Dweezil Zappa: My debt to my Dad.
By Adam Sweeting 16th November 2011. Find Full Article Here:-
Though he died in 1993 aged only 52, Frank Zappa recorded more than 80 albums which covered an astonishing amount of musical turf. Jazz-fusion, progressive rock, musique concrète, scatalogical satire, movie soundtracks and orchestral compositions all figured in Zappa’s teeming aural universe, and he is regarded as one of the most stubbornly individualistic artists of the late 20th century.
But nobody ever accused him of being easy listening, and it’s difficult to imagine an artist less attuned to our blaringly commercialised pop era. In 2006, his son Dweezil decided it was high time Zappa’s legacy made itself known to new generations of listeners who had never had their brain cells nuked by its spiky wit and wilful complexity.
“I felt Frank’s music was under-appreciated and misunderstood, and his contributions were too great for them to be allowed to disappear in my lifetime,” says Dweezil. “I noticed that, if you said to people younger than me, ‘Hey, what do you know about Frank Zappa?’ they’d say, ‘Who?’ I thought, if I’m going to do something about this, I need to make the effort now.”
Thus he conceived the idea of Zappa Plays Zappa, a band devoted to sustaining Frank’s legacy by performing his music for younger listeners who were unaware of it, as well as for Zappa’s surviving fans. The unit arrives for an extensive British tour this week, following a one-off appearance at the Roundhouse a year ago to celebrate what would have been Frank’s 70th birthday, and once again it will perform his 1974 album Apostrophe in its entirety alongside a selection of his other works.
However, in order to pick up the baton from his dad, Dweezil first had to learn how to play the music himself. He was already an accomplished rock guitarist, with a particular fondness for the hyper-blitzkrieg playing style of Eddie van Halen, but his father’s work demanded a different order of expertise and musical understanding altogether.
“The challenges were great and numerous,” says Dweezil. “I’d spent more than 30 years playing guitar, but I had to change how I did everything. It was like getting a lobotomy and then training for the Olympics. I’d be practising the same tiny part for eight hours a day, until the technique became something I didn’t have to think about.
“I’d always learned everything by ear, and I didn’t have a strong background in musical theory, but that was vital to be able to learn Frank’s music. Even more importantly, I had to be able to communicate with my other musicians in a language that made sense.”
Frank Zappa’s music is crammed with complex rhythms, difficult key changes and baffling time signatures –in fact, it’s strange that he tends to get pigeonholed under “rock” because he had more in common with composer Edgard Varèse or jazzman Thelonious Monk than he did with Aerosmith – and he insisted on using state-of-the-art technology to ensure that every nuance of sound was rendered with fanatical clarity. He was also extremely specific about how his precisely scored music should be performed.
