How Frank Zappa helped invent jazz-rock

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‘Hot Rats’ at 50: How Frank Zappa busted up his band, moved to L.A. and helped invent jazz-rock 

By Richard Gehr 

America in 1969 was nearly as weird as it is today.
A seemingly
endless war in Southeast Asia, the horrific assassinations of political
progressives and creepy Richard Nixon’s presidency cast shadows even
the last flickering flames of summer love couldn’t dispel. (Charles
Manson didn’t help.)
Elsewhere in this strange world, rock still mattered a great deal to a great many people. The Band,
the Byrds and their brethren were espousing an acoustic rural retreat
from all that; the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were keeping the
West Coast weird, although that wouldn’t last long; and King Crimson
was unleashing a prog-rock masterpiece, “In the Court of the Crimson
King.”
In Los Angeles, meanwhile, Frank Zappa
seemed to split the difference between art, revolution and retreat when
he recorded “Hot Rats,” his second yet most important solo album,
during the summer of ’69. The 50th anniversary of “Hot Rats,” released
in October of that year, has been observed with “The Hot Rats Sessions,”
an illuminating six-CD box set co-produced by Frank’s younger son, Ahmet,
and longtime Zappa “vaultmeister” Joe Travers. It’s a revealing look
into the mind of a genius at the height of his powers and itching to
move on. 

“The Hot Rats Sessions” is the latest in a series of ambitious
vault-spelunking projects undertaken by Frank’s descendants in
collaboration with UMe, their long-term licensing partner since 2015.
“We’re completists,” Ahmet says. “It’s like archaeology and we take it
very seriously.”
Long before novelty hits like “Valley Girl” and his televised jousting with the would-be music censors of Tipper Gore and the Parents Resource Music Center,
Zappa was already a musical force to be reckoned with. “Freak Out!,”
his 1966 doo-wop-meets-dada-rock debut with the Mothers of Invention,
was cited by Paul McCartney as inspiration for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Zappa repaid the compliment in 1968 with “We’re Only In It for the Money,” which pilloried “Sgt. Pepper’s” with its cover and all things Summer of Love with its music.
“Hot
Rats,” however, was completely different. Raw yet refined, accessible
yet sophisticated, “Hot Rats” introduced what would come to be known as
jazz-rock fusion, but with the added allure of Zappa’s intriguingly
idiosyncratic take on classical music. Its beautifully layered textures
were the result of previous experiments with variable-speed recording.
For all its organic innovation, though, it was both a critical and
commercial failure, topping out at No. 173 on the Billboard album chart.
It did well in Europe, however, and eventually became one of the Zappa
catalog’s most consistent sellers.
Zappa didn’t pal around with other rockers, preferring to hunker down
in the studio and tour regularly, if not always profitably, with the
Mothers. Zappa had been living in New York for two years prior to “Hot
Rats,” performing surreal and improvisational shows in Greenwich
Village. He was looking for a new direction when he returned to Los
Angeles, where he would spend the rest of his life, in 1968. The
Mothers’ failure to achieve commercial sense, and his own desire to move
forward musically led Zappa to replace the Mothers with studio
musicians on “Hot Rats,” with the exception of keyboards, reeds and
woodwinds player Ian Underwood.
The rationale for “Hot Rats’”
reliance on hired hands — and the stark reasons why Zappa disbanded the
Mothers — can be gathered from an unpublished press release that would
have announced the Mothers’ dissolution: “I wanted the group to be a
frightening big band,” Zappa writes. “The only thing frightening about
the band today is the expenses, the wrong notes & disinterested
performances, and the inability of the audience to grasp what the group
is really doing.” Acrimony and lawsuits inevitably followed the breakup,
and Frank would assemble different and more musically pliable “Mothers”
lineups in years to come.
Zappa released 62 records before his
death from prostate cancer in 1993 at age 52 — and nearly as many have
been released posthumously. He was driven by an extraordinary work ethic
from beginning to end. In 1969 alone, “Hot Rats” was preceded in April
by the densely-collaged double album “Uncle Meat.” He also produced Captain Beefheart
and His Magic Band’s underground double-album masterpiece, “Trout Mask
Replica”; “Permanent Damage,” by all-girl groupie group the GTOs (Girls
Together Outrageously); and “An Evening With Wild Man Fischer,” a
movingly destabilized double-album commentary on ‘60s rock culture.
Music from the “Hot Rats” sessions would also appear on subsequent Zappa
releases. 

“Hot Rats” looms large for the Zappa family. “For the majority of my
life I only heard Frank’s music,” says Ahmet. “Maybe 10 times at the
max did I hear him play something else, like Howling Wolf or the
Bulgarian women’s choir.” As for the music on “Hot Rats”: “These were my
lullabies.” Older brother Dweezil, meanwhile, to whom the album is
dedicated, has been performing “Rats” on the road in its entirety.
“The Simpsons”
creator Matt Groening, a Zappa family friend and longtime Zappa fan,
wrote appreciative liner notes prior to hearing “The Hot Rats Sessions.”
After doing so, he says, “I was struck by how fun and confident the
early versions of the instrumentals are, and by what a melodic genius
Zappa is as both a serious composer and a rock guitar improviser.”
For
Joe Travers, the eventual success of “Hot Rats” was due to “the
combination of styles of music, the relatively instrumental nature of
the music, and the guitar soloing. As Gail [Zappa, Frank’s late widow]
told me so many times, that was the album that put Frank on the map as a
guitar player.” Zappa indeed plays at his air-sculpting, storytelling
best on a roughly modified Gibson Les Paul Goldtop. He also had access
to more tracks on a tape recorder than ever before. Recorded on a
prototype machine, “Hot Rats” became rock’s first 16-track album.
Over
the course of three lengthy recording sessions, Zappa and Underwood
mixed it up with adventuresome jazz-steeped studio cats including Max
Bennett (bass), Ralph Humphrey (drums) and John Guerin (drums); sinuous
R&B violinist Don “Sugarcane” Harris and French jazz violinist
Jean-Luc Ponty; and even a 15-year-old Shuggie Otis on bass. Evocatively
swinging electric chamber music rubs against vigorously dirty R&B
improvisations, and a new feeling of precision prevails.
Also in the studio for the “Hot Rats” sessions was 19-year-old Bill
Gubbins, whose intimate photographs and account of the experience are
collected in “The Hot Rats Book” (Backbeat). Gubbins chanced upon Zappa
buying a pre-gig coffee in Cleveland and requested an interview. Their
meeting led to an invitation to visit the rock star in Los Angeles,
where the college sophomore slept on the carpet in the Zappa family’s
purple-painted living room when not enjoying a fly’s-eye view of “Hot
Rats’” creation. His images reflect the calm, almost radically polite
professionalism you can hear in Zappa’s musical direction during the
sessions.
“Everything was very workmanlike, as you can tell from
the outtakes,” says 80-year-old Ian Underwood from Portland, Ore., where
he has lived since the mid-'80s. “Not that people aren’t having fun, or
enjoying it, or playing the best they can, which I’m sure everybody
did.” After leaving the Mothers in 1973, Underwood became a session
musician himself, playing keyboards and programming synthesizers for
Hollywood film scores.
For Underwood, working on “Hot Rats” was
just another day at the office; the same as previous recording sessions
with Zappa (whom he has described as a combination of Stockhausen,
Ornette Coleman and Stravinsky), only this time without the Mothers. “It
was just more music from Frank,” he says. 

Not unlike Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” — a slice of East Coast
jazz-rock yin recorded almost concurrently with Zappa’s West Coast yang —
most of “Hot Rats” consists of lengthy improvisations edited down to
their dramatic essences. Free jazz informs much of the album as well as
its title, which was inspired by an Archie Shepp solo during “Shadow of
Your Smile” that sounded to Frank like “an army of pre-heated rats
screaming out of his saxophone.”
Neither rock, jazz nor fusion,
“Hot Rats” is also all those things at once — and a little more besides.
The thoughtful intimacy of Blue Note recordings informs “It Must Be a
Camel,” while Underwood’s “Gumbo Variations” solo owes a debt to
free-jazz pioneer Albert Ayler. Conversely, you can hear the influence
of Zappa’s “Hot Rats” playing in Allan Holdsworth’s and Al Di Meola’s
later music, while Return to Forever, Weather Report and others would
pick up on his newly expanded sonic palette. And, having performed with
Zappa, violinist Jean-Luc Ponty would always retain a Zappa tinge. But
while Miles Davis would continue to record music in the vein of “Bitches
Brew,” “Hot Rats” was a one-off whose ongoing influence was more about
ambition than imitation.
Perhaps most significantly, “The Hot Rats
Sessions” is a monument to Zappa’s process. On disc one, you can hear
“Hot Rats” opening track “Peaches En Regalia” expand from basic rhythm
tracks into a finished product containing 10 layers of Underwood horn
overdubs. To begin another disc, Travers edits the sound of Zappa
lighting a cigarette, and then coughing, to a needle dropping onto an
acetate containing an early-'60s version of “Little Umbrellas.” Travers
wanted listeners to feel as though they were in the room with Zappa.
“It’s almost as if he’s sitting and presenting this material to you,” he
says.
The meat of “Hot Rats,” though, lies in long, consistently
energized improvisations. Expansive master takes of “Willie the Pimp,”
“The Gumbo Variations” and “Son of Mr. Green Genes” appear on “The Hot
Rats Sessions” in their uncut, multi-take, bonus-guitar-solos glory. 
“On the guitar-solo options, Frank is tearing it!” says Ahmet. “It’s
like you’ve been given the Lego pieces to build your own ‘Hot Rats’.”
After
“Hot Rats,” Zappa released a pair of albums recorded by the Mothers of
Invention — “Burnt Weeny Sandwich,” released only four months later,
represents the original Mothers at their strangest, funniest and most
musically profound — and then another solo album, “Chunga’s Revenge.”
And that was only 1970. Frank Zappa continued to perform and record
prolifically until his death, leaving a vault’s worth of released and
unreleased material to savor through the inevitably weird times ahead.
from www.latimes.com

Edited by snobb - 05 Mar 2020 at 10:07am

Author	Message Topic Search Topic Options Post Reply Create New Topic Printable Version Translate Topic
snobb Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Forum Admin Group Site Admin Joined: 22 Dec 2010 Location: Vilnius Status: Offline Points: 29717	Post Options Post Reply Quote snobb Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: How Frank Zappa helped invent jazz-rock Posted: 05 Mar 2020 at 10:06am
	‘Hot Rats’ at 50: How Frank Zappa busted up his band, moved to L.A. and helped invent jazz-rock By Richard Gehr America in 1969 was nearly as weird as it is today. A seemingly endless war in Southeast Asia, the horrific assassinations of political progressives and creepy Richard Nixon’s presidency cast shadows even the last flickering flames of summer love couldn’t dispel. (Charles Manson didn’t help.) Elsewhere in this strange world, rock still mattered a great deal to a great many people. The Band, the Byrds and their brethren were espousing an acoustic rural retreat from all that; the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were keeping the West Coast weird, although that wouldn’t last long; and King Crimson was unleashing a prog-rock masterpiece, “In the Court of the Crimson King.” In Los Angeles, meanwhile, Frank Zappa seemed to split the difference between art, revolution and retreat when he recorded “Hot Rats,” his second yet most important solo album, during the summer of ’69. The 50th anniversary of “Hot Rats,” released in October of that year, has been observed with “The Hot Rats Sessions,” an illuminating six-CD box set co-produced by Frank’s younger son, Ahmet, and longtime Zappa “vaultmeister” Joe Travers. It’s a revealing look into the mind of a genius at the height of his powers and itching to move on. “The Hot Rats Sessions” is the latest in a series of ambitious vault-spelunking projects undertaken by Frank’s descendants in collaboration with UMe, their long-term licensing partner since 2015. “We’re completists,” Ahmet says. “It’s like archaeology and we take it very seriously.” Long before novelty hits like “Valley Girl” and his televised jousting with the would-be music censors of Tipper Gore and the Parents Resource Music Center, Zappa was already a musical force to be reckoned with. “Freak Out!,” his 1966 doo-wop-meets-dada-rock debut with the Mothers of Invention, was cited by Paul McCartney as inspiration for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Zappa repaid the compliment in 1968 with “We’re Only In It for the Money,” which pilloried “Sgt. Pepper’s” with its cover and all things Summer of Love with its music. “Hot Rats,” however, was completely different. Raw yet refined, accessible yet sophisticated, “Hot Rats” introduced what would come to be known as jazz-rock fusion, but with the added allure of Zappa’s intriguingly idiosyncratic take on classical music. Its beautifully layered textures were the result of previous experiments with variable-speed recording. For all its organic innovation, though, it was both a critical and commercial failure, topping out at No. 173 on the Billboard album chart. It did well in Europe, however, and eventually became one of the Zappa catalog’s most consistent sellers. Zappa didn’t pal around with other rockers, preferring to hunker down in the studio and tour regularly, if not always profitably, with the Mothers. Zappa had been living in New York for two years prior to “Hot Rats,” performing surreal and improvisational shows in Greenwich Village. He was looking for a new direction when he returned to Los Angeles, where he would spend the rest of his life, in 1968. The Mothers’ failure to achieve commercial sense, and his own desire to move forward musically led Zappa to replace the Mothers with studio musicians on “Hot Rats,” with the exception of keyboards, reeds and woodwinds player Ian Underwood. The rationale for “Hot Rats’” reliance on hired hands — and the stark reasons why Zappa disbanded the Mothers — can be gathered from an unpublished press release that would have announced the Mothers’ dissolution: “I wanted the group to be a frightening big band,” Zappa writes. “The only thing frightening about the band today is the expenses, the wrong notes & disinterested performances, and the inability of the audience to grasp what the group is really doing.” Acrimony and lawsuits inevitably followed the breakup, and Frank would assemble different and more musically pliable “Mothers” lineups in years to come. Zappa released 62 records before his death from prostate cancer in 1993 at age 52 — and nearly as many have been released posthumously. He was driven by an extraordinary work ethic from beginning to end. In 1969 alone, “Hot Rats” was preceded in April by the densely-collaged double album “Uncle Meat.” He also produced Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’s underground double-album masterpiece, “Trout Mask Replica”; “Permanent Damage,” by all-girl groupie group the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously); and “An Evening With Wild Man Fischer,” a movingly destabilized double-album commentary on ‘60s rock culture. Music from the “Hot Rats” sessions would also appear on subsequent Zappa releases. “Hot Rats” looms large for the Zappa family. “For the majority of my life I only heard Frank’s music,” says Ahmet. “Maybe 10 times at the max did I hear him play something else, like Howling Wolf or the Bulgarian women’s choir.” As for the music on “Hot Rats”: “These were my lullabies.” Older brother Dweezil, meanwhile, to whom the album is dedicated, has been performing “Rats” on the road in its entirety. “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, a Zappa family friend and longtime Zappa fan, wrote appreciative liner notes prior to hearing “The Hot Rats Sessions.” After doing so, he says, “I was struck by how fun and confident the early versions of the instrumentals are, and by what a melodic genius Zappa is as both a serious composer and a rock guitar improviser.” For Joe Travers, the eventual success of “Hot Rats” was due to “the combination of styles of music, the relatively instrumental nature of the music, and the guitar soloing. As Gail [Zappa, Frank’s late widow] told me so many times, that was the album that put Frank on the map as a guitar player.” Zappa indeed plays at his air-sculpting, storytelling best on a roughly modified Gibson Les Paul Goldtop. He also had access to more tracks on a tape recorder than ever before. Recorded on a prototype machine, “Hot Rats” became rock’s first 16-track album. Over the course of three lengthy recording sessions, Zappa and Underwood mixed it up with adventuresome jazz-steeped studio cats including Max Bennett (bass), Ralph Humphrey (drums) and John Guerin (drums); sinuous R&B violinist Don “Sugarcane” Harris and French jazz violinist Jean-Luc Ponty; and even a 15-year-old Shuggie Otis on bass. Evocatively swinging electric chamber music rubs against vigorously dirty R&B improvisations, and a new feeling of precision prevails. Also in the studio for the “Hot Rats” sessions was 19-year-old Bill Gubbins, whose intimate photographs and account of the experience are collected in “The Hot Rats Book” (Backbeat). Gubbins chanced upon Zappa buying a pre-gig coffee in Cleveland and requested an interview. Their meeting led to an invitation to visit the rock star in Los Angeles, where the college sophomore slept on the carpet in the Zappa family’s purple-painted living room when not enjoying a fly’s-eye view of “Hot Rats’” creation. His images reflect the calm, almost radically polite professionalism you can hear in Zappa’s musical direction during the sessions. “Everything was very workmanlike, as you can tell from the outtakes,” says 80-year-old Ian Underwood from Portland, Ore., where he has lived since the mid-'80s. “Not that people aren’t having fun, or enjoying it, or playing the best they can, which I’m sure everybody did.” After leaving the Mothers in 1973, Underwood became a session musician himself, playing keyboards and programming synthesizers for Hollywood film scores. For Underwood, working on “Hot Rats” was just another day at the office; the same as previous recording sessions with Zappa (whom he has described as a combination of Stockhausen, Ornette Coleman and Stravinsky), only this time without the Mothers. “It was just more music from Frank,” he says. Not unlike Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” — a slice of East Coast jazz-rock yin recorded almost concurrently with Zappa’s West Coast yang — most of “Hot Rats” consists of lengthy improvisations edited down to their dramatic essences. Free jazz informs much of the album as well as its title, which was inspired by an Archie Shepp solo during “Shadow of Your Smile” that sounded to Frank like “an army of pre-heated rats screaming out of his saxophone.” Neither rock, jazz nor fusion, “Hot Rats” is also all those things at once — and a little more besides. The thoughtful intimacy of Blue Note recordings informs “It Must Be a Camel,” while Underwood’s “Gumbo Variations” solo owes a debt to free-jazz pioneer Albert Ayler. Conversely, you can hear the influence of Zappa’s “Hot Rats” playing in Allan Holdsworth’s and Al Di Meola’s later music, while Return to Forever, Weather Report and others would pick up on his newly expanded sonic palette. And, having performed with Zappa, violinist Jean-Luc Ponty would always retain a Zappa tinge. But while Miles Davis would continue to record music in the vein of “Bitches Brew,” “Hot Rats” was a one-off whose ongoing influence was more about ambition than imitation. Perhaps most significantly, “The Hot Rats Sessions” is a monument to Zappa’s process. On disc one, you can hear “Hot Rats” opening track “Peaches En Regalia” expand from basic rhythm tracks into a finished product containing 10 layers of Underwood horn overdubs. To begin another disc, Travers edits the sound of Zappa lighting a cigarette, and then coughing, to a needle dropping onto an acetate containing an early-'60s version of “Little Umbrellas.” Travers wanted listeners to feel as though they were in the room with Zappa. “It’s almost as if he’s sitting and presenting this material to you,” he says. The meat of “Hot Rats,” though, lies in long, consistently energized improvisations. Expansive master takes of “Willie the Pimp,” “The Gumbo Variations” and “Son of Mr. Green Genes” appear on “The Hot Rats Sessions” in their uncut, multi-take, bonus-guitar-solos glory. “On the guitar-solo options, Frank is tearing it!” says Ahmet. “It’s like you’ve been given the Lego pieces to build your own ‘Hot Rats’.” After “Hot Rats,” Zappa released a pair of albums recorded by the Mothers of Invention — “Burnt Weeny Sandwich,” released only four months later, represents the original Mothers at their strangest, funniest and most musically profound — and then another solo album, “Chunga’s Revenge.” And that was only 1970. Frank Zappa continued to perform and record prolifically until his death, leaving a vault’s worth of released and unreleased material to savor through the inevitably weird times ahead. from www.latimes.com Edited by snobb - 05 Mar 2020 at 10:07am

js Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Visit Members Homepage Add to Buddy List Forum Admin Group Site admin Joined: 22 Dec 2010 Location: Memphis Status: Offline Points: 35348	Post Options Post Reply Quote js Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 05 Mar 2020 at 10:47am
	There are many myths surrounding so called 'jazz rock'. The truth is, jazz artists were putting rock n roll and RnB in their music as far back as the 50s. Besides, rock comes from jazz via jump blues. As far as the hippie era jazz rock goes, Frank was way behind Don Ellis and stole many of Don's band members and musical ideas. Over in the UK, Soft Machine (Wilde Flowers), Brian Auger and many others also had the jump on Frank.