Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention - Grand Wazoo
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Free Music Notes for Grand Wazoo
Free Music Review: Highly recommended
Hit: 5 Stars
This is a mostly instrumental album and one of Zappa's best albums of all. And I've got copies of about a dozen of his albums in my collection. Terrific compositions and arrangements.Free Music Review: JUST GRAND!
Hit: 5 Stars
If you did not enjoy this WONDERFUL MUSIC please check the top of your head for a large dent.Free Music Review: Better than Hot Rats, barely
Hit: 5 Stars
Hot Rats is wonderful, the fact that this album is even better amazes meFree Music Review: More, please!
Hit: 4 Stars
I get the feeling that while Frank was very good at writing for small ensembles of woodwinds, witness the quite incredible writing skills evident in Uncle Meat and Burnt Weeny Sandwich, he may have found the pieces here just a little harder. I guess we'll never really know, but on the whole, very few of these pieces (3, really) actualy use the manifold resources of the musicians mentioned in the flyleaf.I have no idea, as a matter of fact, where the big band writing skills ever come from, since to get the sounds as you want, you have to have a very capable audition and there's only so many who can do that reasonably well. Take this with the possibility that Frank was indeed recovering from a quite bad accident and was a bit upset, and you can imagine that somewhere in the vaults there must surely be a lot of material that was recorded, or scripted, but didn't quite make his very high standards.
This collection is very nice, cheerful, and undoubtedly listenable. I could only really wish that there was more.
It doesn't seem to reveal much of the man who wrote the strange things earlier, but actually, it does after a few listenings, reveal some rather unorthodox ideas, but presented in quite a different way to anything else, even from the Hot Rats/Waka Jawaka set.
I wonder where this might all have headed if there had been the time.
Free Music Review: Just when you thought you had a handle on Zappa
Hit: 4 Stars
One of the many things I loved about our late, lamented Frank was his unpredictable versatility. Just when you thought you had a handle on what he was doing, he released an album like "Lumpy Gravy", "Cruisin' With Ruben and the Jets", or this one.
This is Zappa's jazz big band album and man, is it amazing! French horns, tubas and all kinds of brass pop out of the recording at you along with the usual "Abnuceals Emuukha Electronic Orchestra" type of approach.
I saw this band (which featured jazzman George Duke)in Chicago and they were amazing, although Frank was bemoaning the fact that they were'nt much on the "crazy stage antics" side of the equation. I sure wish I could go back and relive that episode from the non-rock side of Zappa.
"Eat that question" and "For Calvin's Next Two Hitch-hikers" are top ten Zappa compositions, in my book.