“Black and orange? I’ve always liked those colors, you know. And when everything turns black and orange, I feel very comfortable. I like the pumpkin as a vegetable. I think that it’s a wonderful invention. And I’m into it, you know,”
That’s Frank Zappa’s response to a question about Halloween in a cringeworthy CBS interview conducted on Oct. 31, 1983. It’s hard to know whether he was being sincere or trolling the clueless interviewer because . . . well, he’s Frank Zappa. But taking him at his word, let’s assume that the Father of the Mothers of Invention would be secretly tickled about Saturday’s Schlenk Zappa tribute concert at BOP STOP.
But you never know.
That sort of ambiguity is built into the man’s music. Is it high art or the lowest of the low? If it’s the former, then why are there so many potty jokes and crude sexual images in the lyrics? If it’s the latter, then why did the haughtily dismissive conductor Pierre Boulez perform and record it?
Saturday night’s concert won’t answer those questions, but it will present as wide a survey of the man’s music (remember, he released more than 100 official albums) as you can crowd into two sets on one night. And if you come to the concert never having heard the music or knowing much about its composer, you just might come away impressed.
That’s exactly what happened to Jeremy McCabe when he first heard Zappa’s Apostrophe album at age 12. “’St. Alphonso’s Pancake Breakfast,’ that was the one,“ McCabe told me at a café in Birdtown where we both live. “That mallet solo at the end with the synthesizer; I was like, I want to know what this is. Also, the drumming was so incredible. It grooved so hard, it was so cerebral, and it didn’t take itself that seriously either. It just really checked all the boxes.”
The evening’s two sets will include about a dozen songs. That might not sound like much, but these aren’t three-chord bangers. Zappa considered himself to be a serious composer. So he packed his songs with tricky meter changes, wildly virtuosic solo passages and shuddering jump cuts. Faced with a new piece of music to rehearse, more than one member of Zappa’s bands was known to pronounce it to be unplayable.
McCabe shouldn’t worry. The band he assembled for the Halloween show includes some of the region’s top players. Joining Schlenk in the horn section will be Garrett Folger on trumpet and trombonist Will Horner. Grace Blackford and Esther Fitz will be on vocals, joined by McCabe and keyboardist Alex Hoyt. Playing Ruth Underwood’s mallet parts will be Evan Mitchell, while Kevin Martinez will play bass. BOP STOP director Bryan Kennard is billed as a “special guest’ on flute.
Maybe the toughest assignment falls to Jeremey Poparad, who will play guitar parts originally written for shredders such as Steve Vai, Adrian Belew and Zappa himself.
Saturday’s concert is the culmination of a process that began almost as a lark, in 2018 when McCabe and saxophonist Max Schlenk put a band together to play three Zappa tunes for Oberlin’s Cover Band Showcase. “We played ‘Village of the Sun,’ ‘City of Tiny Lights’ and “Peaches En Regalia,’ and we’re playing all those tunes again on Halloween as well.”
Zappa’s influence, McCabe said, “is still very much there. It’s an echo of it rather than the source. Part of what we want to do is showcase a lot of different sides. For example, we’re definitely doing silly stuff in the set, but we’re also playing some of this more serious instrumental music.
That’s what people who think about Frank Zappa in the abstract remember him for and not any of the musical substance. It’s like, ‘Oh, he has all those gross sexual songs.’ [as if] that’s his only legacy,” McCabe said. “We’re going to fix that, you know? It is just fearlessly original music,” McCabe said.
“Playing this music live is such a labor of love,” McCabe said. “I really want people at any level of familiarity with the music to come to the show and get excited, because every time I’ve ever seen that music performed live, I’ve felt that.”
Schlenk Zappa: Celebrating 60 Years of Frank Sat, Oct. 31 8 p.m., BOP STOP, 2920 Detroit Ave., Cleveland, Tickets $25 available here
For the most complete listing of jazz and jazz-adjacent events., look to Jim Szabo’s essential, weekly Northeast Ohio jazz calendar.
