Frank Zappa

Egocentric, anarchic, mad, bizarre, a genius: Frank Zappa is all this and much more. A figure who was always larger than life, an artist who never bowed to the "system", and who, until death took him away, had the courage and the nerve to spit out the whole of his being onto a society too bourgeois and too prim to ever understand him.

After a long career marked by a multitude of changes, no one can say with any certainty what Frank Zappa's true artistic face really was: his irony and sardonic streak defined him as a singular author, as lovable as he was detestable, in equal measure. Musically he ranged across every existing genre, and it was precisely in doing so that he forged a distinctly "Zappa-esque" sound that went on to influence a whole school of musicians. His dazzling debut album "Freak Out!" dropped like a time bomb into the world of rock. It was 1966, and Zappa was the emperor of the freak world. The "stupid songs", as he himself called them, were nothing more than a vehicle for pouring poisoned darts into the prevailing bigotry and hypocrisy of a culture — "stupid" songs designed to turn politicians into buffoonish, grotesque cartoon caricatures; "stupid" songs, deliberately shallow in theme and lyric, precisely to give even more force to the twisted, ridiculous strut of the characters Zappa so loved to mock.

The Mothers Of Invention were Zappa's worthy subjects during the first, brilliant and dazzling phase of his career: they helped him translate his own mockery into music, with complex musical tapestries coloured by endless shades of nuance. Then, in 1969, Zappa reshuffled his line-up and gave birth to Hot Rats, bringing together Captain Beefheart, violinists Ponty and Don "Sugar Cane" Harris, Underwood, and an imposing rhythm section.

The eponymous album "Hot Rats" opens in phantasmagoric fashion with "Peaches En Regalia", a miniature suite, gorgeous in its arrangements and orchestration. It's an interweaving of textures in which horns, keyboards, guitar and piano duet with one another, forging in their own highly personal way a sonic blend of multiple personalities that manage to interact in coherent harmony. Sublime symphonism in an ageless track, then, one that even years later still resists the wear of time, its enveloping charm undiminished.

The sardonic streak of Captain Beefheart, Zappa's longtime friend/enemy, is entrusted with “Willie The Pimp,” the only song to feature a small but significant written score. It's a guttural, scratchy vocal performance, almost ogre-like, that draws us into the very heart of the song; a total guitar trip in experimental form. The Frank Zappa guitarist ventures into terrain riddled with complexity of melody and execution, sketching out the base melody only to then drift away from it into complete improvisation. These are guitar parts that favor effects work — distortion, wah-wah — while the rhythm is relentless and gives the lead player no quarter: it almost feels as though Zappa is about to collapse at any moment, only to imperiously pick the base melody back up, an original melody bolstered by the supreme violin of “Sugar Cane” Harris. Special mention also goes to the rhythmic “engine”, entrusted to Max Bennett's bass and John Guerin's percussion, both excellent at grinding out tempos with such powerful precision that they make the track blazingly compelling.

"Son Of Mr. Green Genes" opens with a commanding introduction entrusted to keyboards and horns, through which Hot Rats carve out refined baroque flourishes, projecting us into a distant, unreachable world; the melody repeats on a loop for a few minutes until suddenly the first of several breaks arrives, catapulting us into a mounting crescendo of tension: a mood entirely different from the one in which the song first presented itself. What's remarkable about this break is that it ushers in one of the most spectacular guitar "entrances" in all of modern music: the first 30 seconds are the stuff of legend, presenting an engaged, incisive Zappa who manages to give his instrument's sound a soul and twist it into something almost celestial, forging an astonishing union in perfect symbiosis between brutality and harmony. The track shifts mood again and again, suddenly reinventing itself in multiple guises; it's a studio jam, and its central section is also the stage for a fabulous contrapuntal sax entry courtesy of Ian Underwood, who first props up the main melody with repeated, insistent chords, then duels with Zappa's extreme guitar. Sax and electric guitar in unison: rarely in rock has such a singular pairing reached such lofty heights.

"Little Umbrellas", on the other hand, leads towards more markedly jazz-inflected atmospheres, in which the main focus falls on a "stitching together" of the various instruments courtesy of organ keyboards, which create a sinister sound, almost like a funeral march. Also crucial is the melodic embroidery of certain wind instruments, the flute for instance, which shyly but gracefully peeks out through the folds of the track. Next comes "The Gumbo Variations": Max Bennett's pulsing opening bass riff serves as a prelude to the arrival of an adventurous sax, teetering on the very edge of total sonic breakdown. Underwood is masterful in this pure jazz solo excursion: it's an exercise in style without borders or barriers. The track continues, propelled by a rhythm section brimming with odd time signatures, while Zappa works away in the background on a dark rhythmic groundwork, until, in a total orgiastic explosion of sound, "Sugar Cane" Harris's violin takes over, delivering a hallucinated, inspired solo, wringing from his instrument hisses and sounds never before heard from a violin. The violin gives way to Zappa's raw soloing and to Paul Humphrey's technical prowess, before the whole thing concludes in one of the most extreme explosions of jazzy avant-gardism around. Smooth, polished jazz doesn't live here. Here reigns the rawest, most feverish vein, flying past every convention, ranging far and wide into improvisational-experimental marathons.

The mood turns more relaxed on the closing "It Must Be A Camel": the roiling odd-metre percussion lays the groundwork for a choral dialogue between sax and piano in the background. The brutality that marked key moments of the album gives way to a refined ensemble sound, dominated halfway through by a Zappa solo that unwinds into calmer sonorities, only to then surprise us with sudden, lightning-fast electric explosions.

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14/11/2006