The Black Page
The Black Page
It's low hanging fruit for Zappa fandom, but as a drummer I love this image and what it represents.
I'm curious what non percussionists think of all the xylophone, marimba and other percussion complexity in Zappa's music? Do you like it?
One of my all time favourite Zappa pieces! Top 10 for sure.
I very much enjoy the rhythmic complexity in Zappa's work. It's fundamental to everything he does, his first instrument was drums. And one of his first albums was Ionisation by Varese, which definitely shows in the black page.
I'm a guitarist but I've always been a big fan of weird time signatures and the different feeling they can give a piece just by moving the notes to a slightly different place. Zappa dialed that art down to a delicate science. Black Page is one of the more extreme ones, very stop start, and I say that as someone who is quite comfortable with polymeters and odd sigs. I've heard it being compared to driving a car in heavy traffic. It took me a long time to get an ear for it. Now it's hard to find anything that hits quite the same!
I think this quote is a good summary of the way Frank treated time and rhythm. It was another tool, something to poke and twist and pull to see what he could squeeze out the other side.
"A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time. Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid." - Zappa
That's a great quote.
I like the process of becoming familiar with unfamiliar things. When I first heard the bebop tango, I thought it was completely random notes with no sense of melody. After listening hundreds of times I can happily hum along!