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Zappa and Jazz: Did it Really Smell Funny, Frank?
When, at the age of fourteen, Zappa entered Mission Bay High School in San Diego in 1955, his first exposure to the elitist snobbery of a certain type of jazz fan occurred. It was like a red rag to a bull, and was no doubt the source of all his later caustic comments about jazz. He recounted the experience in an interview with Dan Forte in Musician magazine in 1979: ..."at the time I was down there, there was a real definite division between the people who liked rhythm and blues and the people who liked jazz... The people who liked jazz would always go around putting you down..." These people were fans of West Coast jazz, at the time at the height of its popularity, and exemplified by 
Howard Rumsey
bass, acoustic1917 - 2015
Shorty Rogers
trumpet1924 - 1994
Was Zappa being disingenuous here? "Martians Go Home" is not bleak—it is a piece of quirkily mischievous, Basie-inspired, small-group swing. Interestingly, Rogers, like many West Coast jazz musicians, also had a foot in the rhythm and blues camp. He supervised recording sessions by doo-wop groups and formed a publishing company with singer Jesse Belvin, publishing the latter's hit "Guess Who" (Rounce, 2004). Under the name Boots Brown and the Blockbusters he recorded a series of rhythm and blues instrumentals and reached number 23 in the charts in 1958 with "Cerveza" (Myers, 2013). It is not stretching the imagination too much to suggest that Rogers was the type of person that Zappa later sought to emulate when he worked with Paul Buff at Pal Studios in the early 1960s, where they produced rock instrumentals and used group names like The Hollywood Persuaders and The Rotations.
Jazz fans could be bigoted and snobbish. So could certain jazz musicians. On the other hand, many were prepared to be open-minded about different types of music. They were not all haters of rhythm and blues.
Johnny Otis, who, as Barry Miles states, Zappa first met in 1958 on a visit to his studio, was another musician whose feet were in the camps of both jazz and rhythm and blues. He had early associations with jazz, having played drums with
Lester Young
saxophone1909 - 1959
Illinois Jacquet
saxophone, tenor1922 - 2004
Stan Kenton
piano1911 - 1979
As described in the 1979 Musician interview, Zappa's first encounter with bebop was not a positive one. He said, "I didn't hear any bebop until I moved away from San Diego, and moved to Lancaster and I came across a
Charlie Parker
saxophone, alto1920 - 1955
"I'd come into contact with Charlie Parker records and things like that, but they didn't hold my interest. I couldn't follow it. Same kind of argument that you'd get from people today: 'What are they doing? They're just noodling around,' you know. I mean, now I understand why they're noodling and where they're noodling and I can tell the difference between good noodling and bad noodling, but without certain musical clues, it just all sounded like noodles to me."
Zappa was only fifteen when he first encountered Parker's music. In "The Mother of All Interviews," he described how and why he struggled to understand and appreciate certain pieces of music, for instance "Chronochromie" by Olivier Messiaen:
"It's just that the more I learned, the more interesting it became, because at the time I was exposed to this kind of music, I didn't have a classical education. I was just a guy buying records. Everything that I liked was based on my gut reaction to what was on the record. For some reason I liked Varèse right away. I liked Stravinsky right away, but these other things not... when you start learning about structure, when you start learning about how these things work, then you can appreciate how other people deal with the material... the more I learned about what the rules of the game were, the more I could appreciate how other people might solve the problem."
Although he did not clarify this, it seems not unlikely that the more Zappa learned about music, the more his appreciation of Parker, like that of Messiaen, grew. His initial dislike of Parker may have been partly connected to aversive experiences with bebop-loving jazz snobs, in contrast to his reaction to the music of Varèse, as he said in the BBC 2 Late Show Special:
"I liked it a lot. Nobody had to explain it to me... It just sounded good to me. The dissonance—the way I perceived the dissonance was, 'these chords are really mean. I like these chords. And the drums are playing loud in this music, and you can hear the drums often in this music...'"
Contrasting with jazz snobs, Varèse, with his "really mean" chords, loud drums and (according to The Real Frank Zappa Book) mad scientist looks, could express Zappa's teenage angst brilliantly, and was probably a perfect alternative to his father.
Despite his initial negative reaction to bebop, Zappa continued to explore jazz and invested in albums by
Oscar Pettiford
bass1922 - 1960
Charles Mingus
bass, acoustic1922 - 1979
Thelonious Monk
piano1917 - 1982
Eric Dolphy
woodwinds1928 - 1964
Harold Land
saxophone, tenor1928 - 2001
Ornette Coleman
saxophone, alto1930 - 2015
Cecil Taylor
piano1929 - 2018
Oliver Nelson
saxophone1932 - 1975
Zappa referred to another jazz album that he was familiar with in a 1967 interview with Frank Kofsky. He was asked if he listened to
John Coltrane
saxophone1926 - 1967
Cecil Taylor
piano1929 - 2018
Sun Ra
piano1914 - 1993
This album features Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor at relatively conventional stages in their careers, and John Coltrane in a mid-1950s hard bop setting reminiscent of his Blue Train session. Other tracks include one with
Donald Byrd
trumpet1932 - 2013
Horace Silver
piano1928 - 2014
Art Blakey
drums1919 - 1990
Herb Pomeroy
trumpet1930 - 2007
Zappa was on his own ceaseless personal, private quest to gather knowledge and information that would feed into his unique vision—the Project/Object, the overall concept of his work in various mediums, with each project connecting to a larger object. It appears that he made regular "research trips," exemplified by his visit to Johnny Otis's studio in 1958, and, having discovered
Miles Davis
trumpet1926 - 1991
It is interesting to speculate about other research trips that Zappa might have made. As Vladimir Simosko states in his 1974 biography of Eric Dolphy, the Ojai, California, Festival in 1962 featured Dolphy playing Varèse's 'Density 21.5,' and other performers included Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio. Compositions by John Cage and Thelonious Monk were played. This is the sort of event that Zappa might have attended but not talked about. Certainly, Zappa associates like trumpeter Malcolm McNab were involved in the Ojai Festival during the early 1960s. McNab discusses this in the notes for Wazoo (2007). Interestingly, Zappa had Cathy Berberian in mind as a singer when he wrote a piece of music in 1968 entitled "Music for the Queen's Circus" which later became 200 Motels. Zappa's widow Gail discussed this at a talk given prior to the 2013 London performance of 200 Motels (Greenaway, 2014).
One also wonders whether Zappa paid a visit to The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, despite his disparaging comments about Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All Stars (as well as referring to them in the 1979 Musician interview, he sarcastically called them "Howard Ramsey's Light Love All Stars" in the 1967 Frank Kofsky interview, so he was familiar with their music). A number of black groups, playing funky, soulful hard bop that would have appealed to Zappa, recorded live albums there. They included those of
Cannonball Adderley
saxophone1928 - 1975
"I saw every jazz great who came to town the first half of the 1960s.
Les McCann
piano1935 - 2023
Bill Evans
piano1929 - 1980
Another fact worth noting is that, around the time that Zappa was becoming aware of the music of the composer who became his favourite, Edgard Varèse, the latter was forming close associations with New York jazz musicians. He was on friendly terms with Charlie Parker until the latter's death in 1955, as he described in Robert Reisner's book Bird: The Legend of Charlie Parker (1962), and was involved in a series of jam sessions in 1957, organized by composer Earle Brown. Eminent jazz musicians participating included
Art Farmer
flugelhorn1928 - 1999
Hal McKusick
saxophoneb.1924
Ed Shaughnessy
drums1929 - 2013
Ornette Coleman
saxophone, alto1930 - 2015
Reprinted from Zappa and Jazz: Did it Really Smell Funny, Frank? ? 2015 Geoffrey Wills (Matador)
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Frank Zappa
Book Excerpts
Geoffrey Wills
San Diego
Howard Rumsey
Shorty Rogers
Lester Young
Illinois Jacquet
Stan Kenton
Charlie Parker
Oscar Pettiford
Charles Mingus
Thelonious Monk
Eric Dolphy
Harold Land
Ornette Coleman
Cecil Taylor
Oliver Nelson
John Coltrane
Sun Ra
Donald Byrd
Horace Silver
Art Blakey
Herb Pomeroy
Miles Davis
san francisco
Cannonball Adderley
Les McCann
Bill Evans
Art Farmer
Hal McKusick
Ed Shaughnessy
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