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Zappa Plays Zappa
If you aren't already lost in the crazed noodlings of Frank Zappa...then it's time you were. Sadly, the great man passed on a while back. Thankfully he had a son who likes crazed noodlings as much as his old man did. So let us introduce you to Zappa Plays Zappa.
Guitarist Dweezil Zappa has cocooned himself away in the studio this past year engineering his own metamorphosis. "In order for me to play my father's music correctly I needed to understand the fundamentals of his music more thoroughly, which meant a lot of studying," he explains. His goal was to emerge as a "better musician" as well as a "better guitarist".
The autodidactic Zappa utilised the fruits of his labour to startling effect on his first album project in more than six years - Go With What You Know - featuring a unique guitar rendition of the elder Zappa's classic instrumental, Peaches En Regalia.
"I actually played along with Frank's guitar solo from the original Hot Rats master tapes. He had dedicated that album to me since he was working on that around the time I was born. It's cool to hear us playing together note for note in a stereo time machine."
And so was born Zappa Plays Zappa - the tour extraordinaire - the first official live concert events of Frank Zappa's music since his untimely passing in 1993. Joining Dweezil on stage is a hand-picked band of new, young musicians. Dweezil has recorded under his own name and with his brother, Ahmet, in their band Z. Six-string heroics aside, Dweezil has nurtured a successful television career, starting early on as an MTV veejay when he was only 17. He has appeared in films (Pretty In Pink, The Running Man with Arnold Schwarzenegger) and composed the music for several television shows including the Ben Stiller Show and the hit WB comedy, The Jamie Kennedy Experiment. In addition to cauterising his fingertips learning to play the music of Frank Zappa for the upcoming tour, and lending his studio wizardry to the Zappa archives (his multi-channel production work on the recent Frank Zappa release, QuAUDIOPHILIAc, is positively mind-blowing), Dweezil is loving playing his father's music in a live setting.
"Prepping for the tour has been like preparing for a medieval battle where going into it your sharpest weapon is a spoon," he laughs. "But I'm pretty deadly with that spoon now." Watch the utensils fly at the West Coast Blues 'n' Roots Festival.