ZAPPA vs JAZZ
(from the liner notes of the Cd “RICCARDO FASSI Tankio Band Plays the music of FRANK ZAPPA”)

Frank Zappa's relationship with jazz has always been controversial, to the point where it is a generally held belief that he hated the genre. This is not the case. As a kid he found it hard to get into be-loop: Parker's labyrinths were too abstract and not vibrant enough for a sixteen-year old but he was passionate about rhythm n'blues. Jazz fans would taunt him and the friends who shared his tastes " ...that music you listen to is shill". Inevitably a row would ensue and maybe a punch in the face for a right cause can explain his future attitude. This attitude however was not based on prejudice, but was a critique of an intransigent outlook. His criticisms were in fact directed in general to the fanaticism of those who unthinkingly adhere to a musical genre without understanding its profound values, with the sectarian attitude of those who believe themselves to be part of an exclusive élite, the listeners so well described in Adorno's writings.

In the second half of the 1960's Zappa led his band - The Mothers of Invention - towards a complex and unequalled integration of improvised and written parts unprecedented in the history of rock. In 1968 he said : "We are combining symphonic music, Jazz and the theatre of the absurd and transporting the lot onto a rock n'roll base." Two years later he reminds us that "my group has always been encouraged in jazz- type improvisation in a framework of atonal music. Z and he also complains that... "one of the reasons why the Mothers have never been associated with jazz is because most reviewers have never listened to jazz”. Yet he carried on campaigning against the more banale aspects of a self-indulgent jazz and especially against its most enthusiastic followers.

In "Be-Bop Tango" he prophetically imagined an encounter between modern jazz and the Argentinean dance, albeit satirically represented as the anthem of the chimerical "Old Jazzmen's Church". Zappa clearly expressed his thoughts when he commented on the deeper meaning of the piece: "Jazz is not dead: it just smells funny”. He recognised that the genre was still alive and he could be interested in certain aspects, but basically, as far as Zappa was concerned, jazz stank. Nevertheless, in 1972, Zappa formed the Grand Wazoo Orchestra to carry out it's own big band repertory, which remains one of the most original creations by a rock composer for a large line-up.

As early as 1966 with his first LP “Freak Out!” Zappa had included in the liner notes a list of musicians whom he considered to have had a determining influence on his work; among these were Roland Kirk, Cecil Taylor, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy and Bill Evans. Later in life he admitted to having been particularly influenced by certain arrangements by Mingus: probably those warmed by the loud, euphoric tones of gospel music found in albums such as “Blues & Roots” and “Oh Yeah”.

At the end of the Sixties Zappa had more than one occasion to play alongside Roland Kirk, and during this same time he invited Don Cherry to join his band, as documented by a famous bootleg. In 1969, immediately after the split-up of the Mothers of Invention, Zappa was invited as MC at the Actuel Festival in Amougies, and there jammed with an avant-garde black group led by Archie Shepp. Fifteen years later, Shepp returned the honour by taking part in one of Zappa's concerts. This one-shot collaboration was later documented in the album “You Can't Do That on Stage Any More vol. 4”.

It must be said, that these jazz musicians really deserved Zappa's esteem because they shied from the cliches of conventional jazz music. "People like Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Archie Shepp are very important in the history of music, and not just jazz". It is not by chance that Zappa advised aspiring guitar players to listen to the music of Wes Montgomery, and aspiring pianists to listen to Cecil Taylor: both jazz musicians who had revolutioned the technique of their instruments.

(…)

To this end Fassi has chosen pieces from Zappa's repertory which are most loved by "intelligent" jazzmen, meaning those who are struck first and foremost by good music. Running through the tracks on this album we discover that there are three main sources of inspiration: the teasing and experimental repertory of the early Mothers of Invention, Zappa's solo album "Hot Rats" which In 1969 prefigured a jazz-rock style which was still to be born, and the album Ovenite Sensation with the fabulous group including George Duke and Jean-Luc Ponty, Bruce Fowler and Sal Marquez, Ruth Underwood and Ralph Humphrey. This last album while being one of Zappa's most insolent and provocative is at the same time a synthesis of irresistible singing and highly articulate and complex arrangements.

In this album there are three tracks which Zappa as far forward as 1980 still considered to be among his best works: "Uncle Meat" and "Peaches en Regalia", and above all "Eric Dolphy Memonal Barbecue". This last was the only tribute paid by rock music to one of the most mysterious and misunderstood giants of jazz. And what a tribute! Zappa's theme dilates in those wide intervals beloved by Dolphy, it scans on the ascending arpeggios on imaginary chords, just as the saxophonist used to do in order to find a means to "live" the tonality without weighing statically on his base, and to renovate the jazz melody without sticking neither to free forms nor to the modal system building structures which are at the same time solid and elastic, suspended in space like sculptures by Calder.

(…)

The only track from Zappa's oeuvre to have become in some way a standard in jazz-rock repertoire, where it has become the vehicle of never-ending jam sessions, is "King Kong" with its pentatonic profile extended to the Dorian mode.

(…)

"Twenty Small Cigars" is considered Zappa's jazz masterpiece, a ballad of irresistable levity which was officially recorded on harpsichord (on the album “Chunga's Revenge”), though not many people know that the Mothers of Invention were already playing it in the late Sixties with Bunk Gardner on flute and the title "Interlude".
"Igor's Boogie" instead is one of the first tracks of chamber music officially recorded by Zappa. It bears in its title a double reference to Stravinsky: in the use of his first name; and in the allusion to a paradoxical aflirmation made by the composer in his book "Dialogues and a Diary". Stravinsky maintains that in the part for two clarinets in the middle section of the sarabanda of his melodrama "Persephone" of 1933-34, he had anticipated the boogie-woogie by a decade (he is obviously unaware, or pretends to be that the boogie-woogie in its prototype piano forms was already an affirmed and phonographically well documented genre as early as the 1920's).

One of the cleverest choices, though at first it seems the most dodgey is that of "America Drinks and Goes Home", Zappa's clearest and most direct charge against the banalization of jazz. A parody of the "horrors" - as Zappa called them - of lounge bar music, that bland form of entertainment with presence at being a sort of jazz watered- down for an un-musical and un-attentive audience (the kind of music Zappa had been forced to play in his youth with Joe Perrino and the Mellotones). "It was based" - Zappa stated - "on the same subconscious formula that all those pukers of Tin Pan Alley used: you know II/V/I progressions modulating all the way round." An alibi to form chains of interminable cliches. Zappa used this in "Absolutely Free" as the background to a scene between drunks ending the piece with a fist fight.

I don't know whether Riccardo Fassi knows the interview - one of over four-hundred given by Zappa during the course of his career - in which Zappa admitted that even when dealing with parody he worked on harmony and melody in a manner which after many years he still considered musically valid. Surely Fassi, being an intelligent jazzman, must have realised this on his own: he has taken the parody seriously because, like Zappa, he is attracted quite simply by good music, whatever its original source might have been.