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01-02-2021 06:46 PM
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yeah man..have seen before...the underwoods- ruth and hubby ian- were great players early on with frank...moved him from the great (but limited) original mothers of invention to new jazzier/intricate heights...
cheers
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always liked this one...twenty small cigars...from chunga's revenge...1970
slightly overdubbed quartet...with ian on piano, max bennet (ex kenton, ella, peggy lee. etc) bassist and john guerin ( shearing, monk, sinatra etc) on drums
cheers
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Max Bennet and John Guerin where part of the L.A. Express Tom Scott band. Saw them a lot in the Los Angeles area when I was just a teen getting into jazz. Guerin would often be the drummer in Howard Roberts' band when they played at Donte's.
Originally Posted by neatomic
Also saw the Max Bennet band and he had Mike Miller on guitar. Miller was really into Zappa. Only saw him that one time but I was really impressed.
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how do people even play that stuff ?? Originally Posted by wintermoon;[URL="tel:1087664"
Ruth Underwood .... incredible
ridiculously talented
here be monsters !
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by obsession, dedication, perseverance and love. AKA 'talent'. Originally Posted by pingu
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There’s an interview with Frank which I think might be in the movie...haven’t seen it yet...in which he states his band didn’t do it for the money, which was pretty tight in the early days. They did it because they loved playing interesting music at such a high level. Originally Posted by ccroft
If you were a percussion player like Ruth, where else are you going to play such incredible stuff?
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That was nifty, wintermoon. Thanks for posting.
I heard "St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast" many, many times in my youth. I think I was in 10th grade when that came out. My best friend in high school, Hugh Holder (who played his gold Les Paul way better than I played my Ovation acoustic), was obsessed with Zappa. We would ride around in his Monte Carlo and listen to Zappa 8-tracks All. Night. Long. Per Lebowski, there was a beverage involved...
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to y’all Zappa and Dan followers .... Originally Posted by wintermoon;[URL="tel:1087662"
are these Zappa ‘2’ chords the same as Dan ‘mu’ chords ?
like D2
x57755
and A2
(T5)x745x
kinda thing ? sorta ?
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Her first example of a few chords is "The Idiot Bastard Son", a very old nice piece.
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a caucasian/white russian i hope...haha Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
cheers
ps- & god bless jeff bridges dealing with serious lymphoma
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In honor of Ruth, Frank and all the recent UFO news:
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FZ, timely and prophetic as ever.... Originally Posted by pauln
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This stuff is fun to play, I was in a Zappa tribute for years
I ended up taking up mallets because we couldn't find a mallet player who would rehearse for free!
It was funny, I'd worked on these pieces for years before getting marimba lessons
My teacher was chuckling, a bit astonished that I'd learnt these pieces with totally wrong technique
I was doing double hits rather than hand over hand, just making it difficult for myself
I should have applied alternate picking technique to mallets!
At one point I was playing guitar, mallets and keys, it was a bit hectic
But it goes to show how important assimilation is with material like this.
Because I'd absorbed it for decades it wasn't so hard. I surprised myself, especially with the Ruth parts
Assimilation embeds the tempo, inflections, structure etc, so you just need to find the notes
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of course you could play it all...like ian underwood!
cheers
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My music is light year's simpler than Frank's but I've used a lot of "2" chords over the years, starting with an open D chord with the high E open. I just liked the sound and it pops up in several of my songs.
I had other voicings that are called 2 (or sus2) chords. I didn't know the names until I got a 'chord namer' app and I put in fingerings and it tells me the various things such a chord might be called (depending on context). I'm working on a moody thing now that is mainly one measure of C2 and another measure of D2 / C2 with pickup notes of G and B leading back to the C2.
Not having much success soloing over those looped changes, though a few simple 'melodic cells' seem to work well.
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Yes, the lyrics were a profound component of his music (their connotation, their gaudiness, and sometimes just the intentional "philosophical accident" of the sound of them). Originally Posted by citizenk74
FZ, timely and prophetic as ever....
There is a "sound" in Zappa's music that has what I would describe casually as "wrong notes that just sound right". I have a theory about this which I have never proved. The violinist Giuseppe Tartini discovered what are now called the tones of Tartini. When two pitches are produced, one hears two additional pitches (if within the frequency range of hearing perception) comprised of the frequency sum and difference between the two original pitches... the musical magic thing is that these two extra pitches are an artifact of the hearer's ear; they don't really exist "in the air", but the ear derives them from the two original tones.
In a similar way to which Bach inventions stagger a second copy of a melody line harmonically against itself (or a manipulated copy either backwards or inverted or shifted up or down various intervals, etc.), my theory about Zappa (and McLaughlin, King Crimson, and some others) is that the tones of Tartini are deliberately employed in composing.
A simple example would be to start with a two part harmony passage using the pitches' frequency values to calculate the tones of Tartini (most likely the difference values), then actually scoring the resulting single line only as the pitches of the difference values so this is a reduction from two lines of pitch to a new single line of pitches - so within the same harmonic context from which the original lines were developed, omit those original lines and play just the single line of derived difference pitches as the new melodic line.
What happens? The ear presented with the Tartini tones of the original harmony "recognizes" what must have been the missing two pitch lines' harmony - the ear puts back together and infers melodic harmony that is strictly absent in the music presented; harmony that was the composer's intent that you hear it, and you do.
Anyway, that's my theory and I'm sticking to it...
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Back in the '70s I spent some time trying to buy a ring modulator (long story), which produced sum and difference tones in addition to the input signal. When the store owner finally condescended to shut up and take my money, I had a great time writing songs based on the unique noises coming from the box. I even had people dancing to these off-planet harmonies. Good times! Originally Posted by pauln
Yes, the lyrics were a profound component of his music (their connotation, their gaudiness, and sometimes just the intentional "philosophical accident" of the sound of them).
There is a "sound" in Zappa's music that has what I would describe casually as "wrong notes that just sound right". I have a theory about this which I have never proved. The violinist Giuseppe Tartini discovered what are now called the tones of Tartini. When two pitches are produced, one hears two additional pitches (if within the frequency range of hearing perception) comprised of the frequency sum and difference between the two original pitches... the musical magic thing is that these two extra pitches are an artifact of the hearer's ear; they don't really exist "in the air", but the ear derives them from the two original tones.
In a similar way to which Bach inventions stagger a second copy of a melody line harmonically against itself (or a manipulated copy either backwards or inverted or shifted up or down various intervals, etc.), my theory about Zappa (and McLaughlin, King Crimson, and some others) is that the tones of Tartini are deliberately employed in composing.
A simple example would be to start with a two part harmony passage using the pitches' frequency values to calculate the tones of Tartini (most likely the difference values), then actually scoring the resulting single line only as the pitches of the difference values so this is a reduction from two lines of pitch to a new single line of pitches - so within the same harmonic context from which the original lines were developed, omit those original lines and play just the single line of derived difference pitches as the new melodic line.
What happens? The ear presented with the Tartini tones of the original harmony "recognizes" what must have been the missing two pitch lines' harmony - the ear puts back together and infers melodic harmony that is strictly absent in the music presented; harmony that was the composer's intent that you hear it, and you do.
Anyway, that's my theory and I'm sticking to it...
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The lyrics are often, as the youth say these days, problematic.
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That's interesting. I don't know if Frank was aware of Tartini...he was HEAVILY influenced by Varese though, who was quite a proponent of "accidental music".. Originally Posted by pauln
Yes, the lyrics were a profound component of his music (their connotation, their gaudiness, and sometimes just the intentional "philosophical accident" of the sound of them).
There is a "sound" in Zappa's music that has what I would describe casually as "wrong notes that just sound right". I have a theory about this which I have never proved. The violinist Giuseppe Tartini discovered what are now called the tones of Tartini. When two pitches are produced, one hears two additional pitches (if within the frequency range of hearing perception) comprised of the frequency sum and difference between the two original pitches... the musical magic thing is that these two extra pitches are an artifact of the hearer's ear; they don't really exist "in the air", but the ear derives them from the two original tones.
In a similar way to which Bach inventions stagger a second copy of a melody line harmonically against itself (or a manipulated copy either backwards or inverted or shifted up or down various intervals, etc.), my theory about Zappa (and McLaughlin, King Crimson, and some others) is that the tones of Tartini are deliberately employed in composing.
A simple example would be to start with a two part harmony passage using the pitches' frequency values to calculate the tones of Tartini (most likely the difference values), then actually scoring the resulting single line only as the pitches of the difference values so this is a reduction from two lines of pitch to a new single line of pitches - so within the same harmonic context from which the original lines were developed, omit those original lines and play just the single line of derived difference pitches as the new melodic line.
What happens? The ear presented with the Tartini tones of the original harmony "recognizes" what must have been the missing two pitch lines' harmony - the ear puts back together and infers melodic harmony that is strictly absent in the music presented; harmony that was the composer's intent that you hear it, and you do.
Anyway, that's my theory and I'm sticking to it...
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Raney and Abersold, great interview.
Yesterday, 11:21 PM in Improvisation