Flatlands New York Performances

John Zorn’s *Flatlands* arrives at National Sawdust as a chamber-scaled project that treats composition and improvisation as adjacent languages. Built for shifting lineups, the music moves through notated structures and abrupt ruptures, with traces of downtown jazz, amplified rock timbres, Jewish modal inflections, and film-score logic. In a city where Zorn has long shaped the post-1970s “downtown” tradition, *Flatlands* reads as both document and continuation. Its real subject is control: how quickly a written plan can be rerouted by human choice.