Frank Zappa - Hot Rats
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Free Music Notes for Hot Rats
Free Music Review: zappa: nutcase or genius??
Hit: 5 Stars
i agree with another reviewer who said i wish more zappa albums were like this. it took guts for frank to do this at the time, but it paid off! fantastic and insightful work in zappa's career. the instrumental tunes (all except Willie the Pimp) are all pure zappa! if you've heard other instrumentals or instrumental albums by frank like "shut up n play yer guitar" or "jazz from hell", you know that he is a wizard of composition. he's a master at writing twisted music that is just fun to listen to. this album was still early in his career, and he honed his compositional style a bit more elegantly in later works. this album was still in the '60s ('69 i believe) and the straight-ahead blast with the long ugly jams thing was still more or less en vogue. even Willie the Pimp gets the vocals out of the way early in the tune so frank can dominate the last 5 minutes of the song with a guitar solo! sweet! of course, the best tune on the album is the nearly-17-minute jam, The Gumbo Variations, featuring the psycho-sax of Ian Underwood, hot violin of Sugar Cane Harris, and of course frank on guitar. freakin' awesome! it's worth the price of the album just for the Gumbo!! but, i'll admit one of the reasons i was interested in this album is because i'm a Jean-Luc Ponty fan, and i knew he made a brief appearance on this work. it only recently came to my attention that frank zappa was the man who convinced ponty to move to the USA after zappa saw ponty performing in a european jazz ensemble. zappa was so blown away by ponty's talent, he went on a major quest to convince ponty to move to LA so he could sign him up with the mothers. that would've been around the time this album was released. i'm a bit disappointed that on the only track on this album that features jean-luc, the violinist was not allowed to step out and show off very much....especially after the blazing solo Sugar Cane did on Gumbo, but i can't hold any major grudges. as always, ponty played wonderfully. this is a supurb nearly-instrumental zappa album.....clearly done in the late '60s, with zappa already developing his gift for brilliant but twisted composition, fantastic jams....Underwood, Harris, Ponty and Gumbo Variations and a pimp! this is truly a 5-star album!Free Music Review: Not too much to add, save for a few observations...
Hit: 5 Stars
Let me begin by saying that after jazz and classical music, Zappa's music means the most to me. Not much more can be said about this album in light of the multitudinous reviews which have been posted. However, I would like to make this observation, particularly to those familiar with Zappa's catalog: "Hot Rats" & "Uncle Meat" are 2 rare instances in Zappa's output where his improvisations reflect the melodic contour and sophistication of his compositions. If you listen to any Zappa recordings made prior to or after these two landmark albums, the overwhelming majority of his guitar solos are melodically blues solos (albeit with often unusual phrasing and rhthyms). This is true even of Shut Up & Player Yer Guitar. Now, I'm not referring to his ensemble work on other albums. Zappa's playing in that regard on tracks like "Zombie Wolf" or "Big Swifty" show that he was able to incorporate his guitar into the compositional framework of the ensemble and not have it sound "guitaristic" (e.g., "bluesy"). However, his solos in my view generally (if slightly) pale in comparison to his writing on most of his ablums. Hot Rats and Uncle Meat are 2 albums, by exception, where there is no doubt that Zappa could IMPROVISE on guitar. The key tracks in my view are "Nine Types of Industrial Pollution" on Meat and "Son of Mr. Green Genes" on Rats. I come from a jazz background, and a small part of my interest in Zappa is how he relates to that tradition. I don't think he was a jazz musician, per se. He largely did not display the ability to improvise in a "jazz" sense, although he certainly employed jazz musicians (George Duke, Jean-Luc Ponty, The Brecker Brothers, etc.), he was able to compose and arrange in a way that allowed them to improvise "in a jazz sense", and his tunes were performed by jazz musicians not otherwise associated with him (check out Woody Herman's interesting version of "America Drinks and Goes Home"). Just listen to the last chorus that Zappa takes on "Genes". You could transcribe THAT SOLO and harmonize it for any big band and it would sound great.
Just an observation.
Free Music Review: Perfect.. perfect.. perfect.
Hit: 5 Stars
Records like this don't happen often. Every now and then an artist will spin out a work where not a single note seems out of place, where there's not a weak moment to be found. Hot Rats is such an album. One only needs to take a listen to "Peaches En Regalia," which Frank once described as the ultimate FZ song since it was "the only song I wrote which no one ever did not like." He packs in more insane twists and changes in 3-1/2 minutes than many others do in 10, yet it remains upbeat and hummable throughout. Flawless.And "Peaches" is only the beginning. Sans Mothers for the first time, Frank's vision took him almost into pure jazz territory, yet keeping the trappings of rock and blending both effortlessly. Although I hate labels, I have to say the word "fusion" was coined because of albums like this. The melodies and progressions are (for the most part) firmly in the rock camp, but all executed with the in-the-moment creativity and spontaneity that's the essence of true jazz. Captain Beefheart's vocal appearance on "Willie the Pimp" doesn't detract from either aspect; it too blends perfectly. For the rest of the album, even through all 16+ minutes of "Gumbo Variations," the music never drags and never gets clunky or repetitive. It's just as fresh and vital now as it has been for the past 32 years. Jazz for people who don't like jazz - it stands with Miles Davis's Kind of Blue in that respect.
If you're looking for a good first introduction to the world of Zappa, this isn't quite it - Cheap Thrills or Strictly Commercial are better to begin with (as much as is possible for single albums, that is - in my view the only album that could accurately be called an overview of FZ's whole output is the more expensive Läther). But Hot Rats stands on its own: worth picking up on its own merit, whether you're getting into Zappa or not. Like jazz at all? Then click and order; if you don't like it, you probably know someone who will.
Free Music Review: Turns out Zappa knew jazz, too!
Hit: 5 Stars
Though he's better known as an extraordinary satirist, Zappa was also a guitar virtuoso and a briliant composer.
Let's face it, Frank Zappa's so-called "arty" contemporaries couldn't match Zappa. I mean, was Pink Floyd making use of countermelodies? Could ELP ever ditc the pretention and come up with a melody that will stick with you for days? Did the Beatles (or Led Zeppelin, for that matter) have enough talent to keep a group jam going for seventeen minutes? And were any of these groups as wonderfully eccentric as Zappa? No, no, no, and no.
Zappa couldn't have picked a better way to open this album than with Peaches En Regallia, an extremely innovative instrumental that will stick with you for the rest of your life. It never, ever gets old. Trust me. Believe it or not, his guitar takes a backseat to Mr. Ian Underwood's sax, clarinet and keyboard. Then we have Willie the Pimp. At first, it sounds like Zappa-by-numbers, with some sleazy lyrics from Captain Beefheart. But then Frank takes over on guitar, delivering a jaw-dropping seven minute solo. Brilliance. Thirdly is another group jam, Son of Mr. Green Genes, though with its' similar melody and feel it could have very well been called Son of Peaches En Regallia. As we'd expect, it's a highlight, with Zappa contributing a great melody and better guitar. I don't really have much to say about Little Umbrellas, which is fun but forgettable...
...especially compared to The Gumbo Variations, a seventeen-minute group jam that proves just what Zappa's group was capable of. Other bands can't keep a jam going for half this length - not even Santana. But Frank Zappa, Ian Underwood and violinist Sugarcane Harris actually sound like a jazz group, not a garage band playing as long as possible. It's awesome. Sadly, the closer (It Must Be a Camel) is weak.
So, there you have it. Good jazz from a famed rock musician. Yes, that is possible.
Free Music Review: star toh
Hit: 5 Stars
I can't believe I haven't reviewed this yet. Maybe because it's hard to explain it. But it is simply the most perfect music ever made, more or less. You should note that this cd version has a longer edit of the outstanding Gumbo Variations than on the original lp & that overall it's remixed & it occasionally shows, there's a bit of flute on Little Umbrellas that you can't hear on the lp. Anyway these are just concerns for the converted, either version will the job very nicely. Whilst you need both this & the Mothers stuff, this is music that speaks for itself instrumentally & very funkily similar to what Miles Davis was doing around the same time, get that & this. Of course there is Willie The Pimp which makes it not quite instrumental because the legendary Captain Beefheart aka Don Van Vliet sings on it, the end of the year that his Trout Mask Replica, the best album ever made came out, & the amazing thing is that he just disappears & FZ takes over on his best guitar soloing ever. Of course the album opens w/ Peaches En Regalia, the most famous & loved of FZ's instrumental themes [alongside Holiday in Berlin & Little House I Used to live in off Burnt Weeny Sandwich, the next album after this & just as excellent]. In case you weren't aware, the Gumbo Variations is a amazingly funky 13-17 minute jazz skronk track starring the blowing talents of multi-instrumentalist Ian Underwood who is the secret weapon of Hot rats. The closer, It Must Be A Camel is sort of a starring piece for violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, quite refined & classy [he then did a whole album of Zappa tunes called King Kong]. I think it's a thing where a review won't really convince, you have to find out for yrself. A good introduction for people who don't listen to jazz, I'm no longer in that category, or FZ for that matter.