FRANK ZAPPA

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.

Zappa's late 1978 band hasn't had so much in the way of official releases compared to other lineups, and I hear Zappa himself preferred the mildly tweaked 1979 lineup. Chicago '78 also has unusually lukewarm recording quality mitigating against this - don't get me wrong, it's an officially-sourced recording and whatnot, but it was recorded to four-track and this means there's only so much the mixing job can do, meaning it sounds a little muggy and flat compared to, say, the Hammersmith Odeon live set from the start of the year.

Still, Zappa's increasing use of influences from disco and the mellower side of funk adds an interesting twist here which proves rewarding if you persist at it, and whilst the lyrics are often juvenile on balance the vicious turn they took in 1977 and early 1978 seems to be alleviating - the end of Zappa's legal troubles with Warner Brothers perhaps mellowing him out somewhat. And Zappa's lead guitar solos add spice even to what is otherwise a fairly flat mix. Nonetheless, it's got a "rough draft" feeling to it which perhaps points to why Zappa made adjustments later on down the line.

Excellent live album from early 1978, capturing full setlist Frankensteined together from the best performances of Zappa's string of shows at the Odeon. Sounds from these gigs were extensively harvested for Sheik Yerbouti, and you can tell why, because this incarnation of Zappa's lineup has rarely sounded better, with the likes of Bozzio, O'Hearn, and Belew all on excellent form. The broader selection of songs means that the cruel lyrical turn taken on Sheik Yerbouti is signifcantly softened, there's a fantastic 20 minute version of Pound For a Brown, we get some previews of material which would later coalesce on Joe's Garage, and even the extended take on I Have Been In You which dials up its evisceration of pop star narcissism to no end is grand.

Just as the Mothers of Invention's residency at the Roxy in December 1973 formed the basis for Roxy and Elsewhere and Roxy: the Movie before eventually being issued in full as The Roxy Performances, so too did the six shows they play at the Palladium in New York at the tail end of October 1977 turn out to have a rich destiny. Backing tracks and the like were harvested by Zappa from this for Sheik Yerbouti (along with some sounds from the later Hammersmith Odeon show in early 1978), the shows were filmed for the Baby Snakes movie, and now expansive sets are available for those who wish to do a deep dive in this.

There's a hard copy CD version which just offers the show on Halloween itself (with some bonus tracks from the previous day), or there's download stuff out there which lets you explore the whole residency. On the first two days Zappa and his band played two sets per day, and we get all four of those here, with essentially identical setlists. Still, Zappa fans know that there's enough improvisation in his material that two rundowns of the same set are going to have intriguing differences here and there.

The day 1 and day 2 sets at points seem a little rushed at points - in particular, the band are audibly galloping through Punky's Whips - presumably because with two shows crammed into one day, they had some running time constraints they had to contend with. By comparison, the day 3 and day 4 shows have more room to breathe, hence this being where the setlist gets to vary a bit more, with day 3 having a bit more material at the start of the set and a runthrough of San Ber'dino at the end and some other deviations from the standard setlist midway through (running through early drafts of Sheik Yerbouti material which isn't quite ready for prime time yet and a highly unusual rendition of King Kong), and day 4 having an additional Black Napkins in the encore.

These shows offer a sort of middle ground between Zappa In New York and Sheik Yerbouti; there's also early passes at Conehead from You Are What You Is, though in a near-unrecognisable form. I wouldn't put this on the level of the Roxy material - there's a bit less variation, and this band isn't quite as technically adventurous as the mid-1970s Mothers (though they come close), and Zappa's lyrical direction at this time loses me a bit. On top of that, rushed sections in some shows and haphazard moments in others means there's no one set here which is 100% solid from start to finish. Nonetheess, this is a deep well of music to explore and it's a lot of fun doing so, especially with the epic workouts of Wild Love, turned from a brief time-filler as it appeared on Sheik Yerbouti into a half hour improvisational extravaganza.