14 AUGUST 2002: “OUTSIDE,
LOOKING OUT.”

From the current issue of
BOMB
magazine

JOHN ZORN: 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 . . .

MICHAEL GOLDBERG(artist/interviewer):
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 believersˆwhich is hard to findˆpeople 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.