In between stints with jazz saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and fusion drummer Billy Cobham, keyboard visionary George Duke joined Frank Zappa and The Mothers for some of their most ambitious studio recordings.
The subject of an excellent new documentary by Alex Winter (from Bill & Ted), Zappa grew up in the shadow of the chemical arsenal where his dad worked in the 1940s. He spent his youth playing with the gas masks that had to be kept in the house, trying to blow up his high school and editing together random bits of tape, for instance splicing an alien invasion movie into his parents’ wedding video. He carried this chaotic chemistry into his music, which grew from a love of Edgard Varèse’s cacophonous orchestral works and hours spent listening to R&B with his friend Don Glen Vliet before he was Captain Beefheart.
Zappa formed The Mothers of Invention in 1965, notorious for their 12-hour rehearsals and eclectic live shows that combined performance art with boundary-pushing rock music. It seems counter-intuitive at first glance that Zappa didn’t do drugs (he named his children Dweezil and Moon Unit), but on closer inspection it becomes evident that you don’t record 112 albums by being high all the time. His vices were strictly cigarettes, groupies and workaholism, pushing his musicians hard to bring the eccentric, surreal musical worlds of Zappa’s mind into something approaching reality.
December 1971 proved an eventful month for Zappa and The Mothers (he dropped “Of Invention” after disbanding the original lineup). A fire at the Swiss casino where they were performing destroyed the band’s equipment (as immortalised in Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’), then a week later he was attacked on stage at London’s Rainbow Theatre. Unable to go on the road, a wheelchair-bound Zappa wrote and recorded a pair of jazz-fusion albums that built on the instrumental experiments of 1969’s Hot Rats, which had featured Beefheart and Lowell George from the great rock band Little Feat (whom Zappa fired for reasons best described as drug-related).
The 1972 sessions that produced both Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo involved a revolving jazz-rock orchestra of 20+ musicians. The last release on his own Bizarre Records label, The Grand Wazoo is my favourite Zappa album (of the tiny fraction I’ve heard), thanks to the deceptive looseness of its infectious, intricate compositions. The rattling title track is a 13-minute masterpiece of catchy hooks and jazzy solos, while ‘For Calvin (And His Next Two Hitch-Hikers)’ delivers a 12/8-time tribute to Calvin Schenkel, the illustrator behind the esoteric cover art. ‘Cletus Awreetus-Awrightus’ is the album’s only single (presumably due to its length rather than its lyrical content) and ‘Eat That Question’ a monster groove led by Duke.
The final track ‘Blessed Relief’ is a strangely serene jazz waltz built on a swirling rhythmic bed of Duke’s keys, Alex “Erroneous” Dmochowski’s bass and Aynsley Dunbar’s drums, and boasting beautiful solos from Zappa, Duke and Sal Marquez on trumpet. Glowing with warmth and personality, it carries the unique Zappa quality of total perfectionism that sounds like it’s been tossed off in an afternoon. And I don’t think he’d mind me saying that.
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