mg I gather that you do lots of reading.
jz   I like to read. I like to look.

mg I also gather you do lots of research for the music.
jz   Lots of research for life and music, same thing.

mg I have a vice; I buy records and books.
jz   Yeah, that's my vice, too. Except I include movies in that vice, and it's getting out of hand now. You know, when we were kids, we had to go to a theater to see a movie. And then television came in and you had to wait until midnight to see the one you wanted to see. Now, all you've got to do is go to a store and buy it and you can watch it whenever you want!

mg Your music is on that label Tzadik, and I was told that Tzadik means wise man, is that true?
jz   Well, it means a lot of things, it's a letter in the Hebrew alphabet.

mg I asked my mother, and she said wise man.
jz   Yeah. Or it could be justice, or righteousness, the concept of right. Or a rabbi or holy man in a small community. One of the reasons I started Tzadik, which is my own label, is to keep things in print. I got tired of labels dropping things out of print when they don't sell. Tzadik is driven by the need to keep important work in print forever, as a catalogue. You know, if we sell it, that's great, but . . .

mg How many titles has Tzadik put out?
jz   About 250 now.

mg Whoa! Are you doing it pretty much yourself?
jz   I have about two or three people, we don't have an office, we don't even have a dedicated phone line. We do it out of our own homes, and we make it work.

mg That's extraordinary. And does it make money to pay for itself?
jz   It breaks even. We lose ten, twenty grand every year. But then the people who are working say, Look, I'll kick this back in, I don't need to take this profit share. It's very cooperative.

mg That's wonderful. So they're really believers.
jz   Yeah, these are believers–which is hard to find–people who care. And I've been lucky. So it survives because of goodwill, and because there are still idealistic people in the world.

mg Not many.
jz   Well, you're one.

mg Yeah, but I figure I'm a little crazy.
jz   You can't be idealistic in this world and not be crazy. Because they've created such a deep structure now, you can't get in. And we don't want to get in, we're on the outside. But we're not on the outside looking in, we're on the outside looking out. So I feel we're in a very healthy place. The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive.

mg I feel your music is very compartmentalized, this kind of music and this kind and that.
jz   On the label it was done that way deliberately. Because . . . well, I have certain obsessions.

mg Loads of obsessions!
jz   Oh yeah, I have obsessions. And it's a way of focusing them. I guess the label is very supportive of the scene. It's a way of supporting specific things that I feel close to. People send me shit all the time that simply isn't appropriate for Tzadik. Like improvisation stuff, jazz stuff, those kinds of normal labels–no, not interested. More interested in the stuff that fits in between the gaps.

mg I was really impressed with the Masada group's first recording of Alef, how you were involved with melody. I hadn't heard that in your music before.
jz   No, that was a major exploration of melody, to see if I could write a book of songs like Gershwin or Thelonious Monk.

mg Exactly. You can whistle them.
jz   That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year.

back continued