The weegee photo on the cover sets you up for downtown composer/alto saxophonist John Zorn's latest musical onslaught. Yanking deliberately harsh and grainy shots out of the mix-and-match sonic grab bag called pop history, Zorn compresses them into odd-angled sound bites, shuffles them and then hurls them by in a gleeful assault. Despite patches of relative calm and even innocence, ironic subversion lurks at every turn of phrase.

Naked City was formed a year and a half ago to give Zorn a focused vehicle for his omnivorous compositions and rearrangements. Taking its name from the gritty pulp TV show ("There are eight million stories in the ..."), this collection of downtown all-stars – Zorn, Bill Frisell on guitar, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, Fred Frith on bass, Joey Baron on percussion – did a four-night, eight-set stint at the Knitting Factory, in New York City, last summer, never repeating a tune. Now tightened and toughened by roadwork, the band jump-cuts – often within a single piece – from surf-music buoyancy to reggae punch, country twang to film noir sleaze, hardcore slam-dunk to second-line strut, with the kind of grinning, methodical urgency you'd expect from a chain-saw murderer in a rush-hour subway car.

Imagine the resulting spatter as a Jackson Pollock canvas, and you'll begin to understand how Naked City transforms everything it touches. Like, for example, jazz great Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman." Coleman, a Zorn hero, wrote and played it as a brooding, off-balance elegy, but in this band's hands, it comes out as a contemporary "Peter Gunn" played by Booker T. and the MG's. "The Sicilian Clan," by another Zorn fave, spaghetti westerner Ennio Morricone, curls up in a cocktail lounge with a cheesy Farfisa organ out of "Telstar." Then there are Zorn's originals – raging grungers like "Hammerhead," mutant cartoon memories like "Snaggle-puss," skewed beach-blanket bingos like "Batman" and infectious R&B party-downs like "Latin Quarter" – each produced to mimic its genre's classic sound.

Think of Zorn as a rapid-fire radio scanner: Part of the listening fun is hanging on for dear life whenever he hits the button. Catch your breath when you can. (RS 581)

GENE SANTORO