by Michael Rose
I was in Manhattan on business and across the street from my hotel was the Iridium Jazz Club. The Ed Palermo Big Band was there that night doing their intermittent gig of Frank Zappa compositions. Yes, the Frank Zappa of "Valley Girl" and Sheik Yerbouti, but the big band wasn't performing the satirical material for which Zappa was best known in the 1980s. Palermo spoke from the stage about Zappa, dead now for more than a decade, Palermo's hero, another Italian-America who had a big band, sometimes even a symphony orchestra.
Palermo's band primarily covered selections originally released in the period 1968-1973, taken from Zappa and Mothers of Invention albums like Lumpy Gravy, Hot Rats, and The Grand Wazoo. At that time, Zappa's band usually had horn players good enough to follow Zappa's demanding charts, and his music was rendered with an Ellingtonian instrumental warmth that he would never quite recover in the remaining twenty years of his life.
Of course it wasn't quite the same when performed more than thirty years later by the Ed Palermo Big Band. Though the notes were well-played, they never had the acidic bite of Zappa's original recordings. Ellington's big band music was always charming, but even Zappa's loveliest melodies have an arch cast. Zappa wanted respect more than love.
But there was another problem, and that was technological. Many of Zappa's most interesting musical effects were produced by recording his band's instruments at the wrong pitch and tempo, then speeding them up or slowing them down by changing the tape speed during overdubbing, so that they were in key and within the time signature that he intended, but with peculiar timbres. He was particularly fond of speeding up and slowing down vocal tracks, producing a Munchkin-like sound to the singing. [For part of his career, the name of Zappa's music publisher was Munchkin Music.] Then there were the sounds of belches and groupies squealing, scattered between snippets of music. Zappa spent almost thirty years as the greatest musical sampler of his age.
But then came digital sampling, and computer-driven synthesizers that could play in any combination of keys and time-signatures, going far beyond the performance limits of human musicians. By the album Jazz from Hell, Zappa was recording music that was made up almost entirely of sampled notes, assembled digitally on a Synclavier. Sometimes he would mix live instruments into these later releases, sometimes samples of his band members or Congressional testimony. In his last years, he hardly played guitar or toured anymore, holing up in his home studio to produce his music without the burden of live musicians. Technology had freed Zappa to explore music with complete purity, unconstrained by personalities. The last album that he released, Civilization Phaze III, is monumental but chilling. Its music seems to come from a planet inhabited by machines. The samples of human speech interspersed between Synclavier tracks are like anthropological recordings made by alien scientists.
The impact of technology on the consumption of music in the 20th Century was obviously massive. Recorded music has become a pervasive soup that we consume throughout our daily lives. As a music addict myself, I have welcomed every accretion of technology that fosters the ubiquity of music.
But less obvious has been the impact of technology on the processes of creating and recording music. For chamber music, the advent of the gramophone made classical musicians more self-conscious about small variations in tempo, the rubato that they used to commonly indulge in. Personally I prefer strict time-keeping in my classical music.
The three-minute 78 RPM record format dominated recorded music during the first half of the 20th Century. Duke Ellington mastered the art of cramming as much music as possible onto each side of a shellac 78. From 1928 to 1946, his recordings were sonata-like in their rapid alternation of themes. I think particularly of the sublime tracks "East St Louis Toodle-Oo" and "The Mooche." When the LP surfaced commercially in the 1950s, Ellington's recordings exploded in scale. He was able to release lengthy suites of music, and his soloists finally had the room to stretch on the band's recordings.
But the more important change was the move from direct-to-disc cutting to audiotape, which took place around the same time. This transition prepared the way for multi-track recording, overdubbing, and endless snipping and joining of tape segments. Perhaps the most famous early use of such technology comes in "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite," off the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album. To make a surrealistic circus sound at the end of the song, George Martin and John Lennon took tape recordings of several carnival organs and spliced them together in tape loops in which some of the original bits of tape were reversed. Sgt. Pepper's is full of such audiotape experiments, coming as it did at the apogee of the psychedelic movement.
But Zappa had already made many of these same innovations on his 1966 album with the Mothers of Invention, the one with the rather dated title Freak Out! Perhaps the zenith of Zappa's use of the tape recorder is the album We're Only in it for the Money, with its cover parodying Sgt. Pepper's. [Zappa hated hippie pretensions, regarding himself as a freak instead, a counter-cultural type with an edge.] But the sheer work required to sample and edit extensively using audiotape limited the use of sampling in music for the next twenty years.
With the advent of computer-based digital sampling and editing, any idiot (and I have indeed tried this for myself) can generate and assemble bits of sound and music using a personal computer and a few accessories. Thus we have the electronica and hip-hop genres, in which musical virtuosity has been rendered utterly otiose. It is not impossible to create challenging music using computer sampling and editing, as Zappa's Jazz from Hell amply illustrates. But the virtuosic musicians who were so fashionable, if not indispensable, in rock music from 1967 to 1977 can be dispensed with. Computers can be programmed to play as many notes as needed, in whatever combination of melodies and rhythms.
Has this contributed to the decay of music in our time? Technological ease does not create decadence by itself, but it assuredly makes it easier for persons of very limited musical talent to dominate the play-lists of radio stations that proffer the latest offal released by the record companies.
Looking the part has become far more important than sounding it, as the sounds themselves are now produced in a manner like that of egg production in chicken battery farms. Thus aspiring pop music performers are better advised to spend their lunch money on cosmetic surgery rather than piano or guitar lessons. As a famously and happily ugly human being, Zappa would certainly have been amused by this turn of events if he had lived past 1993.
