Frank Zappa with Ray White, Ike Willis, Bobby Martin, Alan Zavod, Scott Thunes & Chad Wackerman playing 'Zoot Allures' live at The Pier, NYC, August 26, 1984:
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Frank Zappa with Jean-Luc Ponty et al playing 'Montana' in 1973:
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Somewhat OT but here's another side of Frank Zappa. At least there's ahint of swing in it, though it's not the tightest or best-recoded performance ever:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhfI3Tg4SrY)Comment
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The Finnish chamber music group, Ensemble Ambrosius, playing Frank Zappa's 'Echidna's Arf(Of You)' from 'The Zappa Album' recorded in 1999:
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A brilliant album. They also did a Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert (March 13 2002) which included a number of Zappa pieces.Originally posted by Jazzrook View PostThe Finnish chamber music group, Ensemble Ambrosius, playing Frank Zappa's 'Echidna's Arf(Of You)' from 'The Zappa Album' recorded in 1999:
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The Norwegian Wind Ensemble plays FZ. Their CD 'The Brass From Utopia' is worth searching for.
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Unfortunately, the link currently leads to "Things don't appear to be working at the moment. Please try again later."Originally posted by Jazzrook View PostThe Norwegian Wind Ensemble plays FZ. Their CD 'The Brass From Utopia' is worth searching for.
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Aha! It's on QOBUZ. I'll import it and have a listen.Comment
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A remarkable solo piano version of Zappa’s ‘Echidna’s Arf(Of You):
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Tremendous JR - many thanks for this!Originally posted by Jazzrook View PostA remarkable solo piano version of Zappa’s ‘Echidna’s Arf(Of You):
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Would be great to hear an album of FZ tunes from this amazing pianist.Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
Here’s a version of FZ’s ‘Black Napkins’ by another pianist, Dave Hartl:
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....just a short video of Ruth Underwood ref Black Page [not Napkins]....there is a longer version somewhere where she cooperates with a drummer to get the piano and complex rhythms that are demanded by Frank....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqmcNKTezSM
Black Page (piano version)....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw4XW-Yxvgobong chingComment
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FZ solo piano medley: Easy Meat 1, Echidna’s Arf(Of You), RDNZL, Dog Breath, Uncle Meat, La Mer(Debussy), Drowning Witch, Easy Meat 2 & Sofa arranged and played by Risa Takeda:
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There is an already existing piano or two-piano arrangement of Debussy's orchestral masterpiece, but these guys seem to know what they are doing, so worth checking out. There's a story about how Debussy fell out with Ravel over La Mer. Debussy had earlier sympathised with Ravel over his not winning the Prix de Rome for his string quartet. Ravel told Debussy he feared it was too much a copy of his; Debussy said no, it is entirely your music, and they became friends. But after Debussy showed him his score for La Mer, Ravel bragged that if he had his way, he would scrap the orchestration and re-orchestrate it himself. This got back to Debussy, and that was the end of their friendship!Originally posted by Jazzrook View PostFZ solo piano medley: Easy Meat 1, Echidna’s Arf(Of You), RDNZL, Dog Breath, Uncle Meat, La Mer(Debussy), Drowning Witch, Easy Meat 2 & Sofa arranged and played by Risa Takeda:
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I was curious about the story of the fall out between Ravel.and Debussy. I was not aware of any relationship between the two as I understood them to be a generation apart. Wicki suggests a number of reasons including Ravel's disapproval of Debussy leaving his wife for a lover. This fits with what I know about Debussy who was a womaniser.
I have not lisrenewed to Ravel for ages but, despite the connections with jazz , the influence of earlier classical styles has struck me as more powerful. It is an interesting period as the Impressionists really influenced jazz from 1920s onwards. I do not feel the influence has ever gone away.
I am fascinated by how the influence of jazz was dealt with by classical composers as some like Shostakovich got it totally wrong whereas Milhaud nailed it . Ravel is always cited as a major absorber of jazz yet I have lost enthusiasm for his music . I love Debussy but my perception of his as a composer has changed as I listen to more music. I find Syzmanowski more interesting and love Scriabin. For my money, Syzmanowski was a better composer than Debussy but no idea cites him as an influence on jazz. For my money, I find the Pole to be seriously undeŕvalued by jazz musicians and maybe Ravel's influence is overplayed. Twenty years ago I woukd have argued Ravel was a giant of 20th century classical music but I would be less inclined to come to that conclusion now. I am a bit underwhelmed by Ravel . My Mum was a qualified piano teacher and she had the view that Ravel was lightweight and not interesting same league as Chopin, Bach or Beethoven. I used to laugh at that because I discovered the Impressionists through Gil Evans and loved colourful orchestration. I would agree with her now. Impressionists took one route when the 20th century offered all sorts of possibilities. I always held French classical music in high esteem yet I think there are other approaches like those taken by Bartok, Symanowski, Scriabin or even Prokokiev who are no less interesting. Ravel seems less impressive these days to my ears. Too much looking back to earlier styles, I think.
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20th century classical modernism and free jazz shared one thing in common - each seems to have manifested two main directions away from their predecessors.Originally posted by Ian Thumwood View Post
In the case of classical music the first direction - the (simplistically-speaking) Impressionist one - one the one hand broke with harmonic orthodoxy by inviting in key changes ( modulations) that would have been considered too abrupt up to that point (around 1890), and either reverting to modal harmonic movement procedures pre-dating the dominance of the major-minor diatonic system from Monteverdi to Brahms, or turning to using "exotic" modes from a fascination in (for examples) Indian or Chinese scales, and even inventing scales-modes of their own, as Debussy did in La Mer. In all this the Impressionists (and their followers) fo9llowed on from and extended innovations in C19 Russian nationalist composers such as Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky. What was now to be seen as a rhythmic stultification contingent on an aesthetic sublimation deriving from classical music's ecclesiastically-dominating roots, and also the way in which foursquare rhythmic and tempo configurations "fitted" with harmonic tension and resolution conventions, could now be freed up since rhythmic phraseology no longer necessarily had to coincide with the conventional ebb and flow of harmony. One can already experience this harmonic dislocation in late Beethoven, in passages which balk at expectations by breaking off the harmonic or rhythmic flow, but Borodin, Musorgsky et al carried this much further with "strange" time signatures, rhythmic momenta and chord sequences shocking to 19th century audiences - and promoters!
The other direction led by Wagner and then carried to its logical conclusion by his followers Strauss and Mahler, rather than breaking with enharmonic and rhythmic/temporal conventions, carried the implications of expressing greater dramatic and subjective emotional tension promoted by the Romantic movement by increasingly using notes outside the prevailing key to the point reached by Schoenberg around 1908 where a predominance of unresolved chords and transitions between keys made it difficult if not impossible to tell what key the music was in at any point, or indeed if it was in any key - the so-called arrival of atonality. Eventually Schoenberg and his circle would arrive at the 12-tone serial method of plotting melodies and harmonies to create what they felt to be a replacement of the diatonic system that would provide for the formal integrity freely atonal music lacked - but that is further down the road than we need consider. Debussy, his friend for a time Stravinsky and their followers and successors such as the Le Six group, felt the Austrians to have sacrificed too much in abandoning key-centred forms - for them rhythm and instrumental colour, along with appropriating "exotic" procedures and references, were self-sufficient in driving the new; most of them would however come to resort to old pre-Classical models whereas when the Schoenbergians, who had been interested in and adopted some of the colouristic innovations of the Impressionists, used Classical and Baroque procedures this was out of respect for and belief in eternal principles believed applicable beyond historical era... positions Boulez and his post WW2 associates of the so-called Darmstadt school revolted against... but that again is another story for another time, perhaps!
Like the early C20 classical music revolutions in form and expression, the changes jazz underwent between approximately 1957 and 1972 took two parallel routes: the modal and the chromatic. Both took on board aspects of classical modernism's innovations but with very different motivations. I've always felt the jazz greats from Satchmo on felt it necessary to meet the challenges of the white Euroclassical legacy on modernism's terms as means to legitimise their grasp of the "progressive imperative" inscribed in Modernism while adapting its means to their own ends as a defiance of their exclusion from its advantages and privileges. The modal harmonies of a McCoy Tyner and a John Coltrane were as equally acknowledging of Debussy's, Ravel's, Bartok's or Messiaen's as the modalities of marginalised/banned pre-colonial musical cultures to be exhibited. Atonality, the other route, would play less of a role in freeing up jazz than modes, which as Bartok and other composers of interest to jazz showed could as equally be used to "liberate" musical procedures from the tyranny of having to adhere to "a-men" cadence resolving forms as the kinds of extensions of chromatic elaboration introduced by Bird, Diz and Monk, extended by Dolphy and sidestepped by Ornette. Paul Bley is an interesting figure in starting out as a West Coast bop-style pianist then absorbing Schoenbergian atonality before reaching an adaptable compromise; one could add others, from here and in America. In some ways the most interesting and possibly lasting aspects of both musical traditions are those figures - rare in classical modernism, much more common in Post Bop - who managed in different ways to bridge the two lines of distinction common to both. We know who they are in jazz; in classical music are (or were) the composers who found ways of reconciling the Impressionist/Post impressionist modal with the atonal Second Viennese School. Szymanowsky, whom you cite, could not have existed without Debussy and especially Ravel; neither could he have existed without Strauss, Scriabin, and possibly Alban Berg. And one can think of others of similar ilk - Josef Suk (Czech), Bartok, Prokofiev, Frank Bridge (UK), Samuel Barber (US).Comment
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