Review: Dweezil Zappa and the Dweezil Zappa Plays Zappa Band: The Music of Frank Zappa, York Barbican (From York Press)

Review: Dweezil Zappa and the Dweezil Zappa Plays Zappa Band: The Music of Frank Zappa, York Barbican

10:27am Tuesday 22nd November 2011 in Music news and reviews By Paul Rhodes

IT COULD so easily have been awful. The prospect of re-creating Frank Zappa’s much loved 1970s album Apostrophe (‘) in full and performing “live” with Frank himself (already dead 18 years), could easily have sent the notorious perfectionist into a tombstone roll. In the event, it was played to perfection and without a hint of mawkishness.

Dweezil, who has matured from an Eddie Van Halen flash Harry to a remarkable guitarist in his own right, was clearly the man to take this to the stage. At four key moments in the set, FZ appeared on screen, with the living musicians taking the band role.

Performing with a razor-sharp seven-piece band, the star took centre stage, and Dweezil, too, risked being upstaged by more exuberant personalities like singer Ben Thomas.

Having toured with Zappa’s music since 2006, compiling a set list from his father’s 60 album-plus output must be an endless challenge.

Apostrophe was a good move. As an album it finds all of FZ’s strengths in alignment; a unique surrealism, technical virtuosity, and a crazed combination of jazz and rock topped off with memorable tunes. It is also an album beloved by schoolboys of all ages for the lyrics to Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow or Stink Foot.

FZ’s appearance on Cosmic Debris underlined the humour in the music, and Pete Griffin, one of the only bass players to upstage lead guitarists of this calibre, stepped into Jack Bruce’s shoes for the show-stopping, visceral title track.

Inevitably, the conceptual continuity provided by Apostrophe wasn’t sustained, and the middle section groaned under solo after solo and the silliness and clinical excellence that afflicted FZ’s cold, cold heart in his later years.

Fortunately the big, dumb Muffin Man closed the night on a memorable high; proof that for all his cold intellectualism, in sensitive hands, the music can still connect.