John Zorn's Masada Ensemble was formed in 1994 and has recorded over 10 volumes of music. The original group consisted of Zorn (alto sax), Dave Douglas (trumpet), Greg Cohen (bass), and Joey Baron (drums). Zorn has since expanded the Masada ensemble to include percussion, piano, clarinet, guitar, violin, and cello featuring musicians including Marc Ribot, Cyro Baptista, Mark Feldman, Erik Friedlander and many others.

Masada has quickly become one of John Zorn's most popular and adventurous musical projects. The Masada songbook is Zorn's attempt at forging a new form of Jew-ish music, one consciously rooted in the past with an eye to the future of Jewish culture. Zorn's two hundred or so Masada compositions integrate elements of klezmer and Middle Eastern music with jazz, avant-garde, and classical. Similar to Zorn's "Great Jewish Music" series on his record label Tzadik, he identifies this music as not just klezmer, but instead as music that Jews have lived with, composed and performed. Mahler's symphonies, Burt Bacharach's pop melodies and Lou Reed's dissonant rock echo in the Masada songbook.

The project seems to indicate a major shift in Zorn's output and intent for his music. It was an opportunity for him to explore traditional jazz influenced song writing with simple melodies and chord changes. Although not all Masada songs reflect this more conventional approach to composing, most seem to fit squarely within the jazz tradi-tion. The compositional standards he set for himself were that any group of instruments should be able to play the songs, and that none of them should exceed three stave lines.