Naked City
by John Zorn
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John Zorn bestography
Naked City is ranked as the best album by John Zorn.
(N.B. Bestographies include all albums by an artist (and their variations), but do not include albums ranked outside the top 100,000).
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Naked City track list
The tracks on this album have an average rating of 76 out of 100 (all tracks have been rated).
Naked City rankings
(Calculated from aggregate positions across 60,000 charts (2 million album rankings). (Last updated: 2 hours ago).
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Naked City ratings
Average Rating = (n ÷ (n + m)) × av + (m ÷ (n + m)) × AVwhere:
av = trimmed mean average rating an item has currently received.
n = number of ratings an item has currently received.
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Showing latest 5 ratings for this album. | Show all 151 ratings for this album.
| Rating | Date updated | Member | Album ratings | Avg. album rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ! | 06/06/2026 11:32 | PurpleHazel | 1,515 | 79/100 |
| ! | 01/14/2026 16:51 | Exist-en-ciel | 15,288 | 70/100 |
| ! | 11/29/2025 03:34 |  Kingturtle | 7,579 | 73/100 |
| ! | 04/02/2025 22:29 | thepardunk | 2,587 | 69/100 |
| ! | 11/04/2024 17:21 | Banner | 4,922 | 80/100 |
Rating metrics:
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(*In practice, some albums can have several thousand ratings)
This album is rated in the top 3% of all albums on BestEverAlbums.com. This album has a Bayesian average rating of 76.9/100, a mean average of 76.9/100, and a trimmed mean (excluding outliers) of 77.2/100. The standard deviation for this album is 15.1.
Naked City favourites
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Naked City comments
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There's a certain virtuosic, show-off-y side to Naked City's pastiche that can be off-putting if you don't accept the manic cartoony angle of the entire thing. But the respect with which Zorn and the band treat the originals in Lonely Woman and the film score covers (especially The Sicilian Clan, Chinatown and, my favorite, Contempt), keeping their melodic beauty intact and even enhancing it through all the creative changes lets me know there's sincere love for the music he covers and samples.
Zorn's wild genre-surfing is at play both at the album level (songs from different styles next to each other) and often inside the songs themselves. Also, his connection between the nihilism of free jazz and punk rock/grindcore is very convincing and will probably make this the best first jazz album for impatient (noise/hardcore) rock fans.
mozzmozz 05/10/2018 19:54 | #214546 | TOP COMMENT
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Utterly, utterly bonkers. On the fringes of jazz.
Some super-gorgeous tunes (The Sicilian Clan, I Want To Live, Chinatown ...) interspersed with short bursts of something I can only describe as "thrash jazz". And there's some funky bass lines on a few film theme tunes.
Great stuff.
Utterly bonkers but it's a huge load of innovative, noisy fun
Completely unhinged and amazing
Naked City is avant-garde at its most fun. Inspired by Looney Tunes veteran composer and arranger Carl Stalling, Zorn's Naked City consists mostly of fast compositions that explore a wide array of genres, styles and moods in a brief amount of time. The dissonant insanity of free jazz and noise, the extreme speed of grindcore, the clean licks of country and western, and so much more... All in the space of a few measures. As Zorn once put it (describing Stalling's soundtracks), 'all [genres] are embraced, chewed up and spit out in a format [reminiscent of] Burrough's cut-ups or Godard's film editing in the 60's'.
has some fantastic high points with Batman, The Sicilian Clan, and The James Bond Theme but is brought down by some of the snippets of noise that can be found in the middle of the album
Gooz 08/19/2014 13:32 | #119794
freak amazing album
Where the hell can I buy this album? I can't find it anywhere
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