Zappa and Jazz: Did it really smell funny, Frank?

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CHAPTER 1

DID IT REALLY SMELL FUNNY?

With every year that has passed since his death in 1993 at the age of fifty two, there has been an increasing acceptance that Frank Zappa is an iconic musical figure. His music continues to be played by a variety of ensembles in America and Europe, and at the time of writing, twenty eight Zappa biographies or Zappa-related books are currently available. Although he used the arena of popular music to make his entrance into public consciousness, to class him simply as a popular musician would be to do him a severe disservice.

Zappa’s music has a unique and easily recognizable quality, and is a brilliant and original synthesis of a wide range of cultural influences, including those of twentieth century classical music, film music, cartoon soundtracks, American stand-up comedy, rhythm and blues and jazz. This book focuses on just one of the influences on Zappa’s music, namely jazz, and an attempt is made to clarify the often-confusing nature of his relationship with it. From the commencement of his career, and regularly thereafter, his liking for jazz (at least, certain types of jazz), and its influence on his work, was obvious. And yet Zappa liked to give the impression that he disliked jazz. On his album Roxy and Elsewhere (1973) he famously stated that ‘jazz is not dead … it just smells funny’, and in his autobiography The Real Frank Zappa Book (1989) he included a section entitled ‘Jazz: The Music of Unemployment.’ In a 1978 interview with Dave Fass in Acid Rock magazine, he simply said ‘I don’t like jazz.’ Possibly his most vehement statement on the topic occurred in a 1984 interview with Richard Cook in New Musical Express:

I was never involved with jazz. There’s no passion in it. It’s a bunch of people trying to be cool, looking for certification of an intellectual community. Most of today’s jazz is worth less than the most blatantly commercial music because it pretends to be something it’s not. I’d rather stay away from that.

(Cook 1984, 15)

In 2003 the music writer Charles Shaar Murray wrote and presented a programme for BBC Radio 3 about Zappa and jazz entitled Jazz from Hell. In it he took Zappa at his word and stated that ‘Frank Zappa was not a jazz musician – and he obviously didn’t see himself as one – he wasn’t even a jazz fan.’ In the present thesis, I shall attempt to show that this statement is manifestly untrue.

So why did Zappa say that he disliked jazz? In truth what he disliked was not jazz, but the jazz Establishment, just as he disliked every other Establishment, be it that of education, religion, politics, classical music or any other orthodoxy of American society. In this sense, he was a classic outsider. Quite simply, jazz was just one of a long list of subjects that had the capacity to incur his displeasure. One has only to refer to The Real Frank Zappa Book to encounter a continuous flow of irritants, including people (‘stupidity, not hydrogen, is the basic building block of the universe … I don’t have friends’), the education system (‘I don’t like teachers. I don’t like schools’), politicians (‘a bunch of really bad people’), musicians (‘they tend to be lazy, and they get sick and skip rehearsals’), the tendency of symphony orchestra members to make mistakes (‘… made so many mistakes, and played so badly … that it required forty edits … to try to cover them’) and religion (‘The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book’).

How did Zappa acquire these bleak views? From an early age his experiences gave him good reason to be cautious in his dealings with the world. As Barry Miles (2004) observes, at the end of the Second World War, people did not forget that Italy had been at war with America, and the young Zappa, as an Italian-American, was subject to bullying. Between the ages of five and ten he was a sickly child, and as a youth his appearance was the antithesis of the all-American boy: he told Kurt Loder (1990) that when he was eleven, he weighed about 180 pounds, had big pimples and a moustache. To add to his feelings of insecurity, his father, ostensibly because of his work, had caused his family to move home eleven times by the time Zappa was aged eighteen.

In The Real Frank Zappa Book he says ‘Because of my dad’s work, I switched from school to school fairly often. I didn’t enjoy it … I kept getting thrown out of high school … I had gotten to hate education so much, I was so fed up with going to school …’ His relationship with his father became strained: ‘I didn’t get along all that well with him … Mostly I tried to stay out of his way – and I think he tried to stay out of mine as much as he could …’ Barry Miles (2004) discusses Zappa’s father, and suggests that there was an agitated quality in his inability to settle in one job for too long, leading to constant, unnecessary relocation. This had a detrimental effect on his family, who found it increasingly difficult to make an emotional commitment to anything more than superficial friendships in each new setting. The young Frank became withdrawn, inward-looking and wary of letting his real feelings show, and this was a mindset that cast a shadow for the rest of his life. By the time he was fifteen he had attended six separate high schools, predictably affecting his education negatively and precluding entry to a university, even though he was highly intelligent.

In his Zappa biography No Commercial Potential (1996), David Walley quotes Ernest Tossi, vice-principal at Antelope Valley High School, as saying ‘Frank was an independent thinker who couldn’t accept the Establishment’s set of rules.’ In 1965 Zappa was falsely accused of making a pornographic tape and subsequently spent ten days in jail. Barry Miles comments that he was a changed man after this experience. Disillusioned by what he perceived to be the reactionary American system of education and government, he vowed that never again would he be taken in.

Because of his early life experiences, Zappa developed a personality with a distinctive set of traits. He had a distrust and suspiciousness of others, and was reluctant to confide in people because of a fear that the information would be used against him. He was unforgiving of slights, and because he was waiting for potential threats, he could act in a guarded or secretive manner. Hostile, sarcastic expressions were frequent, and it was not easy for him to accept criticism.

Thus, his scathing opinions often acted as smoke screens and defence mechanisms, so that while he was saying one thing he was doing another. For instance, although he could be scornful about film music, saying that it was ‘… so transparent. There’s hardly any challenge in that’ in ‘The Mother of all Interviews’ with Don Menn (1993), and parodying what he felt were its clichés and mannerisms in the extended version of his orchestral piece ‘Bogus Pomp’ (1987), he was also a good friend of the eminent film composer David Raksin, as the latter stated in an interview with Bruce Duffie (1988). And although Zappa stated that ‘books make me sleepy,’ he was well-read. Barry Miles describes how, as an adolescent, he read his father’s books and then began frequenting the Lancaster County library in his search for alternative ideas and values. He was familiar with the works of Franz Kafka, William Burroughs, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, according to Nigey Lennon (1995). It was as though he was worried that he might be caught out joining the Establishment, and then subjected to derision. And so it was with jazz. While criticizing it, he drew on its influences. It is no wonder that pianist George Duke, in Charles Shaar Murray’s previously-mentioned radio programme, was moved to comment that ‘it was always interesting to me, why he had this reticence about jazz, and at the same time, there was jazz going on all around him. I thought there was something strange about that, but he wouldn’t admit it.’ And in the same programme keyboard player Tommy Mars felt that, for Zappa, jazz was ‘like that thing in the closet.’

The eminent American composer John Adams, discussing Zappa in a 2002 BBC Radio 3 interview, said:

One of his goals in life was to prove that he could do anything – you know, you wanna play blues guitar? I’ll beat ya at that! You wanna have a gross- out contest? I’ll beat ya at that! You wanna write super-complex avant-garde European music? I can do that too!

(Adams 2002, BBC Radio 3)

Zappa was trying to show that he was better than the Establishment that had slighted him. The phrase (with apologies to Shakespeare) ‘He doth protest too much, methinks’ springs to mind here, and it is sad because he had nothing to prove: his brilliance was apparent.

CHAPTER 2

EARLY ENCOUNTERS WITH JAZZ

When, at the age of fourteen, Zappa entered Mission Bay High School in San Diego in 1955, his first exposure to the elitist snobbery of a certain type of jazz fan occurred. It was like a red rag to a bull, and was no doubt the source of all his later caustic comments about jazz. He recounted the experience in an interview with Dan Forte in Musician magazine in 1979: ‘… at the time I was down there, there was a real definite division between the people who liked rhythm and blues and the people who liked jazz … The people who liked jazz would always go around putting you down …’ These people were fans of West Coast jazz, at the time at the height of its popularity, and exemplified by Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars and Shorty Rogers and his Giants. Unfortunately, Zappa’s ire at mindless adherence to a fashion spilled over onto the music. He commented ‘… to me, there wasn’t that much emotional depth in listening to something like ‘Martians Go Home’ by Shorty Rogers – that kind of stuff. It was just bleak.’

Was Zappa being disingenuous here? ‘Martians Go Home’ is not bleak – it is a piece of quirkily mischievous, Basie-inspired, small-group swing. Interestingly, Rogers, like many West Coast jazz musicians, also had a foot in the rhythm and blues camp. He supervised recording sessions by doo-wop groups and formed a publishing company with singer Jesse Belvin, publishing the latter’s hit ‘Guess Who’ (Rounce, 2004). Under the name Boots Brown and the Blockbusters he recorded a series of rhythm and blues instrumentals and reached number 23 in the charts in 1958 with ‘Cerveza’ (Myers, 2013). It is not stretching the imagination too much to suggest that Rogers was the type of person that Zappa later sought to emulate when he worked with Paul Buff at Pal Studios in the early 1960s, where they produced rock instrumentals and used group names like The Hollywood Persuaders and The Rotations.

Jazz fans could be bigoted and snobbish. So could certain jazz musicians. On the other hand, many were prepared to be open-minded about different types of music. They were not all haters of rhythm and blues.

Johnny Otis, who, as