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Dweezil Zappa living in the past, or having the people who formerly played it being key to it. So you needed the right mindset first? How about the audience?
Part of the whole process of doing this is to kind of re-educate the audience to have a different perspective, because it’s very easy for people to think of this as nostalgiabased entertainment. Frank’s music is very contemporary and, in fact, way ahead of its time. Future generations should want to learn this music and play it correctly. What has Frank Zappa’s music taught you?
Through Zappa Plays Zappa, Dweezil Zappa brings to life the work of his late father, the legendary Frank Zappa. “Frank’s music is very contemporary and, in fact, way ahead of its time. Future generations should want to learn this music and play it correctly,” Dweezil says. PHOTO PROVIDED [ INTERVIEW ] BY FRANK DE BLASE
Frank Zappa was a musician whose approach to music was unconventional, humorous, free, and consequently maligned by those who clung to the predictable safety of mainstream music’s teat. Zappa explored the fringes as a composer and as an incendiary guitarist. In 1966 he formed The Mothers of Invention and tested the boundaries of avant-garde music as well as polite society with the band’s irreverent explorations of both music and humor. Frank Zappa broke the mold and continued to break it until his death in 1993 at age 53. Since 2006, Dweezil Zappa — one of Frank’s sons — has taken chunks of his father’s catalogue and painstakingly re-created them note for note, word for word, ad hoc, verbatim. As much as we know of Frank Zappa —his enigmatic genius and off-color, off-tempo, off-beat humor — there is plenty we don’t. His project Zappa Plays Zappa tackles this reverently and referentially. Frank Zappa once said talking about music is like dancing about architecture. Dweezil Zappa called up from his home 24 CITY • JAZZ FESTIVAL GUIDE 2012
in California, and we did just that for 10 minutes or so. An edited transcript of our conversation follows. CITY: How did you choose which songs to tackle? Dweezil Zappa: There’s so much music to
choose from; it’s a constant challenge to see what we’re going to focus on. Was Zappa Plays Zappa inevitable?
It’s something I didn’t know was going to be totally possible until I put some effort into learning the music. I didn’t want to do it unless it was done to the right standards. It’s a daunting catalogue. How did you approach it?
The real key to all this stuff is the music itself is inspirational — not only to me but to other people. The idea would be, if you’re inspired to learn the music the way it is written, future generations will have the opportunity to be exposed to it and be inspired... not just perceiving the music as
There’s so much, it’s hard to tell. The main thing — and what people probably don’t know about Frank’s music — is he started writing orchestral music as a young teenager. He studied on how to be a composer from books at the library. He sent music he had written out to orchestras with no one taking him seriously. So over the years, his music was developed by rock bands under his baton. He would use his rock band as his orchestra. He did work with orchestras in his career, but his music was more along the line of compositions than a rock band writing four-chord songs. When I was young, a lot of things appealed to me in the music. When I was younger, I didn’t know what the names of those things were. So when I studied the music, I had to discover the devices — not equipment, but the things Frank used in his compositions. This is clearly more than a Zappa tribute or cover band.
People may say Zappa plays Zappa is a cover band. Well, technically an orchestra is a cover band. And Frank Zappa is virtually a genre at this point.
The problem we perpetually run into with this project and with his music was, people want to continues on page 26