FRANK ZAPPA

This is an interesting live release for Zappa fanatics largely because we've not heard so much from this particular lineup of Zappa, Terry Bozzio, Napoleon Murphy Brock, Roy Estrada, Andre Lewis, and Norma Jean Bell. It's a touring group that Zappa formed in late 1975, after the dissolution of the mid-1970s version of the Mothers of Invention and the Orchestral Favorites experiments, and which lasted just long enough to contribute a little to Zoot Allures before being mostly dissolved, with Zappa retaining Bozzio and then recruiting Eddie Jobson and Patrick O'Hearn as the core of his next lineup.

This missing link between the One Size All and Zoot Allures eras finds Zappa shifting to a more muscular sound with more traditional rock instrumentation (farewell, Ruth Underwood and her galaxy of percussion instruments) and making the most of that sort of setup. We get updates on old songs, and we get some new material like Black Napkins, Zoot Alures, and the Illinois Enema Bandit, the latter being one of Zappa's more misjudged lyrics (is it really funny to laugh at sexual assault?). Chunga's Revenge gets a long and pretty decent workout, at that. In the end, this might not be one of Zappa's more essential live albums, but it's worth it if you're interested in this lineup, since the closest other live release I'm aware of featuring it is FZ:OZ, and Norma Bell isn't on that (a shame, because her sax contributions here are on point).

I'd like to take the time to reminisce a little bit about Zappa, as I believe this is my final review of his music. It's been a ride! And "Dance Me This" is such a meaningful title for his final release. He finished this album in 1993, the year of his passing, and did it all pretty much on the synclavier. This is of course an archival recording, not being released until 2015. Who needs musicians when you have an electronic device that is like an electronic workstation for creating music. A digital synthesizer with a digital sampling system included.

I first heard of the synclavier when reviewing Zappa's 1984 album "The Perfect Stranger". Four of the tracks on that one were done by Frank on his synclavier, which he called "The Barking Pumpkin Digital Gratification Consort". The other three songs on it were done by a real mini orchestra with a conductor. That album was on the Classical music charts for almost a year. And hey, you could use the synclavier at home in your underwear if you wanted. In fact Frank says that album was recorded in the "The Utility Muffin Research Kitchen".

So on this final release it's all synclavier music, no musicians except for the addition of a brief guitar solo from Zappa that was overdubbed, and the use of vocals he recorded from the Tulvan Throat Singer from Siberia who happened to pay him a visit when doing a US tour. He promptly had them in the studio recording some of their vocals and using it here.

Memories? Not a lot. As far as Zappa's music goes "Hot Rats" stands alone in my opinion. I'm not sure when I first heard of Frank or his music but I do remember one Christmas my cousin Tim who would have been about 18, put on "Titties & Beer". I still remember the nervous laughter from my dad and uncles. Bold move Tim when pretty much that whole side of the family were church goers. I remember hanging out with this attractive Italian girl who played me her Zappa records.

But it would be much later in life before I would actually buy his music. I remember the business I had, and of course I played my music no matter what it was. And getting many interesting comments over the years. Not all positive believe me. This lady comes in while Zappa is playing. She turns her head, like she's listening intently to it. And comments about the incredible arrangements. "Who is this?" she asked. "Frank Zappa" I replied with a smile. I could tell by her non-reaction that she had no idea who he was.

This album is quite experimental with half of it being taken up with the "Wolf Harbour" suite which is divided into five sections. My favourite track is "Rykoniki" because it reminds me of UNIVERS ZERO. "Piano" is pretty good with that classical piano, but again it's all done on the synclavier. A good album but far short of 4 stars in my world. Check out "The Perfect Stranger" if you can. I found "Yellow Shark" to be disappointing as well.

From the now legendary drum fill that opens "Peaches in Regalia" to the last crazy notes of "The Gumbo Variations" this album is a true tour de force of the genius from Baltimore.

I think that a great merit of this album is to leave aside the uncomfortable comedy and social satire with which he filled his previous albums to launch a serious work (if you can call anything Zappa has ever done that).

And it is that this album proved once and for all that Zappa was a great composer of sera music, jazz, rock, blues and avant (in case there were any doubts about it) while in the aspect of execution he made it clear that he was a guitar virtuoso with a unique language that to this day is confused just by listening to a few notes of his glorious guitar.

An album that many mark as the best initiation into the world of Frank and all his conceptual continuity... I'm not sure about this, but I'm sure that Hot Rats is an absolute masterpiece!

There's one thing you can say for sure about Zappa: the dude was a keen early adopter when it came to new technology. At its best, this yielded groundbreaking, incredible results in the studio, as on Hot Rats; failing that, it at least made him seem prophetic from time to time, like late in life when he speculated about novel systems of music distribution, essentially considering the creation of online streaming a while before the technology was really there to implement the idea.

Then there's Jazz From Hell, an experiment in making most of an album (bar for St. Etienne, a live track) using just his trusty Synclavier. This is an electronic instrument whose sound has dated poorly, but which may have some nostalgic associations for some, especially those who love videogame soundtracks of a certan era - don't think NES-style beeps and boops, think of the sort of output you'd have got on a nice Roland soundcard from a game which really explored the possibilities of that equipment (a Sierra graphical adventure, perhaps).

Freed of the need to work with other musicians, Zappa unleashes complex material which would be difficult to achieve in real life - indeed, he thought some of this was genuinely unplayable by human hands, though eventually sufficiently talented performers proved otherwise. It's an interesting technology demo for sure, but it's not really more than that; Zappa is pushing one-man digital composition to its limits here, and whenever you push technology beyond its limits you risk creating something which ages worse because it exposes all of the limitations of the equipment you are working with.

A solid attempt, but the passage of time has seen other hands find a more nuanced and less gung-ho "all complexity all the time" approach to composing on this sort of legacy electronics yield works that have largely eclipsed Zappa's early efforts here, such as on the chiptune scene. Zappa gets credit for blazing the trail, but others have walked it with more confidence and better results.

The triple LP Shut Up N' Play Yer Guitar set proved there was an appetite for people to just listen to Frank Zappa's guitar solos shorn of context; Guitar, its sequel, proves that you can't just fill two CDs with this stuff, throw it out there, and call it a day and expect to produce something as interesting as that set was. For one thing, thanks to the triple LP format Shut Up N' Play Yer Guitar could at least be absorbed in digestible chunks; here Zappa pretty much fills two CDs of material and throws you in at the deep end.

For another, Zappa had already mined his archives fairly thoroughly to put Shut Up together in the first place; the selections on that hail from 1972 to 1980, the selections here come from 1979 to 1984. That's a tighter period of time - the start of which had already been raided for Shut Up's purposes, the latter end of which doesn't represent one of Zappa's more beloved live bands (or at least, not so beloved by me). A shorter time period means less musical variation and development over the course of the set - and by the end of the 1980s Zappa's guitar technique had matured to the point where it just didn't develop that much from year to year.

A lot of this ends up running together to my ears in a rather unmemorable fashion; the only times it really makes me sit up and pay attention is when I recognise the backing song Zappa's playing his improvisation over, or when he starts quoting someone else's material. And when the least interesting thing about a collection of improvisations is the most imporovisational and original parts, that's not a great sign.

Is this Zappa's last really solid studio album in a conventional "jazz-rock and comedy rock songs played by a band" mode? It might well be. The Man From Utopia is, well, the album from dystopia; Them Or Us is a double album with perhaps a single side's worth of serviceable material and a lot of filler, issued at a time when Frank was spreading himself thin between rock operas, orchestral endeavours, and Synclavier experimentation; Thing-Fish is, well, Thing-Fish; Mothers of Prevention is a sort of odds-and-sods collection of lesser studio efforts and Synclavier offerings; Jazz From Hell is where the Synclavier really takes over in terms of Frank's studio output.

So of all of those (and the various other albums which followed Ship), only Them Or Us and The Man From Utopia really offers a straight ahead "Zappa and his band in a studio" album, and neither of them match up to this, with a sound which mashes up muscular guitar lines with genuinely hooky material. Sure, Valley Girl might be irritating if you lived through the period when it was on the radio all the time, but I'm lucky enough not to have, and it's a funny gimmick set to a deeply addictive tune, and No Not Now is almost as memorable, as is I Come From Nowhere.

The second side sets sail for less commercial waters, with the twelve minute Drowning Witch as its centrepiece and Envelopes as a pretty decent followup to it. (By contrast, Teenage Prostitute is a big old goof-off.) It's all a bit polished and a touch plasticy to my taste - as is much of Zappa's 1980s output - but it just about passes muster.

A massive collection, in light of how expansive these live shows were, but compared to Halloween 73 or 77 I'm not so keen on this one. Zappa's early 1980s band neither has the groundbreaking virtuosity and experimentalism of his mid-1970s incarnation of the Mothers or the exciting raucousness of his late-1970s group. It's all rather polished, but the polish is rather ruined when the band rush through the songs to this extent, Zappa deciding to go for quantity over quality.

That's kind of how his release schedule went in the 1980s - just look at how much stuff he put out in 1984, where you had classical releases (Boulez Conducts Zappa), plus a double studio album (Them or Us), plus a truly horrible Broadway-style musical (Thing-Fish), plus an adaptation of a long-dead composer's works to the Synclavier (Francesco Zappa). There, as here, Zappa provides an object lesson in the idea that just because you have the space to do anything you like, doesn't mean you should necessarily do *everything* you like - selectivity and editing is important.

I'm not so keen on the live sound Zappa's band had in the early 1980s based on what I've heard previously, and Buffalo doesn't offer anything to really change my mind. The slick sound of the band sounds is certainly polished, but it also risks appearing a little sanitised - not lyrically, obviously, but in terms of the overall audio texture.

On top of that, there's too many bits where Zappa's tweaks to his repertoire make the songs more annoying to no benefit to the music or sections get played through in a hurry, like Zappa's kind of sick of playing this stuff and wants to go for quantity over quality. Broken Hearts Are For Assholes especially suffers from this, with goofy vocal interjections and the whole thing being rushed. I can't blame Zappa for getting tired of the joke - I tire of his jokes sometimes too - but if that were the case he should have just retired the dang song, it's not like he didn't have over a decade of material to draw on by this point in his career. If he wasn't bored of it... why play it in this way?

The Mudd Club set combines very new material - with selections from Sheik Yerbouti and Joe's Garage as well as material which would eventually wind up on You Are What You Is - along with quite old stuff material like Chunga's Revenge, with tunes originating from the 1973-1975 incarnation of the Mothers absent more or less entirely, which perhaps is indicative of a desire by Zappa to move on from songs he'd played rather extensively. The longer Munich set covers more ground.

That's fine in principle, but the particular renditions of the material here I'm not so keen on - the keyboard sound in particular is rather thin and muzak-y, Zappa being the technophile he was having been an early adopter of these 1980s synths but not quite having best practice down in terms of how they're used. Between this and a fairly syrupy take on some of the songs, and fairly lukewarm production at points (Zappa's vocals in particular are a bit fuzzy), this set ends up being rather inessential.

I suppose we should really call this one Halloween 78 these days, to better distinguish it from Halloween 73, Halloween 77, and Halloween 81 sets which followed on from it. Less vast than those, this provides a live performance from Zappa and a truncated version of his late 1978 band - Ike Willis having taken a leave of absence. As with Chicago '78 (which *does* feature Willis), the sound feels a little flatter than many Zappa releases of a similar vintage, leaving one with the sense that something went a touch awry with Zappa's live recording process during this period, though it perhaps doesn't help that the late 1978 lineup isn't one of his better-remembered bands, particularly compared to those preceding and succeeding it.