Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
Unkle Meat

The supposed "Conceptual Continuity" of Zappa, the perfect unity and coherence of life and art, when observed from within his vast work, becomes increasingly credible. Thomas Aquinas said that the artist cares about what he creates, and Frank Vincent never stopped doing this. Therefore, the bizarre thesis of a structural identity in the conception of the entire production of the master from Cucamonga, which never lacks effectiveness and value, can be supported.

After the Doo-Wop interlude of "Ruben and The Jets" and "Lumpy Gravy," a ballet composed by Zappa at the editing desk, combining orchestral and band parts from various and disparate contexts in a fertile post-production activity, "Uncle Meat" arrives, like a morning greeting. Like a question.

"Uncle Meat," pure conjecture, is Uncle Sam, the meat grinder. Verify the aberrant collage of the cover.

"King Kong" is the beastly and awkward man redeemed by love. But incapable of the way that achieves it. Experience of a tragic and inexorable mystery. Evil to be endured. Not to be rationalized. Cinematic, literary drama, and, surpassing both, dramatization in music.

The variations on the two main themes, marking the transition from the collagist mockery of the psychedelic trilogy to the orchestral production, attest to another meaning of the work, namely its anti-academic function.

Then the Zappa theological anthropology. Against Hegel, the replacement of God through man had become programmatic with Feuerbach, Stirner, Marx, and Nietzsche. Not a very advantageous thing, even if Hegel dabbled with the rationality of all that is real, and in the same way, with the reality of all that is rational. The anti-metaphysical intention, like the loss of the Sacred or reason split from the imaginative faculty, is just as propitious as external thrombosed hemorrhoids, a degenerative form of a pathology, in itself, already horrible. It's not just about "feeling good" for the Duke of Plums, who promptly lifts us from these querulous issues! Instead, he presents us with a man amused and in good health. Intelligent and music-loving. A divine image.

Frank, who for convenience we will call Vincent, sends back to the sender the Adornian critique of art reduced to mere entertainment; instead, he restores its dignity, through the cognition of a perfect reciprocity and communion of the two terms, not at all antithetical. How? He battles cultured music with Rock and Rock with cultured music. He makes one the condition of possibility for the other. However, he always deals with all the issues of academic music, incorporating them, congregating them in his compositions, and mocking it in every institutional claim. Not a controversialist or dogmatic! Unfortunately, hard to accept, Vincent ends up being above almost all musical issues. This doesn't mean he never missed a shot. But he's not lacking in aim. It's not just about good intentions; rather, it's always about putting everything at stake, without negligence, nor distractions. With generosity and with profound intuitions. The assiduous listener manages to find them and, from this contact, becomes enriched: milk for the infants, cream cheese for the others. A type of panic interpenetration. Even more. A powerful and full perception. That poetic abundance that removes a little of the misery from us.

His ideal of music and omnivorous knowledge is revealed freely to each one. The album, the song, the fragment, the grimace that pierces the heart. Or intellectually irritates. The mental cramp. That's where the initiatory rite begins. Every plurality is consumed in unity. We too are chasing the logos of music (which FZ loves in a visceral, tender and passionate, rational, but also carnal and spiritual, totalizing way). And the music comes to meet us. Vincent reaches out a hand to us. And his pointed mustache. We sense that everything is full of mysteries. That reveal themselves little by little. Like Zappa, in fact.

But let's observe some constant traits of intense, if not extremist, Zappaism.

The imperious virtuosity of the performance. What? First-rate executions. Against the affected dogma of impossibility. Action playing. Zappa rejects the academic concert routine and the related institutions that debase his musical perfectionism and his rigorous interpretative discipline. Always disappointed with the orchestras he worked with, he took refuge in the synclavier, finally meeting, but only in the '90s, the Ensemble Modern. He pursued the highest quality, impeccable execution like no one else.

Improvisational mastery. More than the typical practices of Jazz and Rock, Vincent implements an infrequent approach for Westerners, relying on the modal improvisational practice of the oriental Arab-Ottoman and Indian traditions. Tough stuff, as spicy as Roy Estrada's cheeseburgers (also credited among his instruments).

An immense competence in writing. His complex scores, the result of an intransigent meticulousness, give life to exceptional architectures. Authentic wonders. Arrangements are always very accurate. Then Vincenzo has that quirk of putting spoken language into music with its irregularities, condensing them with a paradoxical and systematic, not to say inane, rigor. His written page assumes a utopian dimension, mysteriously brought back to the radical original improvisation. Then he teases diatonism, rarely resorts to the chromatic enrichment of melodic-harmonic contexts, for which he prefers to dwell with the Lydian mode.

Sound editing / Sound engineering. Frank, at the mixer (finally with 12 tracks with “Uncle Meat”), pours out in extravagant manipulations and overdubs, slowing and/or speeding up the tapes to achieve hyper-fast solos, deformed voices, novel sound, clownish effects, and, again, to invent intertwining, mixtures, and improbable textures. The studio is an instrument.

Erudite dallying. He is a professional at the genre. He combines satire, utopia, and cynicism. The taste for paradox. He has an internal ethic: liberation. Of man and music. He caricatures and deconstructs the cultured tradition, from the inside but without belonging: this is the sharp arrow that FZ initially launches with "Lo Zio" and his provocative, humorous, savory, and dense musical lexicon. Then, unavoidably, he whips prejudices and society.

In his art, then, theory and practice, executive logic and improvisational logic, are conjugated through specular movements. Wherever you look, you end up returning to the whole, with good Vince. Like in Borges' hexagonal libraries. Everything that is one. Conceptual Continuity. Composition is a circular process, it is not just writing on a staff. It is a totally organizational process with a strong, cultured ratio however bastard and heterodox, a telos and a meticulously designed and constructed plot. And no stochastic tendencies.

Frank from Cucamonga, self-taught composer, is not just a rock musician with cultured ambitions. He makes art music, total music, creations of art. Not Eurocultured, not academic, but not even superficially anti-academic. He's a factotum. He is the demiurge of an organic work of 100 albums, of 1100 songs plus 500, including covers and reworkings of others' materials. He is a composer in the traditional sense, of orchestras and rock bands, capable of thinking Rock with the compositional means of Classico-Contemporary music. In the Pop Rock panorama, he is the greatest composer of the postwar period. He who definitively shatters the boundaries between cultured and popular musical practices. He is ahead of his time. Criticizes the musical Establishment because it is sclerotic, but continues its research, even in the seediest and least considered interstices.

“Uncle Meat” is his absolute masterpiece. Anomalous, unusual rock, with decisive experimental infiltrations, backed by an alien musical arsenal, diversified in form, harmony, and color. The Baltimore-born master has assimilated the "organized sound" of Edgar Varèse, the polyrhythmic and polytonal constructs of Igor Stravinsky, the electronic music of Charles Ives and Pierre Schaeffer, the cacophonous celebrations of the mechanics by Georges Antheil, the utopian music of the semi-unknown composer Conlon Nancarrow.

In this way, in Zappa, everything becomes rhythm. And the rhythm is physical, pressing, electric. It interprets Balkan folk traditions. It employs the Bulgarian rhythm, in 7/8. It adopts additive rhythms, interpolating or suppressing sixteenths in otherwise regular rhythmic structures. There's a passion for the prosody of spoken language, which he tries to reproduce not only rhythmically but also in melodic-harmonic terms, even reaching guitar solos. He exploits hemiolia, transitioning from binary to ternary subdivision. His melodic lines favor diatonism, and he loves the Lydian mode, typical of the Balkans, whereas jazz and rock correspond to Dorian and Mixolydian in their compositional technique. Enough of that. Let's turn to the phonographic support in question.

"Uncle Meat" is thus liberated, total, oblique, thorny music. Earth. Carillons, sarabandes, instrumental pieces, sound experiments, and nursery rhymes. It is the global inclusion of genres: rock, blues, classical, avant-garde, fusion, free jazz, doo-wop, vaudeville, recitation; the fusion of rock and jazz.

Vincent, just liberated from Verve and having founded Bizarre, extends this double LP. The work gains greater care. Even excessive. We are between the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968.

"Uncle Meat" unfolds its theme in two minutes of vibraphone asymmetries, Arab clarinet, and piercing harpsichord chords. They twitter, not stutter, they prickle. In the dance of a minor god. In the stream where a nymph bathes. An emblematic miniature, between Antheil and Nancarrow, twittering in rhythmic contrast between different scansions. His idea of "Xenochrony" emerges, a strange synchronization, that is, polyrhythmic play. The downbeat rhythmic trend is apparently regular, but it consists of an incorrect punct uation (since Zappa, moving the accents on subsequent quarters, deludes us into hearing a 2/4 measure, where there are two measures of 3/4. Such jocularities the master of Archibald Boulevard reserves for us). On the other hand, Zappa's pulsations are always physical, carnal, clattering; they generate and resolve tensions, between deceptions and subtleties not at all cheaply. In orchestral compositions, this capricious genius often yearned to do exactly the opposite (more linearity, shifting interest to colors and textures).

The stertorous breath of the "Dog Breath" theme appears like rock 'n' roll. We sense babbling as the beauty of popular music as instruments multiply (brass, keyboards, percussion, strings). Then the pop song, poignant, syncopated vocal harmonies, then the classical-influenced insertions of soprano Nelcy Walker, choruses imitating instruments, a humorous voice anticipates the idiocy of the Chipmunks' era. Meanwhile, the piece becomes orchestral avant-garde, electronically modified clarinets simulate trombones. A sublime indulgence falls on the inconsistencies.

The themes very dear to him, “Uncle Meat” and “Dog Breath,” Zappa would revisit them until the last days of his earthly life, in “The Yellow Shark” conducting the Ensemble Modern.

There's the epic sortie on the Royal Albert Hall organ by Don Preston sketching “Louie Louie." The dirty riff (par excellence). The Varèsian “Nine Types Of Industrial Pollution”: melodically apathetic, clattering percussion, and speeded-up guitar in post-production. “Electric Aunt Jemima,” a simple composition, nonsense with a love topic with Collins in great form. Majestic “Mr. Green Genes” epic, martial, at times, turns into elegy.

The suite “King Kong” further proves its masterpiece status. A prelude in 5/8 and six variations in 3/4. The Mothers dress as a rock band, jazz orchestra, and chamber ensemble. Splendid, lively, vivid, burlesque, farcical, and elevated are the "simplex" melody of the "Prelude," the electric Fender Rhodes piano solo by Don Preston (devastating beauty!), the frantic figurations of the tenor sax by Euclid Motorhead Sherwood, the soprano sax of Bunk Gardner replying to electronic effects simulating a double bass. Stands out the solo, immortalized live, by Ian Underwood on the alto sax on a pulsating percussive carpet sponsored by Artie Tripp; Frank’s guitar puzzles with panic enchantments, instruments are speeded up, after the drum solo (by Jimmy Black), returning to primordial chaos among gags and raspberries, gummy, and heart-wrenching saxophones. There's definitely plenty to get excited about.

Then, as usual, interludes, ramblings, jokes, pranks among band members, in a Dadaist approach. However, this element in Zappa is merely accessory, never the end. Pamela Zarubica is the inevitable, mother of all groupies, Suzy Creamcheese.

The Mothers of Invention are unparalleled performers, expressing themselves here to the maximum. Zappa directs and composes, everything and everyone. He imposes on musicians also his absolute denial of drugs.

The double CD edition of "Uncle Meat," originally released in 1969, adds staggering excerpts from dialogues of the homonymous film (completed only in the late '80s) and “Tengo una minchia tanta,” whose fundamental core is extracted from a live performance in Palermo from 1982. The “narrating” voice is of the Italian journalist Massimo Bassoli, indulging on chicken-measured loins. Seriously facetious stuff.

Dweezil, Moon Unit, Ahmet, and Diva Zappa, your children, can walk with heads held high!

In short, praise to Frank from Cucamonga!

Thank you, master!

Thanks again.

All inherit from a musical genius.