Zappa'a Grand Wazoo performed this weekend

ZAPPOLOGY 101– David Morgan

Many of you have come out this evening for a night of fine big band music, with a fine professional jazz ensemble performing fine charts from the swing era. So why is the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra presenting an all-Frank Zappa concert? Frank Zappa is best known as the leader of the Mothers of Invention, for his provocative and cynical social commentary, and for his satiric and sometimes vulgar lyrics. In reality Frank Zappa was a complex musician and thinker full of contradictions. He was a hero of stoners who himself distained drugs and alcohol and did
not permit their use in his bands. He was the leader of a rock and roll band who was deeply involved in twentieth-century classical music. His classical compositions were championed by Pierre Boulez and other luminaries, and recorded by major ensembles.

This evening we focus on the jazz side of Frank Zappa. Zappa had an interesting relationship with jazz. On one hand he coined such aphorisms as "jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny," and "jazz is the music of unemployment." On the other hand he created a highly personal form of rhythmically complex jazz-rock music on albums such as Hot Rats, Waka Jawaka, The Grand Wazoo, Jazz From Hell, King Kong, Uncle Meat, and Make a Jazz Noise Here. For a while Zappa toured with the 20-piece Grand Wazoo big band, and later with the Petit Wazoo. Zappa's music contains rhythmic challenges that simply aren't found in traditional big band music, including
metric modulation, subdivision of the beat into fives, sixes, and sevens, and superimpositions
such as seven over three. He employed the best instrumentalists of his time to play his music, many of whom have expressed their pride at being able to master Zappa's complex and idiosyncratic scores. These instrumentalists include George Duke, Ernie Watts, Jean Luc Ponty, Ruth Underwood, Ian Underwood, Bruce Fowler, Steve Vai, Billy Byars, Chester Thompson, and Terry Bozzio.

Like Duke Ellington, Frank Zappa seems to have maintained a working band so that he would always have an ensemble available to perform his latest creations. Like Charles Mingus, Zappa stretched the boundaries of the common practice of his time, creating music that cannot be confined by stylistic labels. Both had an insatiable hunger for all styles of music and strove to synthesize these influences into their music. Both had ideas for big projects that would prove difficult and costly to realize.

As tonight's program will demonstrate, Frank Zappa was a brilliant musician who simply cannot be put into a convenient stylistic box. It is becoming apparent that when it all shakes out, he will be recognized as one of the most important musicians of any genre from the second half of the twentieth century.

Sphere: Related Content