Frank Zappa - Zappa: The Yellow Shark

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Music reviews of Zappa: The Yellow Shark

Music Review: Now, let's get serious, folks....
Rating: 5 Stars

Academia, if it as smart as it purports to be, will hopefully also take Zappa's chamber work seriously. Let's take a look at some of the major trends in the chamber / art music of the twentieth century and see why.

From 1900 to WWI, tonal harmony got deconstructed and eventually destroyed by Schoernberg and his students, Webern and Berg. Stravinsky and Bartok used this freedom to create new tonalities, like octotonicism and symmetrical harmony. Between the World Wars, many composers, like Copland and Villa-Lobos, turned towards the traditional music of their homeland for inspiration. After WWII, Cage and Brown worked under a philosophy that came to be called indeterminacy, in which the very idea of what music was came to be questioned. In the late 20th century, the climate of "classical" chamber music was a rediscovery of tonality and a turn towards minimalism. Composers like Glass and Reich took cues from meditative music from different cultures to create complex textures that were composed of very simple parts.

Then Zappa comes along. He asks the musicians to interpret notation like an indeterminist (Food Gathering in Post-Industial America), but uses melody and harmony in a way that recalls Stravinsky (Dog Breath Variations). He paints a picture of the landscape of his surroundings like a mid-20th century composer, but the picture he paints is one of excess, stupidity, and ignorance (Welcome to the United States). He creates textures like a minimalist (Pound for a Brown), but uses them as a tool to lull the listener into a musical trap that explodes in his/her face. He calls Varese a major influence, and has a similar percussive approach, but moves away from electronic music and into the wind ensemble (G-Spot Tornado). In short, people will most likely be studying his work well into the 21st century.

In this regard Yellow Shark is and will be a historically significant recording. Frank's hand is all over this album. One gets the sensation that it was organized and executed in a way that he approved of, and getting Franks approval on anything was no easy task. The recording is clear and pristine and the performances are passionate and flawless. G-Spot Tornado as realized by Rundell and the Ensemble Modern here is the most electrifying chamber performance I own on CD. The audience sits in an audibly stunned silence for several long seconds before literally erupting into applause. Ah, to have been there.

Be warned, if you are a FZ fan, you may or may not "get" this. If you liked the LSO recording, Yellow Shark stomps it. If Freak Out is your favorite and you were the guy on Baby Snakes hollering for Dinah-Moe Humm, you get no guarantees from me. This is dense and heady, but it is probably the definitive recording of Zappa's chamber work. At the very least, it's the swan song of the last great composer of the 20th century and is worth owning for that reason if no other.

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