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CD review: Frank Zappa
By Adam Goldstein
goldstea@mscd.edu

Frank Zappa Buffalo (Vaulternative, 2007)

During a career that spanned more than 30 years, Frank Zappa’s recording habits bordered on the obsessive-compulsive. For nearly every live show, countless rehearsal sessions and even exchanges of banter between musicians in the studio, Zappa had a tape recorder rolling

More than 13 years after his death, Zappa’s family is drawing on this vast cache of aural gold to please hard-core fans and attract new listeners.

Buffalo is the latest jewel harvested from the late composer’s immense body of unreleased material, documenting a single, two-hour live show from New York in October 1980.

For a casual listener, the concert’s program may play like a whirlwind of conflicting styles and genres. For any fan familiar with Zappa’s 70-plus album discography, however, this album provides an engaging blend of streamlined classics from the ’60s and ’70s with skeletal versions of songs that would find fruition in later albums of the ’80s.

The album features one of Zappa’s most impressive ensembles, the touring band that was featured on 1981’s Tinseltown Rebellion. The eight-piece band drew on all the virtuosic zeal of its players – musicians such as Steve Vai on “stunt” guitar, Ike Willis on guitar and vocals, Tommy Mars on synthesizers and Vinnie Colaiuta on unbelievably dense drum lines. All their performances infuse the album with a degree of skill difficult to find in most live rock recordings, but par for the course on live Zappa albums. As on Tinseltown Rebellion, the ensemble easily navigates a complex musical program that seamlessly shifts from hard driving rock to faux punk to jazz-infused classical compositions.

The show opens with the title song from 1970’s Chunga’s Revenge album, a song that benefits immensely from the 10-year development period between its premiere and its performance in Buffalo. A flurry of frenzied drumbeats introduces the cadenced, hypnotic bass line, which in turn becomes the aural canvas for one of Frank’s signature guitar solos. Every element of the composition, including the rhythmic accompaniment, the melodic textures and the six-minute solo, has been streamlined and refined by years of development.

Similarly, songs such as “The Torture Never Stops,” “Andy” and “Ain’t Got No Heart,” which were released years before the Buffalo performance, are performed with a fluency and ease that add to the improvisational depth of the compositions.

The concert also proved a testing ground for several songs that would make up Tinseltown Rebellion, 1981’s double album You Are What You Is and 1982’s Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch. Though many of the songs from these records are a bit less refined in the Buffalo performance, these live versions show just how much tinkering went into a Zappa song before the composer decided to officially release it. A three-song suite from You Are What You Is proves the closest recreation of their studio counterparts, while the live version of “Drowning Witch” veers from the more refined album version almost entirely. In lieu of the complex, multitiered orchestral opus that was “Drowning Witch” a mere two years later, the version on this album, titled “Buffalo Drowning Witch,” is a minimalist vocal experiment by Zappa, with only the slightest vamp from the band as backup.

The album’s most impressive achievement remains its basic format: a full concert by one of Frank’s tightest ensembles. The treatment of the songs varies from seamless to skeletal, but the record manages to capture all the complexity, bawdiness and virtuosity of an average Zappa show.

The recording is sure to satisfy even the most hard-core fan – that is, until they dip into the vault for the next posthumous release.