There is no such thing as a casual Frank Zappa fan — it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. (Really, there’s no such thing as a casual Frank Zappa listener, period: You either immediately recoil from his grandiose, often goofy odes to dancin’ fools and yellow snow, self-promoting pimps and and S&m aficionados … or you end friendships arguing over which bootleg of his Over Nite Sensation ’73 shows is the best.) And on a scale from one to plays-in-a-Joe’s-Garage-cover-band, we’d put Alex Winter’s level of worship somewhere near an eight.
- 11/28/2020
- by David Fear
- Rollingstone.com
If you grew up with Frank Zappa, and he loomed large in your youth-cultural pop rebel sandbox (as he did in mine), he seemed to be many things at once. The outrageous hippie with the thick black T-shaped goatee who looked weird and threatening enough to represent something very far removed from peace and love. The avant rock ‘n’ roll absurdist who led the band of wilted flower children known as the Mothers of Invention. The scandalous joker seated half-naked on a toilet seat in the iconic ’60s poster that read “Phi Zappa Krappa.” The airy and sophisticated pop-rock-jazz prodigy who, starting around the time of “Hot Rats” (1969), began to put together songs that had the intricate quality of hypnotic musical Tinkertoy. The band leader who whipped his musicians into learning those how-many-notes-can-i-jam-into-three-seconds tracks with the bop-till-you-drop discipline of a counterculture Duke Ellington. The tall skinny long-haired guitar god who...
- 11/23/2020
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
Alex Winter is best known for his role as Bill in the “Bill & Ted” movies opposite Keanu Reeves as Ted. The pair reprised these roles earlier this year in the hit comedy “Bill & Ted Face the Music.” Winter is also a documentary filmmaker and is an Oscar contender this year with “Zappa.” This documentary feature chronicles the career of rock musician Frank Zappa. It’s produced by Zappa’s son, Ahmet Zappa, distributed by Magnolia Pictures and premiers in theaters and on-demand on Friday, November 27th.
The film examines Zappa’s life through the use of archival footage and unrestricted access to the Zappa family trust, as well as interviews with those closest to him. It starts by looking at Zappa’s initial interest in film editing and then his burgeoning interest in modern classical music coming into focus with his discovery of the works of Edgard Varèse.
We...
The film examines Zappa’s life through the use of archival footage and unrestricted access to the Zappa family trust, as well as interviews with those closest to him. It starts by looking at Zappa’s initial interest in film editing and then his burgeoning interest in modern classical music coming into focus with his discovery of the works of Edgard Varèse.
We...
- 11/13/2020
- by Charles Bright
- Gold Derby
Tony Sokol Nov 12, 2018
Skip The Beatles' "Revolution 9" at your peril. It's music, not noise.
Turn me on dead man.
Long before conspiracy-minded rock fans screwed up their needles playing records backwards, to paraphrase George Carlin, The Beatles’ “Revolution 9” was a spooky experimental tour de force of hidden meaning. Marketed as one of the first boy bands, the mop topped sensations were best known for being at the toppermost of the pops. The ultimate pop band was also at the forefront of the rising underground scene.
While The Beatles are best known for writing love songs, not only catchy romantic ditties, but songs about the larger concept of love, they had a very dark side to their output that defied easy categories. John Lennon could be particularly scary. He forced George Harrison to arrange a guitar solo that had to sound better backwards on “I’m only Sleeping,” and shoveled...
Skip The Beatles' "Revolution 9" at your peril. It's music, not noise.
Turn me on dead man.
Long before conspiracy-minded rock fans screwed up their needles playing records backwards, to paraphrase George Carlin, The Beatles’ “Revolution 9” was a spooky experimental tour de force of hidden meaning. Marketed as one of the first boy bands, the mop topped sensations were best known for being at the toppermost of the pops. The ultimate pop band was also at the forefront of the rising underground scene.
While The Beatles are best known for writing love songs, not only catchy romantic ditties, but songs about the larger concept of love, they had a very dark side to their output that defied easy categories. John Lennon could be particularly scary. He forced George Harrison to arrange a guitar solo that had to sound better backwards on “I’m only Sleeping,” and shoveled...
- 4/18/2018
- Den of Geek
The rock star and provocateur is imperturbably articulate and droll in this entertaining documentary made of archive footage and interview clips
This excellent documentary doesn’t spell it out, but Frank Zappa was actually Frank Zappa’s real name (unlike, say, Ziggy Stardust) and everything about him was authentic, presented to the public on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. If anyone deserves an approving sobriquet with the “American” prefix – American Original, American Genius, American Rebel – it was Zappa, the rock’n’roll musician, freak-provocateur and contemporary composer and orchestral arranger influenced by Anton Webern, Edgard Varèse and Igor Stravinsky. This film allows him to speak “in his own words”, which means clips from his imperturbably droll, articulate performances in TV interviews over the years during which he morphed from sensually hirsute rock god to bearded patriarch, without selling out or putting on weight.
In a perfect world, “Zappa in his own words...
This excellent documentary doesn’t spell it out, but Frank Zappa was actually Frank Zappa’s real name (unlike, say, Ziggy Stardust) and everything about him was authentic, presented to the public on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. If anyone deserves an approving sobriquet with the “American” prefix – American Original, American Genius, American Rebel – it was Zappa, the rock’n’roll musician, freak-provocateur and contemporary composer and orchestral arranger influenced by Anton Webern, Edgard Varèse and Igor Stravinsky. This film allows him to speak “in his own words”, which means clips from his imperturbably droll, articulate performances in TV interviews over the years during which he morphed from sensually hirsute rock god to bearded patriarch, without selling out or putting on weight.
In a perfect world, “Zappa in his own words...
- 11/21/2016
- by Peter Bradshaw at the International Documentary film festival Amsterdam
- The Guardian - Film News
In the wake of the terrible attacks in Paris, I found myself listening to a lot of French music and thinking about the Leonard Bernstein quote going around on Facebook: "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." This list came to seem like my natural response. A very small response, I know. This list is chronological and leaves off people I should probably include. The forty [note: now forty-one] composers listed below are merely a start.
Léonin Aka Leoninus (c.1135-c.1201)
The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the 1100s was a major musical center, and Léonin (the first named composer from whom we have notated polyphonic music) was a crucial figure for defining the liturgical use of organum, the first polyphony. Earlier organum was fairly simple, involving parallel intervals and later contrary motion, but the mid-12th century brought...
Léonin Aka Leoninus (c.1135-c.1201)
The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris in the 1100s was a major musical center, and Léonin (the first named composer from whom we have notated polyphonic music) was a crucial figure for defining the liturgical use of organum, the first polyphony. Earlier organum was fairly simple, involving parallel intervals and later contrary motion, but the mid-12th century brought...
- 11/15/2015
- by SteveHoltje
- www.culturecatch.com
Medea, Glasgow
It's been a good year for playwright and director Mike Bartlett. Love, Love, Love played at the Royal Court and his adaptation of Chariots Of Fire is currently at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End (to 10 Nov). This latest play, which he also directs, is something very different: Euripides's tale of a woman scorned who takes her revenge on her ex-husband in the most appalling way is one of the greatest and most enduring of Greek tragedies. Now it's reinvented for the modern age in Bartlett's new version about a 21st-century woman who is unhinged by grief when her husband, for whom she has given up everything, leaves her for another woman. The excellent Rachael Stirling is in the title role in a production for Headlong, which will be touring to major venues across the UK until December.
Citizens, Thu to 13 Oct
Lyn Gardner
Kanjoos: The Miser,...
It's been a good year for playwright and director Mike Bartlett. Love, Love, Love played at the Royal Court and his adaptation of Chariots Of Fire is currently at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End (to 10 Nov). This latest play, which he also directs, is something very different: Euripides's tale of a woman scorned who takes her revenge on her ex-husband in the most appalling way is one of the greatest and most enduring of Greek tragedies. Now it's reinvented for the modern age in Bartlett's new version about a 21st-century woman who is unhinged by grief when her husband, for whom she has given up everything, leaves her for another woman. The excellent Rachael Stirling is in the title role in a production for Headlong, which will be touring to major venues across the UK until December.
Citizens, Thu to 13 Oct
Lyn Gardner
Kanjoos: The Miser,...
- 9/21/2012
- by Judith Mackrell, Mark Cook, Lyn Gardner
- The Guardian - Film News
This remarkable creator – of orchestral pieces and chamber works as well as hybrids of film and performance art – draws on a plethora of influences, yet devises her own astonishing sound
All articles in this series
After Igor Stravinsky, it's a bit of a cliche to think of contemporary composition as making the most of the etymological truism that the roots of the verb "to compose" come from the Latin "componere" meaning "to put together" – ie that you're not creating anything new as a composer, merely creating new combinations of sounds, of things, of ideas, that already exist. But Austrian, er, composer Olga Neuwirth (whose recent viola concerto Remnants of Songs ... An Amphigory will have its first British performance at the Proms on 13 August) perhaps more than any other musician of her generation (she was born in 1968) really does take that principle as her starting point.
What does that mean for how her music sounds?...
All articles in this series
After Igor Stravinsky, it's a bit of a cliche to think of contemporary composition as making the most of the etymological truism that the roots of the verb "to compose" come from the Latin "componere" meaning "to put together" – ie that you're not creating anything new as a composer, merely creating new combinations of sounds, of things, of ideas, that already exist. But Austrian, er, composer Olga Neuwirth (whose recent viola concerto Remnants of Songs ... An Amphigory will have its first British performance at the Proms on 13 August) perhaps more than any other musician of her generation (she was born in 1968) really does take that principle as her starting point.
What does that mean for how her music sounds?...
- 8/7/2012
- by Tom Service
- The Guardian - Film News
A computer music pioneer, he influenced 2001: A Space Odyssey
Max Mathews, who has died aged 84, wrote the first computer music program and influenced the conception of Hal 9000, the computer in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the 1968 film, Hal gives a memorable rendering of an old song about a bicycle built for two. This was the result of a series of coincidences.
Mathews had been working on synthetic speech at At&T's Bell Laboratories, in New Jersey, where a song entitled Daisy Bell had an obvious appeal. The researchers at Bell Labs used their Ibm 704 computer and a vocoder (voice synthesiser) to sing it, with Mathews programming the musical accompaniment. Although this was serious research, the output was also used to entertain visitors, including Arthur C Clarke, who used the idea in his novel, and the screenplay, for 2001, in which the astronaut David Bowman shuts Hal...
Max Mathews, who has died aged 84, wrote the first computer music program and influenced the conception of Hal 9000, the computer in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the 1968 film, Hal gives a memorable rendering of an old song about a bicycle built for two. This was the result of a series of coincidences.
Mathews had been working on synthetic speech at At&T's Bell Laboratories, in New Jersey, where a song entitled Daisy Bell had an obvious appeal. The researchers at Bell Labs used their Ibm 704 computer and a vocoder (voice synthesiser) to sing it, with Mathews programming the musical accompaniment. Although this was serious research, the output was also used to entertain visitors, including Arthur C Clarke, who used the idea in his novel, and the screenplay, for 2001, in which the astronaut David Bowman shuts Hal...
- 6/16/2011
- by Jack Schofield
- The Guardian - Film News
New York's Lincoln Center Festival announced on March 10 the lineup for its 2010 installment, scheduled to take place July 7–25. Performances and other events will be spread out among seven venues on the Lincoln Center campus and around the city, and the participants represent 12 countries.The festival will present 10 North American premieres and a total of 45 performances. Highlights include a marathon production of Dostoyevsky's "The Demons," to be staged on Governors Island; the premiere of Simon McBurney's "A Disappearing Number" and the New York Philharmonic's performance of the complete works of Edgard Varèse. The full lineup is available at www.lincolncenter.org.
- 3/10/2010
- backstage.com
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