FRANK ZAPPA, THE MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST MUSICIAN

Frank Zappa

Today, The Grandma is working at home. She continues repairing her blog and she has been accompanied by the great music of Frank Kappa, the American multi-instrumentalist musician who was born on a day like today in 1940.

Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940-December 4, 1993) was an American multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, and bandleader. His work is characterized by nonconformity, free-form improvisation, sound experiments, musical virtuosity, and satire of American culture.

In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa composed rock, pop, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestral and musique concrète works, and produced almost all of the 60-plus albums that he released with his band the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. Zappa also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. He is considered one of the most innovative and stylistically diverse rock musicians of his era.

As a self-taught composer and performer, Zappa's diverse musical influences led him to create music that was sometimes difficult to categorize. While in his teens, he acquired a taste for 20th-century classical modernism, African-American rhythm and blues, and doo-wop music.

He began writing classical music in high school, while at the same time playing drums in rhythm and blues bands, later switching to electric guitar. His 1966 debut album with the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, combined songs in conventional rock and roll format with collective improvisations and studio-generated sound collages. He continued this eclectic and experimental approach, irrespective of whether the fundamental format was rock, jazz or classical.

Zappa's output is unified by a conceptual continuity he termed Project/Object, with numerous musical phrases, ideas, and characters reappearing across his albums. His lyrics reflected his iconoclastic views of established social and political processes, structures and movements, often humorously so, and he has been described as the godfather of comedy rock.

More information: Zappa

He was a strident critic of mainstream education and organized religion, and a forthright and passionate advocate for freedom of speech, self-education, political participation and the abolition of censorship. Unlike many other rock musicians of his generation, he personally disapproved of drugs, but supported their decriminalization and regulation.

During Zappa's lifetime, he was a highly productive and prolific artist with a controversial critical standing; supporters of his music admired its compositional complexity, while critics found it lacking emotional depth. He had some commercial success, particularly in Europe, and worked as an independent artist for most of his career. He remains a major influence on musicians and composers. His honors include his 1995 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the 1997 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 2000, he was ranked number 36 on VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him at number 71 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, and in 2011 at number 22 on its list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Frank Zappa

Zappa was born on December 21, 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland.

His mother, Rosemarie (née Collimore), was of Italian (Neapolitan and Sicilian) and French ancestry; his father, whose name was anglicized to Francis Vincent Zappa, was an immigrant from Partinico, Sicily, with Greek and Arab descent. R&B singles were early purchases for Zappa, starting a large collection he kept for the rest of his life.He was interested in sounds for their own sake, particularly the sounds of drums and other percussion instruments. By age 12, he had obtained a snare drum and began learning the basics of orchestral percussion.

Zappa's interest in composing and arranging flourished in his last high-school years. By his final year, he was writing, arranging and conducting avant-garde performance pieces for the school orchestra. He graduated from Antelope Valley High School in 1958, and later acknowledged two of his music teachers on the sleeve of the 1966 album Freak Out!

Zappa left home in 1959, and moved into a small apartment in Echo Park, Los Angeles. After meeting Kathryn J. Kay Sherman during his short period of private composition study with Prof. Karl Kohn of Pomona College, they moved in together in Ontario, and were married December 28, 1960.

Zappa worked for a short period in advertising as a copywriter. His sojourn in the commercial world was brief, but gave him valuable insights into its workings. Throughout his career, he took a keen interest in the visual presentation of his work, designing some of his album covers and directing his own films and videos.

Zappa attempted to earn a living as a musician and composer, and played different nightclub gigs, some with a new version of the Blackouts. Zappa's earliest professional recordings, two soundtracks for the low-budget films The World's Greatest Sinner (1962) and Run Home Slow (1965) were more financially rewarding. 

More information: All Music

During the early 1960s, Zappa wrote and produced songs for other local artists, often working with singer-songwriter Ray Collins and producer Paul Buff. In 1965, Ray Collins asked Zappa to take over as guitarist in local R&B band the Soul Giants, following a fight between Collins and the group's original guitarist.

Zappa accepted, and soon assumed leadership and the role as co-lead singer, even though he never considered himself a singer. With Wilson credited as producer, the Mothers of Invention, augmented by a studio orchestra, recorded the groundbreaking Freak Out! (1966), which, after Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, was the second rock double album ever released.

Frank Zappa

It mixed R&B, doo-wop, musique concrète, and experimental sound collages that captured the freak subculture of Los Angeles at Zappa uniquely contributed to the avant-garde, anti-establishment music scene of the 1960s, sampling radio tape recordings and incorporating his own philosophical ideals to music and freedom of expression in his pieces. Reflecting Zappa's eclectic approach to music, the next album, Cruising with Ruben & the Jets (1968), was very different. It represented a collection of doo-wop songs; listeners and critics were not sure whether the album was a satire or a tribute.

During the late 1960s, Zappa continued to develop the business sides of his career. Zappa and the Mothers of Invention returned to Los Angeles in mid-1968, and the Zappas moved into a house on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, only to move again to one on Woodrow Wilson Drive. This was Zappa's home for the rest of his life.

In late 1969, Zappa broke up the band. After he disbanded the Mothers of Invention, Zappa released the acclaimed solo album Hot Rats (1969). It features, for the first time on record, Zappa playing extended guitar solos and contains one of his most enduring compositions, Peaches en Regalia, which reappeared several times on future recordings.

In 1970 Zappa met conductor Zubin Mehta. They arranged a May 1970 concert where Mehta conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic augmented by a rock band. According to Zappa, the music was mostly written in motel rooms while on tour with the Mothers of Invention. Some of it was later featured in the movie 200 Motels. Although the concert was a success, Zappa's experience working with a symphony orchestra was not a happy one. His dissatisfaction became a recurring theme throughout his career; he often felt that the quality of performance of his material delivered by orchestras was not commensurate with the money he spent on orchestral concerts and recordings.

More information: Louder Sound

Later in 1970, Zappa formed a new version of the Mothers, from then on, he mostly dropped the of Invention.

This version of the Mothers debuted on Zappa's next solo album Chunga's Revenge (1970), which was followed by the double-album soundtrack to the movie 200 Motels (1971), featuring the Mothers, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Ringo Starr, Theodore Bikel, and Keith Moon.

On December 4, 1971, Zappa suffered his first of two serious setbacks. While performing at Casino de Montreux in Switzerland, the Mothers' equipment was destroyed when a flare set off by an audience member started a fire that burned down the casino.

Immortalized in Deep Purple's song Smoke on the Water, the event and immediate aftermath can be heard on the bootleg album Swiss Cheese/Fire, released legally as part of Zappa's Beat the Boots II compilation. After losing $50,000, equivalent to $309,000 in 2018, worth of equipment and a week's break, the Mothers played at the Rainbow Theatre, London, with rented gear. 

Frank Zappa

During the encore, an audience member jealous because of his girlfriend's infatuation with Zappa pushed him off the stage and into the concrete-floored orchestra pit. The band thought Zappa had been killed -he had suffered serious fractures, head trauma and injuries to his back, leg, and neck, as well as a crushed larynx, which ultimately caused his voice to drop a third after healing. This attack resulted in an extended period of wheelchair confinement, making touring impossible for over half a year. Upon return to the stage in September 1972, Zappa was still wearing a leg brace, had a noticeable limp and could not stand for very long while on stage.

Zappa noted that one leg healed shorter than the other, a reference later found in the lyrics of songs Zomby Woof and Dancin' Fool, resulting in chronic back pain.

During 1971–72 Zappa released two strongly jazz-oriented solo LPs, Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo, which were recorded during the forced layoff from concert touring, using floating line-ups of session players and Mothers alumni.

In the mid-1970s Zappa prepared material for Läther, a four-LP project. Läther encapsulated all the aspects of Zappa's musical styles -rock tunes, orchestral works, complex instrumentals, and Zappa's own trademark distortion-drenched guitar solos.

Resolving the lawsuits successfully, Zappa ended the 1970s by releasing two of his most successful albums in 1979: the best-selling album of his career, Sheik Yerbouti, and in Kelley Lowe's opinion the bona fide masterpiece, Joe's Garage.

More information: Groovy History

The triple LP Joe's Garage featured lead singer Ike Willis as the voice of the character Joe in a rock opera about the danger of political systems, the suppression of freedom of speech and music -inspired in part by the Islamic revolution that had made music illegal within its jurisdiction at the time- and about the "strange relationship Americans have with sex and sexual frankness".
 

After spending much of 1980 on the road, Zappa released Tinsel Town Rebellion in 1981. In May 1982, Zappa released Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch, which featured his biggest selling single ever, the Grammy Award-nominated song Valley Girl.

The album Jazz from Hell, released in 1986, earned Zappa his first Grammy Award in 1988 for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. Except for one live guitar solo St. Etienne, the album exclusively featured compositions brought to life by the Synclavier.

in 1990, Zappa was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. The disease had been developing unnoticed for ten years and was considered inoperable. After the diagnosis, Zappa devoted most of his energy to modern orchestral and Synclavier works. Shortly before his death in 1993 he completed Civilization Phaze III, a major Synclavier work which he had begun in the 1980s.

Zappa died from prostate cancer on December 4, 1993, 17 days before his 53rd birthday at his home with his wife and children by his side. At a private ceremony the following day, his body was buried in a grave at the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, in Los Angeles.

The general phases of Zappa's music have been variously categorized under experimental rock, jazz, classical, avant-pop, experimental pop, comedy rock, doo-wop, jazz fusion, progressive rock, proto-prog, avant-jazz, and psychedelic rock.

More information: The Guardian

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture.

The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Frank Zappa