Review: "Zappa Plays Zappa" at The Pageant

The Zappa Plays Zappa "Tour de Frank" made it to The Pageant in St. Louis on Thursday, December 14, and it was a well-executed and highly entertaining show. Drawing heavily on Frank Zappa's 1970s material, guitarist Dweezil Zappa (pictured at left) and the band performed for three hours with barely a pause, displaying obvious enthusiasm and impressive musical skills to a full house of delighted Frankophiles.

Special guest Napoleon Murphy Brock (pictured at right) was in good voice on familiar numbers like "Village of the Sun," "Cheepnis" and "Montana". As always, he also added to the ensemble passages with his tenor sax and flute, and provided extra entertainment value with an assortment of silly dance moves and goofy facial expressions.

Coming on for the second half of the show, Steve Vai supplied the expected high-speed solo guitar theatrics, while drummer Terry Bozzio drove the band through a rockin' segment featuring "Punky's Whips" before teaming up with Vai for "The Black Page," done in both the drum-solo and guitar-instrumental versions.

It was good to see Brock, Vai and Bozzio looking well and playing with energy and enjoyment, but their efforts would have been for naught without the band. Comprised of mostly unknown youngish musicians selected by Dweezil Zappa and drummer (and Zappa Vaultmeister) Joe Travers after extensive auditions, the band went through months of rehearsals before embarking on tour this past spring, and they're clearly now a tight, road-tested unit.

Zappa's music is full of stops and starts, odd time signatures, rapid stylistic shifts, difficult unison melody lines and more, but the ZPZ ensemble negotiated every twist and turn flawlessly. Special mention should go to percussionist Billy Hulting, who ably provided the tricky mallet percussion parts so essential to much of Zappa's music, and multi-instrumentalist Scheila Gonzalez (pictured at left), who supplied lots of important harmony and background vocal parts as well as saxophone, flute, additional keyboards and stage presence. (Gonzalez also seems like a natural visual foil for Nappy, frequently exchanging looks and high fives with him and responding to his dance moves with her own impromptu antics. It's too bad the stage design kept them on different levels the whole night.)

Travers proved more than up to the challenge of executing the difficult drum parts in Zappa's music, and, when following a Bozzio solo with one of his own, didn't suffer at all from the direct comparison to his more famous predecessor. Though relegated mostly to the background, the rest of the band, including Aaron Arntz (keyboards and trumpet), Jamie Hime (guitar) and Pete Griffin (bass), also showed plenty of musical skill, humor and energy.

As for the man with the biggest shoes to fill, Dweezil Zappa isn't quite as inventive a guitarist as his dad, but he's got plenty of chops and a fine command of various guitar tones, and he clearly understands and enjoys his father's music. As a result, his solos were satisfying and effective, even without breaking much new musical ground. Dweezil also took the lead vocal on "I'm The Slime" and "Call Any Vegetable" (the arrangement used on Just Another Band From L.A.) and conducted the band through a couple of collective improvisational passages, including a very effective one in the middle of "Florentine Pogen." I don't know if the hand gestures and signals DZ used are the same that FZ once used to lead the original Mothers in group improv, but it was fun to see that the idea still works.

Dweezil also has clearly taken to heart his dad's observation that the concert business is about entertainment just as much as it is about music. He's marshaled the resources at his disposal very effectively, come up with a wide-ranging selection of material, and found a way to weave the diverse threads of Zappa's music together into a coherent, well-paced show. By the time the all the musicians were on stage for the big finale - the medley of "Oh No," "Orange County Lumber Truck" and "More Trouble Coming Every Day" from the Roxy and Elsewhere album - the crowd was really wound up, cheering loudly at the signature guitar and drum licks of "Trouble" and singing along (to lyrics that, sad to say, seem just as pertinent in 2006 as they did in 1966) with gusto. Capping things off with a short, placid version of "Sofa," ZPZ then left the stage having done the family legacy proud.

Given this tour's apparent success, it's not hard to imagine future scenarios involving possible different guest stars and subsets of the Zappa repertoire, but I'm sure a lot of the people who were there Thursday would gladly pay cash money to see the exact same show again, too. Either way, here's hoping the ZPZ concept can help keep Frank Zappa's music alive and accessible for years to come.

(Note: Dweezil Zappa and other band members are blogging the ZPZ tour, though the most recent entry is from earlier in the day of the St. Louis concert, and thus does not include their impressions of the show and our fair city. You check it out here.)

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