Born and bred in New York, where he lives most of the year, trained in classical music, self-educated in Jazz, avowedly fond of motion-picture composers, Zorn has developed highly idiosyncratic, modestly original improvisations that tend to be very dissonant and disjunctive and thus aggressive, if not abrasively hideous, in acoustic quality. It is not for nothing that he speaks of himself as descending from a tradition that includes Charles Ives , Edgard Varese , and ...