Frank Zappa was a master at creating musical Venn diagrams. What do I mean by that? Well, Zappa’s compositional talents stretched well beyond the rock music idiom, so many of his releases would offer a keen intersection of doo-wop, classical orchestration, avant-jazz, progressive jams, country funk, and pure pop sensibilities (for starters). Sometimes he would even incorporate all his artistic powers into all 20-plus minutes of an album side’s lone track.
As Zappa rolled into the 1970s, he initially leaned into more of an outré, jazz fusion approach on July 1972’s and then swung before harnessing then-modern pop/rock elements to fuel the breakthrough commercial appeal of September 1973’s , one of the most accessible and popular albums of his career. To properly fete that album’s 50th anniversary, Zappa Records/UMe have served up a 4CD/1BD Super Deluxe Edition box set, replete with 57 never-before-released tracks. Besides Bob Ludwig’s 2012 remaster of the original album, the box includes a score of unreleased masters, vault highlights, and additional outtakes from the original 1973 sessions mastered by John Polito on CD1 and CD2. Some of CD2 and all of CD3 and CD4 contain unreleased 1973 live recordings featuring the core band playing a pair of shows—one at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, the other at Cobo Hall in Detroit. The 48-page saddle-stitched booklet features many unseen of-era photos and a pair of deeply informative essays by audiophile-centric journalist Mark Smotroff and Zappa’s longtime Vaultmeister, Joe Travers.
