frank zappa Archive

Continued from Part One … While Dweezil Zappa‘s tour will include a few tracks from Via Zammata, most of each show will center around performances of Frank’s challenging material. And Dweezil’s band follows the late Zappa’s onstage approach of building improvisation into the songs. “That’s one of the unique things about Frank’s music,” Dweezil observes.

For an artist who seemingly documented nearly every moment of his live and studio performance – and, not unlike John Lennon and Yoko Ono, considered the entirety of it as a single body of work – the early work of Frank Zappa‘s Mothers (of Invention) was, surprisingly, not as extensively captured and saved as one

File next to: Frank Zappa, Primus, Tenacious D Today, Dweezil Zappa might sound like a chip off the old block, but it wasn’t always so. On his first release – 1982’s single “Crunchy Water” b/w “My Mother is a Space Cadet” – he sounded like a reasonably talented kid who owned some Van Halen records.

There’s no consensus among Frank Zappa fans as to which album is his “best.” But most will agree that the 1974 double-live LP Roxy & Elsewhere is a high point. Recorded in L.A. over three nights in December ’73, the album captured The Mothers’ unique mix of bizarre lyrics, astounding and intricate musical interplay, and

George Duke (1946-2013) was one of the most fascinating figures in music during the second half of the 20th century. Duke was a jazz-and-classically trained musician proficient on any number of instruments, though he is best known as a keyboard player. He got his start collaborating with French virtuoso violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, and his early