Zappa (Royal Academy of Music)

From Zappa Wiki Jawaka
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Tributes & Cover Albums
   
Zappa
Released April 2011
 

Players

The Manson Ensemble of the Royal Academy of Music

Tracks

  1. Peaches En Regalia arr. Ali N. Askin
  2. Big Swifty arr. Jon Nelson (Meridian Arts Ensemble) for Brass Quintett
  3. Dupree's Paradise
  4. Twenty Small Cigars trans. Chris Lyons
  5. The Legend Of The Golden Arches trans. Robert Peate
  6. St. Alphonzo's Pancake Breakfast trans. Charlie Piper
  7. Little Umbrellas trans. Joseph Davies
  8. Black Page #2 trans. Philip Cashian
  9. Music For Low-Budget Orchestra arr. Ian Underwood from Songbook Vol. 1, transcr. Philip Cashian
  10. Alien Orifice (Munchkin Music arr.) trans. Philip Cashian
  11. Little House I Used To Live In (from Songbook Vol. 1) trans. Philip Cashian
  12. The Perfect Stranger (Movements I and II)
  13. G-Spot Tornado arr. Ali N. Askin

Release Notes

Recorded at the Royal Academy of Music on 14th, 15th and 16th November 2010.

Produced by: Daniel-Ben Pienar
Consultant: Philip Cashian
Executive Producer: Jonathan Freeman-Attwood

Recorded and edited by Kirsten Cowie and mastered by Tom Leader at LCL Digital.

Cover Image © 1974 Zappa Family Trust. Used by Permission.
Recorded by kind permission of Gail Zappa and European American Music Distributors Company, Agent of the Work of Frank Zappa.

The album features reworked versions of various compositions by Frank Zappa, performed by the Royal Academy of Music Manson Ensemble and conducted by Franck Ollu.
The recording was made immediately after a 2010 concert forming part of a major Zappa festival to mark what would have been his 70th birthday.
The repertoire was transcribed by Academy students Chris Lyons, Charlie Piper, Robert Peate and Joseph Davies, as well as Head of Composition Philip Cashian.

Background Information

Performance and recording of this event was part of the event "Zappa At The Roundhouse" in celebration of the 70th birthday of Frank Zappa in London, UK.

Versions

Royal Academy of Music, RAM 045, 2012

Reviews

This album of orchestrated Frank Zappa arrives, as such albums tend to, with a fawning booklet-note by a classical composer – hello Philip Cashian, who’s clearly in love with the Zappa mythology. As Cashian points out, Zappa was indeed a ‘guitarist, songwriter, composer, film-maker, satirist, writer and social and political commentator all rolled into one’ and while, fair comment, it’s true that ‘you could never tell which combinations of those elements would come out in Zappa’s music’, that doesn’t mean everything he touched turned to gold. The big feature here is The Perfect Stranger, which Zappa, with characteristic chutzpah, managed to persuade Pierre Boulez to record in 1974.

With the best will in the world, though, one can’t envisage Boulez really digging its Stravinsky-meets-film score orchestral clutter, structural flaccidity and harmonic inertia. Zappa’s professed models were Stravinsky, Varèse and Xenakis. He was very quick to pounce on what he perceived as the ‘bourgeois’ failings of others, so it’s fair enough, I feel, to point out that The Perfect Stranger probably wouldn’t have got anywhere had it not been by Zappa. The RAM Manson Ensemble deliver a glossy, seamless performance of this relentlessly ‘so what’ music.

The remainder is a mixed bag of Zappa transcriptions. Jon Nelson’s brass quintet realisation of Big Swifty creaks at its many edges, while Little Umbrellas, Twenty Small Cigars et al sound like melodically insignificant doodles stretched around indulgent Broadway-infused orchestrations. Ali N Askin’s take on G-Spot Tornado at least injects some fun into this po-faced homage and his arrangement of Peaches en Regalia, with its grooving rhythm section and unruly wind parts, challenges the players. Then again, there was never anything wrong with the brilliantly idiomatic playing. It’s the music that stinks. Philip Clark - Gramophone