Eddy Loves Frank (review)

The Ed Palermo Big Band is a New York City–based ensemble directed for some thirty years by its namesake, whose arrangements of Frank Zappa's music they have played for the last fifteen years. Zappa (1940–1993) was an eclectic composer, bandleader, and electric guitarist whose music, as Max Paddison nicely summarizes it,

draws freely on the popular music of the 1950s and early 60s, embracing rhythm and blues, rock and roll, doo-wop, middle-of-the-road ballads, the world of Hollywood film music and of TV advertisements, treating them as objets trouvés; at the same time it also draws on the soundworlds of Stravinsky, Ives, Varèse and Stockhausen, creating multi-layered textures and employing montage techniques and abrupt stylistic juxtapositions which have the effect of Brechtian alienation and Dadaist confrontation. . . . Zappa wanted his music to achieve the autonomy associated with high art music while subversively working from within the popular music industry. In the 1980s this was accentuated by the increasing esteem in which Zappa was held as a serious composer. . . . His own material is always calculatedly secondhand, disposable and ephemeral; his approach to structuring it is critical, ironic and self-reflective. The result has a richness of allusion, wealth of detail and a consistency of thought reminiscent of James Joyce.¹

Palermo's big band is a sixteen-member aggregation, featuring an expanded woodwind complement consisting of six players rather than the usual five, a guitarist/vocalist, a pianist, plus an additional keyboardist (synthesizer), three (rather than four or five) trombones, and two (rather than four or five) trumpet players, drums, and electric bass.² Each record usually features some special guests, and Zappa/Mothers of Invention alumni have performed and recorded with the band, including Napoleon Murphy Brock (tenor saxophone), Mike Keneally (guitar), and Ike Willis (vocals and guitar), as well as well-known jazz players such as Bob Mintzer (tenor saxophone), Chris Potter (tenor saxophone), Dave Samuels (vibraphone), Mike Stern (guitar), and many others. The ensemble has garnered numerous accolades in the print and visual media, and the jazz press. They work regularly at some of the top New York jazz clubs. Prior to Eddy Loves Frank, Palermo's Big Band released two other recordings featuring Zappa's music: The Ed Palermo Big Band Plays the Music of Frank Zappa (1997), and Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance (2006).³ These two were somewhat chronological, with arrangements focusing predominantly on the first half of Zappa/Mothers of Invention's twenty-five-year span of records. Dating from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, these albums included:

Freak Out! (1966: "Who Are the Brain Police?")

Lumpy Gravy (1967: "King Kong" and "Oh No")

We're Only in It for the Money (1968: "Mom and Dad" and "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance")

Hot Rats (1969: "Gumbo Variations" and "Peaches in Regalia")

Burnt Weenie Sandwich (1969: "Aybe Sea," "Holiday in Berlin," and "Little House I Used to Live In")

Uncle Meat (1969: "King Kong" and "Pound for a Brown on the Bus")

Weasels Ripped My Flesh (1970: "Dwarf Nebula Processional and Dwarf Nebula" and "Toads of the Short Forest")

Chunga's Revenge (1970: "Twenty Small Cigars")

Waka Jawaka (1972: title track)

One Size Fits All (1975: "Sofa No. 1")

Studio Tan (1978: "RDNZL")

Sleep Dirt (1979: title track)

The Man from Utopia (1983: "Moggio" and "We Are Not Alone")

For Eddy Loves Frank (2009), Palermo chose material stemming mostly from the second half of Zappa's career, including the albums:

Roxy and Elsewhere (1974: "Don't You Ever Wash That Thing?" and "Echidna's Arf [Of You]")

Sleep Dirt (1979: "Regyptian Strut")

Does Humor Belong in Music (1984: "Let's Move to Cleveland" and "What's New in Baltimore?")

Jazz from Hell (1986: "Night School")

Make a Jazz Noise Here (1991...