Frank Zappa
Jazz From Hell

LA RECENSIONE

How ahead of his time was old Frank? In the mid-'80s, while the early Duran Duran with their "wild boys" were sharing the major market with Spandau Ballet, cementing the Glam-rock neo-romantic movement, what did the mustached American guitarist do? Quietly, he comes out with a "breakthrough" album, partly played and partly "blended," inserting his (almost all) played parts and those of his collaborators (essentially the only "S.Etienne") into a "big computer" (they must have been like that back then!) called Synclavier DMS, and reworking everything with a needle-and-thread editing job that would make Edward Scissorhands envious.

An insanely mad and strangely fascinating album where the boundaries between instruments and the parts obtained from the computer become increasingly blurred until they vanish, intertwine, and chase each other without interruption. Old Frank had already figured everything out and, as usual, was turning everything upside down, laying the foundations for new music without genre definition and without structural or formal limits.
Skewed and syncopated rhythms overlap with daredevil-like guitar solos interrupted by pre-literate loop effects, scratches, and never-before-heard sounds on a record. A devilishly beautiful album (did that kind of Jazz really come from there? And if so, who imported it if not the one who somehow had been there?) that was not understood at the time and considered a "nice crazy joke" by Frank. It wasn’t jazz, it wasn’t rock, nor anything heard before... what the hell it was never became clear, and even today, renowned music critics are divided on the ultimate meaning of these 8 tracks, which remain in some ways unclassifiable, having deemed the album in question a "near-masterpiece" for lack of objective judgment elements and objective reference points.

Maybe so, but you don’t know how much I’d pay to have been in that American recording studio to see how he thought, developed, and assembled the tracks for this album: it must have been a mind-bending experience beyond any reach. Album recommended to fine ears and the crazy ones... without any boundaries.