Review Summary: Frank Zappa shows that computer music has a future and belongs in the music industry, even if it sounds out of this world.
Frank Zappa’s biggest challenge as a composer was to find musicians that had the skills and patience to play whatever he wanted them to. Some embraced this possibility of playing his ultra-challenging music, others… not as much. His concern for perfection at the expense of human feeling and his often autocratic ways didn’t make him lots of friends in the music industry. So when Frank Zappa bought a Synclavier in 1982, he realized the potential of the synthesizer as both a compositional and performance tool.
"With the Synclavier, any group of imaginary instruments can be invited to play the most difficult passages... with one-millisecond accuracy—every time." – Frank Zappa
Jazz From Hell is not Frank Zappa’s first foray into Synclavier music, but it’s by far his most well-known endeavour in that field. While past albums included bits of Synclavier music (Thing-Fish, The Perfect Stranger, Francesco Zappa, Frank Zappa Meets The Mothers of Prevention), Jazz from Hell is Zappa’s first full and original Synclavier album, with the exception of one single track which is a live guitar solo showcase.
Zappa’s computer music has often been considered slick, complex and cold, but that’d be more of a result of the technology not being fully developed enough to accomplish Zappa’s true desires; this would definitely be proven in his future Synclavier endeavours which sounded far more lush and natural in comparison to this somewhat primitive effort. It’s fairly obvious this is computer music and the album has a fairly robotic feel going for it, but if you can get past this hurdle, there are treats for the ear in there.
Night School begins the album promisingly and offers us a side of Zappa we haven’t seen yet. The lead instrument in this piece is the grand piano, which is not something we have been used to hear in the man’s music. The piece is both dreamy, complicated yet maintains an accessible facade, dictated by a busy, yet clear percussion track and the synthesizer lines that come later on reminds us of Zappa’s guitar solos. On the other side of the spectrum resides While You Were Art II, which works as a revamped and transcribed version of a guitar solo called While You Were Out. You can recognize the original motif of the guitar lines in this new version, but as a whole the computerization of the solo transforms it into a daring avant-garde piece. The only thing which might spoil the song for some would be the very crude instruments used for this orchestration, which at times feels like you’re reading a MIDI file in Windows Media Player. At the very least, Zappa’s compositional skills keep the song afloat. It’s chaotic, yet very enthralling.
Sadly, not all of the chaos is as captivating. The Beltway Bandits first give the listener the impression of being in the jungle, and then the song frenetically melts down and drowns into a puddle of infinite notes without much structure and end goal. Meanwhile, Damp Ankles is its own puddle, dabbling into more ambient territory. Its percussion and melody both feel too busy for the feel that the song needed, but at the very least it sounds more organic than other songs on the album. Jazz From Hell is the song that suffers the most from its primitive samples. It ain’t exactly jazzy, but it sure sounds hellish in a certain way. It’s another interesting avant-garde piece and it’s easier to listen to, but it’s very difficult to take some of its samples seriously, especially the bass.
G-Spot Tornado is a home run, a triumph of composition on machine. It’s the most complex song on the album, but also the liveliest and catchiest by far. It falls in line with Zappa’s complex rock music of the mid-70s, but everything is turned up to 11 there. Yet, the song is incredibly infectious and creates an impression on its very first listen and shows the true potential of computer music. Zappa considered this song to be impossible to play by human beings, but the Ensemble Modern requested to play it for the Yellow Shark concerts in 1992, to smashing success. Closer Massagio Galore is about as equally immediate, delivering a very funky arrangement where various disembodied human voices are used as either melodies or beats indiscriminately, lending a more playful approach that’s usually typical to Zappa, but have been sorely missed on this album.
St. Etienne is a song whose existence on this album still gets people to speak about it today. It’s the only non-Synclavier song and it’s a guitar solo taken from a live performance of the piece Drowning Witch at St. Etienne’s Palais des Sports in 1982. Zappa’s guitar solo acrobatics are well known and documented: Zappa would often release solos as new, stand-alone pieces since his performances varied enough that any guitar solo of his mainstay songs could become new pieces altogether. St. Etienne ranks highly in Zappa’s solo repertoire, carrying a strong emotive beauty that sometimes is absent in his performances. But why include it into an album that consists otherwise of computer music? Wasn’t this album made to show off the potential of computer music?
The answer is yes and no.
It’s true that Jazz From Hell was an important milestone for computer music and showing the possibilities of the genre. It even won a Grammy in 1988 for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, confusing both the music world and Zappa himself in the process. But St. Etienne was included on the album to make a point: computer music might be a world open to millions of possibilities, but it will never be a substitute to real musicians playing real instruments. Computer music and live music are two different ways to make music, but neither of them is the better choice. It’s clear Zappa was often frustrated finding the right people to play his music, but when things worked right, everything was blissful and guitar playing would be an unmatched pleasure.
So what we have with Jazz From Hell is an album showcasing the state of computer music in the late 80s. It’s a challenging listen all the way through and it’s initially difficult to pick some of these pieces apart, but the results are often worth it. The main problems it has come from its now dated sound design and occasionally unfocused songwriting that comes through Zappa’s freedom to do anything he wanted for a change. This is mainly why I can’t fully recommend this album and I do not believe this is a good starting point for Frank Zappa’s music, but it remains a very powerful and early monument that helped bring computer music to the fold. Things could only get better starting from there and they sure did. Even Zappa’s later Synclavier music, which unfortunately only came out after his death in 1993, went ahead and left Jazz From Hell behind in the dust, as technology would improve at drastic speeds and Zappa’s grasp of the computer and compositional skills kept improving.
