My friend Mike Brown is a BIG Frank Zappa fan. He has a huge collection of Zappa's music and actually saw him in concert back in the 80's. (Frank passed away from prostate cancer in 1993). I had of course heard of Frank Zappa, but freely admit that I knew very little about his music. What I did know was that he was a very prolific composer over the course of his 30+ year career, he was an amazing guitarist, his music did not sound like anybody elses, and his kids had very unusual names like Moon Unit and Dweezil. (Frank's other children are named Ahmet and Diva).
Anyway, in June of 2010, Mike asked me if I wanted to go see the Zappa Plays Zappa show down at Grinders in the Crossroads District here in KC? "Huh? What is ZPZ" I remember thinking. As I soon learned, Frank's son Dweezil is an accomplished guitarist in his own right. In 2006, Dweezil formed a band to perform and tour his father's music. So off I went with Mike on a sweltering June night to hear something new, and I was completely impressed and won over by what I heard. Dweezil is a guitar virtuoso. I am an aficionado of fine guitar playing in any genre...Segovia to Wes Montgomery to Django to Pat Metheny to Roy Clark to Van Halen to Pete Townshend....and so on. I love the instrument and the personalities of the "guitar world". Dweezil has a guitar technique and facility that puts him in the highest order of guitar heroes. Simply amazing. And his band is equally talented. They played a 2+ hour set of music I knew very little about, but became very interested in learning more about after the show was over. I began reading about Frank Zappa, listening to his music, and watching performances and interviews on YouTube. I learned that he was heavily influenced by classical music, especially Stravinsky, Ravel and Varese. There is great video of his first band, called the Mothers of Invention, playing an excerpt from Stravinsky's Petrushka, and another video of him conducting a large ensemble playing Ravel's Bolero. I found these fascinating. He composed many works that were classical in form and style, albeit his own unique style, as well as music that spanned the boundaries of classical-rock-blues-jazz-fusion and the avant garde. Frank Zappa's music was not "mainstream". Dweezil is dedicated to bringing his father's music to new generations of listeners. To quote him from an interview a few years ago, "Frank's music is very contemporary. If we are trying to attract a newer audience, which I am definitely determined to do, I want younger people to be interested in it and exposed to it". He also said "I want to stamp Frank's imperial mustache on the glabrous dome of the music industry".
As I read this, it hit me that I was trying to do the same thing with classical music. (not the mustache part...the attracting newer audiences part) One of the reasons I started this blog was to help others discover the joy and enrichment of classical music. Dweezil and I are both on missions to enlighten and educate.
Mike and I went to see Dweezil and the ZPZ tour again in 2013, and once again enjoyed a tremendous show. I'd kicked around the idea of trying to talk to Dweezil for this blog, and finally reached out to him through his website, and was eventually contacted by his publicist and given the opportunity to have a phone interview. Here is how that conversation went:
TH) Thank
you very much for agreeing to talk to me. I really appreciate it. Was classical music
something you heard as a child growing up?
DZ) I
listened to whatever my dad was either working on in the studio or listening to
when he was relaxing at home, so there was a varied amount of music; his own
work, when he was writing any of his music, generally speaking, he considered
it all to be classical music, and he was using a rock band to be the orchestra
when he wasn't actually working with a real orchestra. Most of his compositions
were constructed that way because as a kid he wanted to be a composer. He went
to the library and taught himself everything about music by reading about it. Around
the house I also heard different kinds of folk music from different countries.
But yes, there was classical music. I remember the modern compositions…. one
time he asked if I wanted to listen to something with him…it was a piece by
Stockhausen. We listened to it and I didn't get it…I was probably 10 or 11, and
it didn't really sound very melodic.
TH) Very atonal probably?
DZ) Yeah,
and he said “do you like this?” and I said “not really” and he said “me neither”.
But he got very into 12-tone music towards the end of his composing, and he was
very interested in what he called note densities and chord densities. He was
writing a book on all of that but he never completed it. But a lot of the note
density and experiments he was doing with that became most of his synclavier
music.
TH) He spoke
in an interview I watched on YouTube about the tone colors and voicings of
chords that were possible with an orchestra and the harmonic languages an
orchestra could create…it was more rich and dense than what a 4-piece rock band
could do. Do you have an interest in classical music today…do you have time to
listen to it?
DZ) Over the years I have listened to a lot of
it….I appreciate Bach and Mozart especially…that stuff is fun to listen to and cool.
How they figured it out is amazing...and then for someone to actually be able
to play it…even more amazing. The stuff I tend to like is because of my
father’s music. Growing up I would hear my dad’s music, and I didn’t really
hear any other stuff on the radio, but by the time I did when I was 12 or 13, I
thought..."where’s the rest of it?”. There weren’t enough instruments or information in pop music. I thought “there’s got to be stuff missing here”.
And so the things I tend to like need to surprise me with texture and rhythm
because that’s what I was used to in my dad’s music and that’s what I have
grown to appreciate. There are also film composers and film scores that I have
enjoyed as well for some of those
things…textures and rhythms. I like the stuff that John Williams has done over
the years, and I listen to it off and on…it’s the background of my formative
years.
TH) Have you
been doing any composing?
DZ) I haven’t
had time to do too much writing of my own for quite some time because ZPZ takes
up so much time to keep the material learned. I’m hopefully going to make a
record of my own later this year. I am planning to write an orchestral piece as
well. I started it awhile back but I haven’t finished it.
TH) Do you
play the keyboards as well as the guitar?
DZ) I do
not. It’s a funny thing about how I decided to write this piece. I am not good
with the actual notation so what I do is take a MIDI project and I will type in
5 minutes worth of the same note and the same rhythm and then I will start
moving it around and make shapes with it. So when I hear things I like, I can
create arpeggios and/or melodies and I can build around it. I can also target particular
places on a time grid where I want something to happen so I can have an
overview of the piece and start filling in the blanks that way. So instead of
having a blank piece of music, I am throwing the notes on the page like
throwing paint on the paper, and then you start seeing what you can make out of
it. The piece I’m writing is based on that plan of attack.
TH) Are you scoring
it for a small chamber ensemble or a larger symphonic group?
DZ) I am not
exactly sure how it will end up, but I intend to play it with the band and an orchestra.
We are already trying to do something next year where we play with smaller
ensembles…there is a wind ensemble in Norway that is very good and they have
done some arrangements of my dad’s stuff so we’d like to do some shows with
them. Beyond just a wind ensemble, I’d like to also have strings and
percussion. We already have a show planned in Denver in April next year with between
8-10 extra players from the Denver Symphony.
TH) I’d love
to hear your own music this way.
DZ) There is one thing I did on a record that
came out in 2006 and it has a short orchestral bit. It was my first foray into
using a computer to create some of those kinds of sounds. It doesn’t have the
human feel I would like (I am not the world’s greatest programmer of MIDI) but
I put it on the record anyway. It’s a tune you might be able to find….most of
my work is not available yet on iTunes, but you can find it on YouTube. It’s
called “Rhythmatist”. The intro to it is called “Preludumus Maximus”. That’s the
piece that has a classical “feel”. I’ve done other things that are classical related.
I made a record called “Confessions of a Deprived Youth” and there’s a song
called “Earth”…the intro on that is all guitar but it’s like a Mozart sounding kind
of thing. It’s only
been with the band I made for Zappa Plays Zappa that I’ve gotten into more
ensemble playing. Most of the stuff I did before that was guitar oriented.
TH) Do you
ever play a classical guitar?
DZ) Only
marginally. I’m not very good with the finger picking. I’ve been trying to
learn a little bit of that and incorporate it. Most recently I’ve gotten into
learning how to play the oud. The only nylon stringed instruments I have are an
oud and I have this other thing called a glissentar which is basically a guitar
that is made to be like an oud. It’s a fretless nylon stringed instrument where
the top E through low A are doubled, unison strings, and the low E is a single
string. It’s a really fascinating instrument.
TH) You
talked once about your dad’s music being “from the future”, and how contemporary
it is. I totally agree with you. I hope that you can continue to find your own
voice as a composer.
DZ) The
record I’m making this November has taken an unexpected turn. I think I’m going
to actually make a record that’s mostly vocal tunes in order to have an opportunity
at a broader audience. And then I’m also going to make an instrumental record that
goes basically into outer space! I didn’t want to combine the two because it
would become, as many journalists like to say…"unfocused” (laughing). I think I
will learn some things along the way and figure out what I want to do. I’ve
done all kinds of things over the years that I never had a chance to actually release.
I had forgotten that I transcribed and played two pieces by the Bulgarian Women’s Choir for guitar. It’s a “guitar orchestra” version of these two pieces. I had
totally forgotten about doing it and I heard a tape of it the other day and
thought “oh my God”. It was pretty cool. It might appear as a transition
between some things. I’m definitely interested in blending some
multicultural sounds. For example, that instrument I was telling you about...the
glissentar…it has the sound of an oud…that ancient thousand year-old
instrument. But a thousand years ago they didn’t have Fuzz Tone! (a guitar effect).
TH) or Wah Wah
pedals!!
DZ) Yeah. Combining
a nylon-stringed, weird instrument with some Fuzz Tone is where the weird
experiment will begin.
TH) Are any
of the musicians in your band classically trained?
DZ) The keyboardist
took some classical lessons as a kid. And our bass player studied composition in
college, so he is quite knowledgeable about orchestral music. He’s the one who goes
through all of the scores we have at the house…anything in Frank’s hand or
anything done by a copyist…he goes through it to make sure it’s all correct.
TH) Did I
hear you say once that you didn’t read music?
DZ) I’m not
very good at it. I can sit down and do it, but it takes me so much longer to
learn something that way then it does for me to just listen to it and play it.
TH) That is phenomenal!
I don’t see how you can learn some of the incredibly fast guitar passages in
your dad’s music that way. For example,
I watched a video of you playing a fast passage from “Inca Roads”…. it’s too
fast to hear!
DZ) You have
things you can use to slow things down. But as a kid, I wanted to learn all
those really fast things from Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads. And before
there was any technology to slow it down in real time I would just have to
press “rewind” a million times, learning one or two notes at a time. So I’ve
grown accustomed to picking things out in small pieces. It’s a challenge no
matter what. One of the pieces we did in ZPZ recently was one of my favorite classical
pieces of my dad’s called “Strictly Genteel”. We played that a couple of tours
back. The crazy thing about learning music like that is it might take me a
month to get something down that was never meant to be played on guitar. There was
a passage for piccolo flute and I learned to play it on guitar and created a
sound that was in the right register and it took me several months just to get
this one thing down. We’re talking about 3 seconds of music or less. Then you
have the other hours put in for learning the rest of the hard parts. The crazy
thing is I spend all that time learning to play it on tour, but the moment I
don’t play it for even one week, it disappears!
TH) I
remember the days of trying to learn songs from a cassette player….rewinding
over and over, and you could never get the tape to the exact spot each time.
DZ) It was
even worse if you were trying to do it from a record!
TH) Are you
coming back to KC on your next tour?
DZ) I’m
hoping to get a Midwest run next year on the tour that starts in April. The date will be on my website soon. We may
be looking for opportunities to play with some smaller ensembles…maybe you
could connect us with some musicians! We are planning to tackle one of Frank’s
most poly-rhythmic pieces called “Sinister Footwear”.
TH) My buddy
Mike Brown and I will be waiting for you! Thank you for your time and good luck
on your projects and upcoming tour.
DZ) You bet. Thank you too.
.JPG)
