Frank Vincent Zappa, born 1940 in Baltimore, USA, died 1993 in Los Angeles, was a composer, guitarist, conductor, filmmaker, entrepreneur and satirist who began his recording career in 1966 with the Mothers double album Of Invention Freak Out, an unprecedented extravaganza for a new pop band and precursor to the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper, about twelve months later.
From the beginning, Zappa was a daring, provocative and somewhat exotic figure in the world of rock ‘n roll. Only his musical influences marked him as a maverick, from the contemporary classics of Edgard Varese, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern to rhythm and blues artists like Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, Howlin ‘Wolf, and the esoteric records of vocal groups like The Canales. , Don & Dewey, The Penguins and Jackie Dee and the Starlites. His mastery of these and many other musical languages make him one of the most important musicians of the 20th century.
I have become familiar with much of his production over the past thirty years, and now there is a great deal of his material to evaluate. For this somewhat morbid exercise of choosing your own funeral soundtrack, I have decided to reduce to four those Frank Zappa songs that I love and I think they best exemplify it. I’d be interested to hear the options from other Zappa fans:
* Strictly Genteel: the end of the movie 200 Motels, sung largely by Theodore Bikel. Several alternate versions of this piece have been released since the original version recorded in 1971 and one of my favorites is the selection from the Orchestral Favorites album. Amazing.
* Inca Roads – From the 1975 album One Size Fits All, this is a masterful blend of jazz, funk, wildly original electric guitar, and the feverish interplay between a group of musicians fully versed in Zappa’s compositional style and closely interwoven by several months of rehearsal. and live performance.
* Watermelon In Easter Hay – from the 1979 album Joe’s Garage Acts II & III; a fairly conventional musical backdrop for Frank, although the time signature for consecutive bars is 4/4 and then 5/4. Nonetheless, it presents him as a quintessential lead guitarist, cleverly instigated by the slide guitar atmosphere of Denny Walley and Vinnie Colaiuta’s sensitive drums. A monumental achievement.
* The Black Page – from the single album Zappa In New York, originally intended for the monstrous 4-disc set, “Lather”, which sparked a major contract dispute with the Warner Brothers label. A basic 4/4 time signature underpins the entire composition, but the dense polyrhythms that live within this framework make it wildly complex as a percussion piece, made a bit more accessible with the addition of its basic melody. I still have a hard time understanding how an ensemble managed to play this for the first time …