NEW YEAR SPINS
Frank Zappa’s second solo album (following Lumpy Gravy), Hot Rats, was his first release to truly unchain the impulses that would dominate the remainder of his career.
It’s fairly standard now to view Zappa’s more left-field prolusions as somehow jazz fusion, and the influence is definitely there. But Zappa always seemed less interested in showing off his own tastes than in disrupting with other people’s—as far back as Freak Out (just three years, but a zillion sessions earlier), he was messing with his listeners’ minds, so read “jazz” as merely shorthand for going off on tangents that few others could dream of, and fusion as, simply, what happened when it met something else.
That, after all, is how he could swing from ’50s doo wop to metallic grind and onto avant garde percussion solos without giving a hoot for continuity, yet still just takes the process further. A lot further.
