Jim Took Off His Rug

This one’s for Papa.

G-Spot Tornado

The Yellow Shark, An Appreciation. Merry Zappadan.

First thing you should do is listen to the track off of Jazz From Hell. I did manage to find a link to it on Vimeo. If you are not familiar with the piece, and if you have a heart condition, tread carefully. This is what you might call a “high energy” number.

When he composed it, it’s pretty clear that Zappa intended to push his music machine, the Synclavier, to the limit.

So here’s how the story goes on Ali Askin’s the liner notes from Everything Is Healing Nicely, in discussing a track called “This Is A Test (AKA Igor).”

Part of Frank’s overall plan was to compose on the Synclavier for the Ensemble Modern so the first order of business was to see how well this plan would work. On the night before the first day of rehearsals, he asked me reorchestrate his Synclavier composition entitled “Igor” and arrange it for the Ensemble Modern, preparing printed parts and a conductor’s score. Frank replace the title with “This Is A Test” right before printing out the parts for the next morning, just so that the musicians would know the purpose of this short piece. As so often happens, the title stuck.

This next part is remarkable and tells you a lot about these musicians.

This recording is a first take performance by musicians who were sight-reading music just handed to them. It illustrates not only the technical skill of this orchestra but the fact that they managed to be expressive and impart a style into what they played, even while struggling to accurately render something they had never seen before.

…

It’s interesting to note that one of these tests was “G-Spot Tornado.” After about an hour of rehearsing, Frank deemed it a failed experiment and put it aside. The members of the ensemble however were determined to master it and continued to practice it on their own. By the time that the Yellow Shark concerts took place, “G-Spot Tornado” served as the finale and the encore.

Imagine listening to something like the track off of Jazz From Hell and thinking hellz yeah we can play that. And they play the fuck out of it. And the La La La Human Steps (those dancers there) give it a big beautiful bushy set of eyebrows. I believe I’ve embedded and lauded this performance in previous years of Zappadan blogging, but knowing that it was the players, not Zappa, who insisted on making this happen just makes it that much more incredible.

Get Whitey

The Yellow Shark, An Appreciation. Merry Zappadan.

Exercise #4

The Yellow Shark, An Appreciation. Merry Zappadan.

If you’re interested in Zappa history, this is, apparently, a tune you want to hear.

I couldn’t find it on the YouTube, but thanks to the WP plugin known as Haiku, you can just steal a listen here:

[haiku url="Exercise4.mp3"]

Zappa comments in the liner notes:

This tune dates from 1957 or ’58. It was originally a string quartet I wrote right about the time I graduated (from high school). It’s one of the oldest pieces, and it’s been played by just about every one of the touring bands, in one version or another.

Like this, from back in the day:

Includes Dog Breath and Uncle Meat, so this clip is very relevant to the topic at hand.

Pound for a Brown

The Yellow Shark, An Appreciation. Merry Zappadan.

So many Zappa titles remind me of this (embedding disabled, worth the click).

From Barry Miles’ Zappa: A Biography:

England also inspired the title of ‘A Pound For a Brown On The Bus’, an attractive tune originally written for a string quartet in a music competition that William Ballard, Frank’s high-school music teacher suggested he enter. When the Mothers flew in from Amsterdam to play the Royal Festival Hall, they were provided with a coach to take them to the Winton Hotel. The bus had very large windows and during the trip Jimmy Carl Black made a wager with Bunk Gardner: ‘I’ll bet you a pound you won’t Brown Out on this here bus.’ Gardner had his trousers down and his cheeks spread across the window before anybody knew what was happening.

If there is a Zappa piece that sounds like Christmas, it is this performance of “Pound For a Brown.”

Welcome to the United States

The Yellow Shark, An Appreciation. Merry Zappadan.

From the liner notes, in mid-paragraph:

[Herman] Kretzschmar, who is normally employed at the piano, cembalo, and celeste, found himself inside a piano at Joe’s Garage rehearsals, reciting everything from his library card to a rather colorful letter-to-the-editor of a flesh-piercing magazine (detailing methods of impaling genitals) while the Ensemble gamely improvised under Zappa’s direction. At the “Yellow Shark” concerts, Kretzschmar’s Dr. Strangelove-like vocalizing was employed to recite (verbatim) actual questions from a less-than-hospitable U.S. customs form during “Welcome to the United States. This points up another of Zappa’s characteristics compositional traits: he is open to chance and whimsy in choosing subjects and themes, whether in music or text. He often makes artistic use of whatever happens along (hence the customs form, piercing magazine, and libray card)—a concept he labels “Anything Anytime Anyplace For No Reason At All” (AAAFNRAA) As [Todd] Yvega, who is also a composer commented: “A lot of times in the world of so-called serious music, people take it so seriously. To Frank, everything is entertainment. You’re either entertained, or you’re not. And nothing is serious. Which is why you can have something that supposedly is serious and suddenly have someone stick his plunger on the side of his face. I do think of his music as being important in the sense I think it will be around for many centuries. It’s serious in that respect, but it is, after all, there to amuse us.

When I read this, I knew I simply had to get my hands on Everything Is Healing Nicely. A hint: Don’t bother going to Amazon if you, too, want to acquire this gem. You can only get it there as a collectible, for like $50. You can get it right from the source for $20. It comes in a beautiful felt case (though I am afraid it will be mighty difficult to keep clean, especially if you happen to reside with a long-haired cat as I do).

Kretzschmar is a rare talent, and Zappa saw that and tapped it. From the EIHN liner notes:

The distinctive timbre of his voice, the German accent, and the humorous pace of his delivery obviously struck Frank as a vehicle to be developed and utilized.

Indeed:

The source material for this piece is certainly worth a read.

On a somewhat-related note, there is a typo in the liner notes that tickles me senseless.

[Zappa] acted as emcee, and conducted three pieces in those two concerts: “Food Gathering in Post-Industrial America, 1992″, “Welcome to the Untied States” and the encore, ” G-Spot Tornado.”

It has been my preferred editorial style for a long time to refer to the country in which we reside as the Untied States. It is now a style that is fortified in print. Grin.

I’m So Happy I Could Cry

Sound familiar?

Food Gathering In Post Industrial America, 1992

The Yellow Shark, An Appreciation. Merry Zappadan.

From the liner notes:

Two more characteristics of Zappa’s approach to music perhaps bear mentioning. First, he has always been adept at bringing out “hidden talents” in his musicians. As [Todd] Yvega put it, “If he’d hire a sax player who’s good at playing the sax, it would almost be redundant and pointless to have him just play the sax. Frank already knows he does that. But then he’ll find out that he can tap dance and well—and make use of that.” Accordingly, the players of [Ensemble Modern] found themselves as actors and narrators—most spectacularly, in the cases of violist Hilary Sturt (who delivers the arresting recitativ in “Food Gathering in Post Industrial America”) and Herman Kretzschmar.

(More on Herman to follow.)

Zappa takes a harsh, unnecessary self-effacing dive when introducing this. It’s a little weird, seeing him stand in front of the musicians and refer to the piece they’re about to perform as a “piece of shit.”

There is no need to apologize for this, Mr. Zappa. You gave every one of these musicians an opportunity to be on stage and to be mirthful, and probably in every one of their heads, they’re giving the finger to some stiff-assed music teacher in their past who yelled once a day, HEY! DON’T DO THAT WITH YOUR INSTRUMENTS!

Zappa said it himself. From Barry Miles’ Zappa: A Biography:

One of the things I like about the Ensemble Modern is that they’re interested in sound for its own sake. At one rehearsal, one of the horn players picked up his horn up off the floor, and it scraped and made a noise. And I said, “Do it again,” and the next thing you know, we had the entire brass section takeing their instruments and scraping the bells back and forth across the lfoor, making this grinding, grunting sound.

Not sure if that technique was used here. But there are no better examples of the EM’s dedication to sound for its own sake then here and in “Welcome to the United States,” which we will consider tomorrow.

Questi Cazzi Di Piccione

The Yellow Shark, An Appreciation. Merry Zappadan.

Translated from the Italian, it means, “those fucking pigeons.”

As performed in The Yellow Shark, there was no conductor. That’s why for all the percussive action on the instruments. Says Frank in the liner notes:

There are all these knocking sounds in that piece, and the knocking sounds were an invention of the string players. When they tried to learn it, it was very difficult for them to count it, and keep it eve. So one of the guys said, “Well, why don’t we just beat time on our instruments in between what we’re playing?”-because they rehearsed without a conductor. When they played it for me with the knocks in it, I told them to leave it in.

So you can just imagine those are the pigeons.