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Music / Musik » alt.fan.frank-zappa » Frank Zappa's Family Brings His Music to a New Audience [slightly different than Zut boF's article]
| Frank Zappa's Family Brings His Music to a New Audience [slightly different than Zut boF's article] [message #283138] |
So, 11 Juni 2006 05:01 |
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Music
Frank Zappa's Family Brings His Music to a New Audience
By JESSE FOX MAYSHARK
Published: June 11, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/arts/music/11mays.html
IN the liner notes to the 1966 album "Freak Out!" by the Mothers of
Invention, you can find the following things: annotations on the 14
songs, describing them variously as "very greasy," "trivial nonsense"
and "what freaks sound like when you turn them loose in a recording
studio"; an advertisement for a map that promises to reveal the
"Freak-Out Hot Spots" of Los Angeles; and a hat-tipping list of 180
influences, musical and otherwise, that includes Slim Harpo, James
Joyce and Charles Ives.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/06/11/arts/11mays.1 901.jpg
Dweezil Zappa in concert on the Zappa Plays Zappa tour, featuring
former Frank Zappa sidemen, this year.
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/06/07/arts/11mays.l arge2.jpg
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Dweezil Zappa, left, with his father, Frank, in the mid-1980's.
You can also find a boxed credit, standing apart and alone, that says,
"All selections arranged, orchestrated and conducted by Frank Zappa."
The confidence in that credit — along with a photo of the composer
himself in sunglasses wielding an upside-down drumstick like a
conductor's baton — signaled the self-possession that would guide
Zappa, then just 25, through the 60-plus albums of his singular
career.
Forty years on from that debut, a band led by Zappa's son Dweezil and
featuring several of his former associates is seeking to illuminate
the rigorous ambition and musical iconoclasm of his work. The Zappa
Plays Zappa tour, which arrives at the Beacon Theater in New York on
Monday after an extensive European leg, is the first memorial effort
by his family since Zappa died of cancer in 1993.
"My overall goal in doing this is to present Frank's music to a newer
audience," Dweezil Zappa, 36, said in a phone interview from the Los
Angeles area last month, the day before heading out for the tour. "I
think his music for one reason or another kind of skipped some
generations that didn't get a chance to discover it."
He has recruited a roster of guests that includes the guitarist Steve
Vai, the drummer Terry Bozzio and the singer-saxophonist Napoleon
Murphy Brock, all of whom recorded and toured with his father in the
1970's and 80's. The tour has been a long time in the making. "It took
me close to two years to get some of the stuff I wanted to get
together," Mr. Zappa said.
Mr. Brock, speaking by telephone from Manchester, England, two weeks
into the tour, said he remembered first meeting Dweezil as a small
boy. "It's quite phenomenal that I would be able to be here with the
son as I was here with the father," said Mr. Brock, whom Zappa
discovered in 1972 fronting a dance band in Hawaii. "We're
representing the authenticity of these songs."
As a cultural figure, Frank Zappa is in the odd position of being both
relatively well known and artistically obscure. His name and face —
with its trademark handlebar mustache and goatee — remain familiar to
millions of people who would be hard pressed to name many songs beyond
novelty hits like "Valley Girl" (which featured Dweezil's sister Moon
Unit) and "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow."
That is what Dweezil Zappa and his mother, Gail, hope to remedy with a
tour that they envision as an annual event. "Hopefully people will
understand that this music is alive and well," Gail Zappa said by
phone, "and it's going to be around for a long, long time."
Even in the freewheeling era that formed him, Zappa was an odd man out
— an abstemious aesthete who turned his withering satire on the
counterculture as readily as he attacked the deadening conformity of
public schools, government and social institutions in general. His
lyrics could be absurdist or tender, scatological or philosophical,
and they were joined to knotty melodies full of hairpin time changes
and subject to gleeful mixing-board manipulation. He was also a
political activist of a determinedly centrist stripe, calling himself
a moderate Democrat and a conservative, arguing passionately for
freedom of speech (most famously in Senate hearings on obscenity in
music in 1985) and exhorting his fans to vote.
The set list for the tour includes some of his most adventurous and
challenging pieces, like "Inca Roads" and the notoriously difficult
"Black Page," which Zappa originally wrote as a drum solo for Mr.
Bozzio (the name comes from the density of notes that covered the
sheet music). Dweezil Zappa said he was especially drawn to the albums
he remembers from his childhood in Southern California, from the era
after his father dissolved the Mothers of Invention.
"He was blending rock and jazz and classical in the middle 70's in a
way that nobody else was," he said.
Although the tour is at least touching on Zappa's earlier work — songs
like "Hungry Freaks, Daddy" (the first track on "Freak Out!") and
"Let's Make the Water Turn Black" from "We're Only in It for the
Money," Zappa's sardonic response to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band" — it is heavily weighted toward the middle of his career, the
period that defines Zappa for many of his fans. (There is no "Valley
Girl," but casual fans will at least be able to find "Yellow Snow" and
"Montana" in the mix.) Response to the European shows in online forums
has been largely positive. On the Zappa-centric blog Kill Ugly Radio,
one fan wrote of the May 19 show in Stockholm: "This was my first
chance to experience the music of FZ live in concert. And what a
concert. Sitting there on the fourth row from the stage, I found
myself with BIG smile on my face, laughing out loud at times."
Gail Zappa said feedback on the family's Web site (zappa.com) had been
similarly warm. "It's all age ranges," she said. "The older guys say,
'Oh, I saw Frank seven times, and now I'm taking my 14-year-old son
who's a musician,' or 'my 7-year-old daughter who loves 'Freak Out!' "
Zappa's own children — Moon, Dweezil, their younger brother Ahmet and
their younger sister Diva — were involved with their father's music in
various ways from young ages. (Given Zappa's relentless recording and
touring, it may have been the only way to bond with him; Moon has said
she suggested the idea for "Valley Girl" via a note slipped under the
door of his recording studio.) All four shared writing or performing
credits on Zappa songs from the 70's and 80's. Frank also produced
Dweezil's first album, "Havin' a Bad Day," in 1986, and released it on
his Barking Pumpkin label.
The Zappa siblings have gone on to an assortment of show business
projects. Dweezil has recorded another half-dozen albums, sometimes
with Ahmet providing vocals, and has been host of shows on MTV and the
Food Network. Ahmet, who married the actress Selma Blair in 2004, is
currently working on a book, his mother said. Moon has acted on
television and in films. Diva has also had small television and movie
roles, and released a single with Dweezil in 1999 that featured Tipper
Gore on drums. (Ms. Gore, wife of the former vice president, was a
target of Zappa's ire during her decency campaigns in the 80's. But
she subsequently became a friend of Gail Zappa, who supported Al Gore
for president in 2000.)
But Frank Zappa's work has remained central to the family. Both
Dweezil and his mother come across as fiercely custodial of that
legacy, fighting against copyright infringements and advocating for
the music to be played as it was written. "My job essentially is to
protect the intent of the composer and the integrity of the work,"
said Gail Zappa, 61, who had been married to Frank for 26 years when
he died.
Dweezil Zappa said that despite his years of experience on the guitar
— he started learning when he was 12 — playing and arranging his
father's music was a significant challenge. For one section of "The
Black Page," he had to "completely change my technical style of
picking to accommodate what was needed to play this accurately."
"That was probably a two- or three-month process of intensive playing
and studying," he said.
Zappa's stature among a cult of musicians and scholars has continued
to grow since his death. His works have been recorded by companies
including the German chamber orchestra Ensemble Modern and the French
woodwind quintet Le Concert Impromptu. Last fall, the Oregon
Percussion Ensemble presented a double bill of pieces by Zappa and one
of his idols, the French composer Edgard Varèse. He is especially well
regarded in Europe: the former Czech leader Vaclav Havel has long
proclaimed him an influence and a group of artists in Vilnius,
Lithuania, erected a statue in his honor in 1995.
Andy Hollinden, a lecturer who teaches a course on Zappa at the Jacobs
School of Music at Indiana University, called him "my favorite writer
of melodies ever." Zappa, he said in a phone interview, "is different
from everybody else in my opinion, in that he was a composer who wrote
for electronic instruments in the rock 'n' roll era."
Zappa has attracted other disciples — tribute bands like
Project/Object in New Jersey and Bogus Pomp in Florida — somewhat to
his family's dismay.
"People get upset with me sometimes when I say I've never heard
Frank's music played correctly," Dweezil Zappa said. "If there were
people out there playing it correctly, with the right spirit, with the
right notes, I'd be the first one to get excited."
But Ed Palermo, a New York saxophonist who has been performing
big-band arrangements of Zappa's music since 1994 (most recently at
the Iridium in Manhattan), said Zappa was subject to inevitable
recontextualization.
"I believe Zappa deserves to be known down through history as a
musician of the caliber of Gershwin and Duke Ellington," said Mr.
Palermo, who has just released an album of his Zappa arrangements
called "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance."
"I know the Zappas are very protective, and it's admirable," he
continued. "But I think they're looking at it from a classical point
of view. I do what jazz musicians do, in reinterpreting the music."
Gail Zappa is not completely dismissive of anyone's efforts to burrow
into her husband's work. "I think that people should attempt it, and
somebody will get it right someday," she said. "But because they're
not operating under the baton of Frank, or even Dweezil, you can only
take it so far."
Mr. Brock, the singer and saxophonist, said that the only thing
missing from the tour was the restless, irrepressible presence of
Zappa himself.
"I think Frank would be smiling and dancing and playing and laughing,"
he said. "And making up some new lines for us to play."
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