Zappa and Jazz

Did it really smell funny, Frank?

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• Publisher: Matador
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781785897993

Although Frank Zappa died over 20 years ago, he continues to be regarded as an iconic figure in 20th century culture. In 1973 he famously said 'Jazz is not dead... it just smells funny, ' and in this new book Geoff Wills takes a look at Zappa's widely assumed antipathy for the jazz genre. Along the way, he throws up some very interesting facts. Frank Zappa's music has a unique and easily recognisable quality, and it brilliantly synthesizes a wide range of cultural influences. Zappa and Jazz focuses on the influence of jazz on Zappa in an attempt to clarify the often-confusing nature of his relationship with it. Zappa's early years are examined, from his first foray into a recording studio to the formation and progress of his band The Mothers of Invention. There are exhaustive critiques here of the key jazz-related albums Hot Rats, King Kong, The Grand Wazoo and Waka/Jawaka. Along the way, Wills analyses Zappa's music and the wider influences that were crucial in forming his attitudes, not only to jazz but to society in general. The book concludes with a discussion of Zappa's similarity to more orthodox jazz leaders, his legacy and the influence on jazz-related music. Guaranteed to appeal to all Zappa fans who seek new insights into his music, to open-minded jazz listeners and to anyone with an interest in the melting pot of 20th century music.

CHAPTER 1

DID IT REALLY SMELL FUNNY?

With every year that has passed since his death in 1993 at the age of fifty two, there has been an increasing acceptance that Frank Zappa is an iconic musical figure. His music continues to be played by a variety of ensembles in America and Europe, and at the time of writing, twenty eight Zappa biographies or Zappa-related books are currently available. Although he used the arena of popular music to make his entrance into public consciousness, to class him simply as a popular musician would be to do him a severe disservice.

Zappa’s music has a unique and easily recognizable quality, and is a brilliant and original synthesis of a wide range of cultural influences, including those of twentieth century classical music, film music, cartoon soundtracks, American stand-up comedy, rhythm and blues and jazz. This book focuses on just one of the influences on Zappa’s music, namely jazz, and an attempt is made to clarify the often-confusing nature of his relationship with it. From the commencement of his career, and regularly thereafter, his liking for jazz (at least, certain types of jazz), and its influence on his work, was obvious. And yet Zappa liked to give the impression that he disliked jazz. On his album Roxy and Elsewhere (1973) he famously stated that ‘jazz is not dead … it just smells funny’, and in his autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989) he included a section entitled ‘Jazz: The Music of Unemployment.’ In a 1978 interview with Dave Fass in Acid Rock magazine, he simply said ‘I don’t like jazz.’ Possibly his most vehement statement on the topic occurred in a 1984 interview with Richard Cook in New Musical Express:

I was never involved with jazz. There’s no passion in it. It’s a bunch of people trying to be cool, looking for certification of an intellectual community. Most of today’s jazz is worth less than the most blatantly commercial music because it pretends to be something it’s not. I’d rather stay away from that.

(Cook 1984, 15)

In 2003 the music writer Charles Shaar Murray wrote and presented a programme for BBC Radio 3 about Zappa and jazz entitled Jazz from Hell. In it he took Zappa at his word and stated that ‘Frank Zappa was not a jazz musician – and he obviously didn’t see himself as one – he wasn’t even a jazz fan.’ In the present thesis, I shall attempt to show that this statement is manifestly untrue.

So why did Zappa say that he disliked jazz? In truth what he disliked was not jazz, but the jazz Establishment, just as he disliked every other Establishment, be it that of education, religion, politics, classical music or any other orthodoxy of American society. In this sense, he was a classic outsider. Quite simply, jazz was just one of a long list of subjects that had the capacity to incur his displeasure. One has only to refer to The Real Frank Zappa Book to encounter a continuous flow of irritants, including people (‘stupidity, not hydrogen, is the basic building block of the universe … I don’t have friends’), the education system (‘I don’t like teachers. I don’t like schools’), politicians (‘a bunch of really bad people’), musicians (‘they tend to be lazy, and they get sick and skip rehearsals’), the tendency of symphony orchestra members to make mistakes (‘… made so many mistakes, and played so badly … that it required forty edits … to try to cover them’) and religion (‘The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book’).

How did Zappa acquire these bleak views? From an early age his experiences gave him good reason to be cautious in his dealings with the world. As Barry Miles (2004) observes, at the end of the Second World War, people did not forget that Italy had been at war with America, and the young Zappa, as an Italian-American, was subject to bullying. Between the ages of five and ten he was a sickly child, and as a youth his appearance was the antithesis of the all-American boy: he told Kurt Loder (1990) that when he was eleven, he weighed about 180 pounds, had big pimples and a moustache. To add to his feelings of insecurity, his father, ostensibly because of his work, had caused his family to move home eleven times by the time Zappa was aged eighteen.

In The Real Frank Zappa Book he says ‘Because of my dad’s work, I switched from school to school fairly often. I didn’t enjoy it … I kept getting thrown out of high school … I had gotten to hate education so much, I was so fed up with going to school …’ His relationship with his father became strained: ‘I didn’t get along all that well with him … Mostly I tried to stay out of his way – and I think he tried to stay out of mine as much as he could …’ Barry Miles (2004) discusses Zappa’s father, and suggests that there was an agitated quality in his inability to settle in one job for too long, leading to constant, unnecessary relocation. This had a detrimental effect on his family, who found it increasingly difficult to make an emotional commitment to anything more than superficial friendships in each new setting. The young Frank became withdrawn, inward-looking and wary of letting his real feelings show, and this was a mindset that cast a shadow for the rest of his life. By the time he was fifteen he had attended six separate high schools, predictably affecting his education negatively and precluding entry to a university, even though he was highly intelligent.

In his Zappa biography No Commercial Potential (1996), David Walley quotes Ernest Tossi, vice-principal at Antelope Valley High School, as saying ‘Frank was an independent thinker who couldn’t accept the Establishment’s set of rules.’ In 1965 Zappa was falsely accused of making a pornographic tape and subsequently spent ten days in jail. Barry Miles comments that he was a changed man after this experience. Disillusioned by what he perceived to be the reactionary American system of education and government, he vowed that never again would he be taken in.

Because of his early life experiences, Zappa developed a personality with a distinctive set of traits. He had a distrust and suspiciousness of others, and was reluctant to confide in people because of a fear that the information would be used against him. He was unforgiving of slights, and because he was waiting for potential threats, he could act in a guarded or secretive manner. Hostile, sarcastic expressions were frequent, and it was not easy for him to accept criticism.

Thus, his scathing opinions often acted as smoke screens and defence mechanisms, so that while he was saying one thing he was doing another. For instance, although he could be scornful about film music, saying that it was ‘… so transparent. There’s hardly any challenge in that’ in ‘The Mother of all Interviews’ with Don Menn (1993), and parodying what he felt were its clichés and mannerisms in the extended version of his orchestral piece ‘Bogus Pomp’ (1987), he was also a good friend of the eminent film composer David Raksin, as the latter stated in an interview with Bruce Duffie (1988). And although Zappa stated that ‘books make me sleepy,’ he was well-read. Barry Miles describes how, as an adolescent, he read his father’s books and then began frequenting the Lancaster County library in his search for alternative ideas and values. He was familiar with the works of Franz Kafka, William Burroughs, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, according to Nigey Lennon (1995). It was as though he was worried that he might be caught out joining the Establishment, and then subjected to derision. And so it was with jazz. While criticizing it, he drew on its influences. It is no wonder that pianist George Duke, in Charles Shaar Murray’s previously-mentioned radio programme, was moved to comment that ‘it was always interesting to me, why he had this reticence about jazz, and at the same time, there was jazz going on all around him. I thought there was something strange about that, but he wouldn’t admit it.’ And in the same programme keyboard player Tommy Mars felt that, for Zappa, jazz was ‘like that thing in the closet.’

The eminent American composer John Adams, discussing Zappa in a 2002 BBC Radio 3 interview, said:

One of his goals in life was to prove that he could do anything – you know, you wanna play blues guitar? I’ll beat ya at that! You wanna have a gross- out contest? I’ll beat ya at that! You wanna write super-complex avant-garde European music? I can do that too!

(Adams 2002, BBC Radio 3)

Zappa was trying to show that he was better than the Establishment that had slighted him. The phrase (with apologies to Shakespeare) ‘He doth protest too much, methinks’ springs to mind here, and it is sad because he had nothing to prove: his brilliance was apparent.

CHAPTER 2

EARLY ENCOUNTERS WITH JAZZ

When, at the age of fourteen, Zappa entered Mission Bay High School in San Diego in 1955, his first exposure to the elitist snobbery of a certain type of jazz fan occurred. It was like a red rag to a bull, and was no doubt the source of all his later caustic comments about jazz. He recounted the experience in an interview with Dan Forte in Musician magazine in 1979: ‘… at the time I was down there, there was a real definite division between the people who liked rhythm and blues and the people who liked jazz … The people who liked jazz would always go around putting you down …’ These people were fans of West Coast jazz, at the time at the height of its popularity, and exemplified by Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars and Shorty Rogers and his Giants. Unfortunately, Zappa’s ire at mindless adherence to a fashion spilled over onto the music. He commented ‘… to me, there wasn’t that much emotional depth in listening to something like ‘Martians Go Home’ by Shorty Rogers – that kind of stuff. It was just bleak.’

Was Zappa being disingenuous here? ‘Martians Go Home’ is not bleak – it is a piece of quirkily mischievous, Basie-inspired, small-group swing. Interestingly, Rogers, like many West Coast jazz musicians, also had a foot in the rhythm and blues camp. He supervised recording sessions by doo-wop groups and formed a publishing company with singer Jesse Belvin, publishing the latter’s hit ‘Guess Who’ (Rounce, 2004). Under the name Boots Brown and the Blockbusters he recorded a series of rhythm and blues instrumentals and reached number 23 in the charts in 1958 with ‘Cerveza’ (Myers, 2013). It is not stretching the imagination too much to suggest that Rogers was the type of person that Zappa later sought to emulate when he worked with Paul Buff at Pal Studios in the early 1960s, where they produced rock instrumentals and used group names like The Hollywood Persuaders and The Rotations.

Jazz fans could be bigoted and snobbish. So could certain jazz musicians. On the other hand, many were prepared to be open-minded about different types of music. They were not all haters of rhythm and blues.

Johnny Otis, who, as Barry Miles states, Zappa first met in 1958 on a visit to his studio, was another musician whose feet were in the camps of both jazz and rhythm and blues. He had early associations with jazz, having played drums with Lester Young, Illinois Jacquet and (at least according to Tom Lord’s 2004 Jazz Discography) Stan Kenton. His experiences are recounted in his 1993 autobiography. Fans created rigid categories, but for the pragmatic musician, the boundaries between jazz and other types of music were much more fluid. Session bass player Carol Kaye, in a 1998 article in Downbeat magazine, admitted that although ‘rock and roll was a dirty word among L.A. bebop musicians in the late 1950s … if it hadn’t been for the huge hidden jazz influence in the 1960s hits, that musical era might never have happened …’

As described in the 1979 Musician interview, Zappa’s first encounter with bebop was not a positive one. He said, ‘I didn’t hear any bebop until I moved away from San Diego, and moved to Lancaster and I came across a Charlie Parker album. I didn’t like it – because it sounded very tuneless, and it didn’t feel like it had any balls to it.’ He confirmed these early impressions in later interviews: in ‘The Mother of All Interviews’ (Menn, 1993) he said, ‘I didn’t like Charlie Parker. I didn’t like some other modern jazz things. Listening to these things, I would go, “Why do people like this? I don’t understand it”.’ And in the Zappa Late Show Special on BBC 2 TV in 1993, in his interview with Nigel Leigh he said:

I’d come into contact with Charlie Parker records and things like that, but they didn’t hold my interest. I couldn’t follow it. Same kind of argument that you’d get from people today: ‘What are they doing? They’re just noodling around,’ you know. I mean, now I understand why they’re noodling and where they’re noodling and I can tell the difference between good noodling and bad noodling, but without certain musical clues, it just all sounded like noodles to me.

(Leigh 1993, BBC2 TV)

Zappa was only fifteen when he first encountered Parker’s music. In ‘The Mother of All Interviews’, he described how and why he struggled to understand and appreciate certain pieces of music, for instance ‘Chronochromie’ by Olivier Messiaen:

It’s just that the more I learned, the more interesting it became, because at the time I was exposed to this kind of music, I didn’t have a classical education. I was just a guy buying records. Everything that I liked was based on my gut reaction to what was on the record. For some reason I liked Varèse right away. I liked Stravinsky right away, but these other things not … when you start learning about structure, when you start learning about how these things work, then you can appreciate how other people deal with the material … the more I learned about what the rules of the game were, the more I could appreciate how other people might solve the problem.

(Menn 1993, 58)

Although he did not clarify this, it seems not unlikely that the more Zappa learned about music, the more his appreciation of Parker, like that of Messiaen, grew. His initial dislike of Parker may have been partly connected to aversive experiences with bebop-loving jazz snobs, in contrast to his reaction to the music of Varèse, as he said in the BBC 2 Late Show Special:

I liked it a lot. Nobody had to explain it to me … It just sounded good to me. The dissonance – the way I perceived the dissonance was, ‘these chords are really mean. I like these chords. And the drums are playing loud in this music, and you can hear the drums often in this music’ …

(Leigh 1993, BBC2 TV)

Contrasting with jazz snobs, Varèse, with his ‘really mean’ chords, loud drums and (according to The Real Frank Zappa Book) mad scientist looks, could express Zappa’s teenage angst brilliantly, and was probably a perfect alternative to his father.

Despite his initial negative reaction to bebop, Zappa continued to explore jazz and invested in albums by Oscar Pettiford and Charles Mingus, according to the 1979 Musician article. He thought Pettiford was good, and really liked Mingus. He also liked Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy and Harold Land. These were not musicians that the casual fan would be familiar with – Zappa was obviously taking a serious interest. And all the jazz musicians that he professed to like had moved through the bebop experience to develop their own music. Ted Gioia (1992) states that ‘the music [Dolphy] was playing on gigs in the mid-1950s was … closely related to the bebop idiom.’ Pettiford, Mingus and Monk all played with Parker at different times. In Lancaster, Zappa became a student at Antelope Valley High School, and, as Barry Miles (2004) describes, he explored its record library. Here he became familiar with albums by Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, and later developed a liking for the Oliver Nelson album Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961), featuring Eric Dolphy. He became a jazz autodidact, in the same way that he taught himself about twentieth century classical music.

Zappa referred to another jazz album that he was familiar with in a 1967 interview with Frank Kofsky. He was asked if he listened to John Coltrane and he replied:

Well, I don’t own any Coltrane, except he’s one artist on the anthology album that Tom Wilson produced in 1950 [it was actually 1957]. The one that has Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra. It’s called Jazz in Transition – it’s a classic.

(Kofsky 1967, 28-32)

This album features Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor at relatively conventional stages in their careers, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• 1. Did it Really Smell Funny?
• 2. Early Encounters with Jazz
• 3. First Jazz Recordings
• 4. Joe Perrino and the II-V-I Experience
• 5. Zappa and the Jazz Waltz
• 6. Early Encounters with Studio Musicians
• 7. Freak Out
• 8. Lumpy Gravy
• 9. Respect for Jazz Musicians
• 10. Ian Underwood, Art Tripp and Uncle Meat
• 11. Buzz Gardner, Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped My Flesh
• 12. The Music of Unemployment
• 13. Hot Rats
• 14. King Kong
• 15. Amougies and the LA Philharmonic
• 16. Waka/Jawaka and the Grand Wazoo
• 17. Grand Wazoo Live
• 18. The Petit Wazoo
• 19. The George Duke Years
• 20. Bozzio, O’Hearn and Zappa in New York
• 21. Wolf, Mars and Mann
• 22. Barrow and Colaiuta
• 23. Martin, Thunes and Wackerman
• 24. The Last Band
• 25. Postscript
• 26. Speculative Afterthoughts: Frank Zappa and the Fable of Mabel
• References
• Discography
• Acknowledgements
• Index