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Rating: "War is work for everyone" (Frank Zappa)
Ten years after his passing (Los Angeles - December 4, 1993), the French label "Chant Du Monde" has just released this tribute to Frank Zappa, a total musician, unclassifiable par excellence, as he was able to navigate from rock, to classical music, to electronic, to jazz, and to extreme experimentation. The record seems to arrive precisely to remind us how much we miss the talent, the ability to be "against" and the immense irony of the mustachioed American musician. Irony, as we said, already present in the very title of the tribute, which manages to elicit a smile and that Zappa would have greatly appreciated.
The genesis of the album is explained in the liner notes. The idea was born in the mid-90s, starting from a not at all rhetorical question: "Is Zappa's music still of interest?" If in answering we were to limit ourselves to observing the majority of the media and the usual distribution circuits, which Zappa himself never loved, the answer would probably be negative. Indeed, despite Zappa's official discography encompassing about 100 hours of music, divided into 58 (!) albums, representing a sort of monumental and multifaceted musical corpus, there is not an interest towards him that we could define as widespread. On the contrary, such interest is always alive in those who have had the opportunity to know his music and in many musicians, for whom he represents a daily source of inspiration.
Among these are the members of the French jazz big band “LeBocal”, who with this work hope, on the one hand, to encourage all those who are not well-acquainted with Zappa's music to deepen their knowledge, and on the other hand, to give an extra opportunity to all his fans to ascertain just how much his work is “rich in new and still unexplored paths.” In fact, as specified in the liner notes, the album is dedicated "to all the fans of Frank Zappa past, present, and future around the world."
Accompanied by the talented Roman pianist Rita Marcotulli - “thanks for her incredible Italian cook, Italian smile & Italian inspiration” :) -, French violinist Laurent Zeller, and American trombonist Glenn Ferris, LeBocal have thus breathed life into the interpretation of 11 tracks chosen from Zappa's musical production. The result is a thrilling album, which aims to be respectful of the original melodic structures and at the same time “Absolutely free”. Paradoxical as Zappa often was. Music, never as in this case, cannot and should not be described. Discover it, you won't regret it.
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