Frank Zappa: Jazz From Hell

By Richard Gehr

Musician, March 1987

FRANK ZAPPA
Jazz From Hell
(Barking Pumpkin)

A Synclavier ain’t nothin’ but a drum machine with knobs on, and Jazz From Hell is the world’s busiest and most intelligent hip-hop record. While it doesn’t buckle your knuckles with an insistent beat-box wham wham wham, it twitches, pulses and throbs like a skateboarder on ice.

Jazz From Hell mainly contains reading music for nervous intellectuals. Rapidfire scalar melodies like “Night School,” “The Beltway Bandits,” “Damp Ankles,” “Massaggio Galore” and “G-Spot Tornado” skitter around equally hectic synthesized polyrhythms, little fanfares played by simulated horn sections (Frank’s Synclavier never misses a note), and miscellaneous sonic inventions. It’s zippy, cartoonish and b-b-busy as hell. What these pieces lack in variation they make up for in consistency, along with an antiseptic cleanliness of sound. FZ has apparently embraced the digital era with open arms and legs.

Fortunately, the two exceptions comprise purt near half the album. “While You Were Art II” is a rich and complex seven minutes in which Zappa seems to deconstruct much of what has gone before, breaking down rhythms and melodies then reassembling ’em into some other kind of beast. “St. Etienne” is six minutes of smart guitar soloing, in which Zappa’s interaction with his band – guitarist Steve Vai, percussionist Ed Mann, bassist Scott Thunes and drummer Chad Wackerman, whose talents were presumably also sampled for the machinery – makes his Synclavier work pale in comparison.

Jazz From Hell may also be the first LP in history to include a warning that “unauthorized reproduction/sampling [my italics] is a violation of applicable laws and subject to criminal prosecution.” Sincere yet sorta hypocritical paranoia from a fellow who appropriated the voices and charming expressions of several members of Congress (and their wives) for the anticensorship tour de force “Porn Wars” on 1985’s Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers Of Prevention. The difference must have something to do with whether the lifted material’s on the public record or not, right?