. When I want
to explain what kind of stuff
I'm into, I always seem to end
up droping John Zorn's name: I've often had the thought that
they've all heard of it. if I were going to get involved
with doing publicity for the
scene, I would require everyone
to give me a quote that uses
John Zorn's name in a sentence.
"Greatest avant sax player since
John Zorn"; "Performed at the
Black Hole festival with John
Zorn"; "Once went drinking with
John Zorn";
A search engine game:
doing altavista advanced searches for:
"has performed with" NEAR "John Zorn"
This immediately turned up
John Adams, Tenko, Stephen
Drury, NMPERIGN, and so on.
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