John Zorn was born September 2, 1953, in Queens, New York. He learned piano, guitar, and flute as a child, attended the United Nations International School through high school, and spent his teenage years absorbing classical music, film scores, and rock. He studied at Webster College in St. Louis, Missouri, where he discovered free jazz, then dropped out and moved to Manhattan, giving concerts in his small apartment using a variety of reeds, duck calls, and tape manipulation.

Zorn attracted wide acclaim in 1985 with The Big Gundown, his interpretations of Ennio Morricone's film music. In 1988 he formed Naked City, pairing his saxophone with Bill Frisell on guitar, Fred Frith on bass, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, and Joey Baron on drums, fusing free jazz with hardcore punk influences drawn from bands like Agnostic Front and Napalm Death. In 1993 he launched Masada, a project built around the idea of expanding what Jewish music could be; he ultimately composed 613 pieces across three Masada songbooks, performed by an array of different groups over three decades.

In 1995, working with producer Kazunori Sugiyama, Zorn founded the Tzadik label to keep his sprawling catalog in print and to support other experimental musicians. His recorded output, spanning hundreds of album credits as performer, composer, or producer, deliberately resists categorization.

Zorn's career-long refusal to settle into a single genre, moving fluidly between free jazz, hardcore, klezmer-rooted composition, and film-score pastiche, made him one of the most restlessly inventive figures in the American experimental music scene, and his Tzadik label became a crucial infrastructure for an entire generation of downtown New York improvisers.