What music are you listening to?

[marshlander]

Steve Vai is an amzing guitarist, very suited to zappa's style, which often sounds like improv but far from it, a friends older brother played me Hot Rats many years ago when i was 12, i didnt get it at all but i knew that i was listening to someone special

No, definitely not improvised. Frank Zappa was notoriously tough as a band leader. He wrote parts that the band members were expected to play. At the time it is possible there wasn't a guitarist on the planet who could play what Zappa wrote until Steve Vai invented the techniques to do it. One hears many anecdotes about FZ having such a keen ear that he could hear a single wrong note amongst the melée and woe betide the guy, or woman, who got something wrong :eek: Much of the music seemed to have been composed in jazz form where strictly composed parts were interspersed with freer instrumental workouts.

Hot Rats was his seventh album and, I believe, the first to be released under his own name. Everything about that album was extraordinary, from the music to the sleeve design. It came out in 1969, when I was fourteen, although it was few months before I had the opportunity to listen to it properly. Of course, for me there was the added attraction of Captain Beefheart singing lead vocal on Willie the Pimp, but the album has been a firm favourite ever since. I thought we might get something from Hot Rats at the show last night night (Peaches En Regalia, at least) but all we had were a few repeats of the two-bar substantive riff from Willie The Pimp during one of the guitar solos. Still, I could hardly be disappointed. The band played non-stop for two and a half hours and how they memorised some of that very complicated music is beyond me. I'm pretty sure Billy Hulting on percussion shed a few pounds during the evening while drummer, Joe Travers should probably win some kind of award for stamina.

Are you familiar with any of Frank Zappa's later orchestral compositions, Matty?