| Album notes by Todd Yvega
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| “Dance Me This” is the last album Frank Zappa completed before his death. But this is not a story of gloom or decline, it was my observation that despite his illness he took joy in the doing - having the goal and feeling inspired. Over the years I had seen Frank jump from project to project often shelving one indefinitely to focus on another. There was an elaborate stage piece titled “Dio Fa” ▲; An opera titled “Uncle Sam” ▲ (about a dystopian future America with a ludicrously polluted New York Harbor); A music notation book with accompanying audio disc titled “The Rhythmic Sadist’s Guide to Drum Patterns for the 21st Century”. Of course I’m barely scratching the surface and giving none of these their due. My point is that “Dance Me This” gave Frank the opportunity to rescue gems from these shelved projects and let them be heard. And I think that brought him some happiness.
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| It is remarkable that Frank was able to construct such a cohesive arc, juxtaposing and superimposing such disparate materials, some of which had been in the works for years, while others were the fruit of the previous week’s happenstance. Thrown into the creative mix were the incidentals (it was FZ’s bent to be open to changing course and making use of whatever happens along). Earlier that year, the Zappas were graced with a visit from a trio of throat singers from the Republic of Tuva in southern Siberia who were on a US concert tour. Naturally a recording session ensued, and the Tuvans’ vocals ultimately became prominent on several tracks. Dweezil had set up his guitar rig in the studio, and Frank decided to take it for a spin overdubbing on the piece we were tracking that day. As far as we know, that was the last time he played guitar.
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| The final track, titled “Calculus” is another case where the spontaneous was integrated (pun intended). It started as just another nightly specimen of what Frank called “burglar music”. To explain burglar music requires a little digression - but even this story ties into Frank’s appreciation for the sciences (mathematics in this case). We were discussing a musical technique called “phasing” in which several parts play simultaneously with each looping but with each having a different loop length. Although the individual loops may be relatively short, the piece as a whole doesn’t repeat until all the individually looped parts realign in exactly their original orientation. By choosing loop lengths that are relatively prime to each other one can achieve a very long period between exact repetitions (hours, even a day or more). That reminded me of an “application in the field” and I told Frank the following story:
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I had been recording daily at a large facility with multiple studios. Every morning we’d discover that one or more of the night staff had scavenged through our room stealing our microwave popcorn at best or borrowing or tampering with our equipment at worst. Hoping to deter the culprit(s) by making it sound from outside the room as if we were still inside working I utilized the aforementioned technique to devise a special Synclavier piece and let it play all night. It would play some subset of tracks for about 20 seconds or so, stop, wait, play rewind noises, wait, restart… all at seemingly random intervals and never repeating itself exactly.
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| Frank appreciated the farce of composing for burglars. Thereafter the “burglar music” concept mutated such that the objective was intellectual stimulation rather than deterrence, and it became a tradition at UMRK. Whenever I was about to quit for the night, the last thing I’d do was whip up some sort of ditty (using the aforementioned and similar techniques, and usually algorithmically assisted) and leave it on the Synclavier to amuse Frank when he arrived in the morning.
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| The rules were:
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| (1) If it takes more than ten minutes to set up then it doesn’t qualify as burglar music.
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| (2) It has to have something intricate or intriguing to justify its existence. (I wouldn’t waste his time with some insipid jingle).
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| One of the artifacts from the session with the Tuvan throat singers was a recording of an a cappella performance by Anatoli Kuular. The syllables and other vocal gestures implied a tempo that varied throughout. Frank wanted to create a tempo map that could be applied to any of his Synclavier pieces causing them to conform to the tempo implied by the vocal. We achieved this by manually placing markers at key rhythmic anchors, nudging them until they felt right, and then computing a spline curve that smoothly intersects the anchors while minimizing abrupt changes of curvature (tempo shifts) between them. The technique is the same used by scientists and statisticians when they “curve fit” a set of empirical data. When the tempo map was complete, Frank had already gone to bed so I wanted to leave a demonstration for him to hear in the morning just so he’d know that it worked. Not wanting to take the time to find and load one of his monstrous pieces, I just cranked out a “foom-fop” rhythm track with Bass and algorithmically assisted Violin Pizzicati as a demo for that night’s burglar offering.
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| I expected that the next day Frank would choose an existing piece to conform to Anatoli’s vocal, but when I arrived Ruth Underwood was visiting and she and Frank had become somewhat enamored by the demo. (Ruth told me she loved what I did. I explained that much of it was algorithmically generated in burglar fashion so I didn’t really do it in the traditional sense. She replied: “Well then I love what you didn’t do”). Frank decided to use that demo as the album closer explaining something to the effect of: “By that point in the album after all the preceding escapades, some relief by way of mindless foom-fop is exactly what we need”.
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| Because the curve fitting involved calculus, Frank named the piece “Calculus”. I couldn’t help but notice that this title subtly ties in with a recurring thread in FZ’s creative output. The word “calculus” has another meaning: it is synonymous with tartar, the mineral concretion removed when scaling teeth. I picture the painting of the teeth under the magnifying glass on the cover of “EIHN” ▲; the animated Dental Hygiene Dilemma sequence in “200 Motels” ▲; raising dental floss ▲ in “Montana”. Maybe the connection is merely a coincidence, but I appreciate it just the same.
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| Album notes by Gail Zappa
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| My story here is one of many converging love stories. It is not important as to how it began or who all of the characters are. But for those of you who mark time by other means than your heart or your foot, let’s begin in 1993. The year that claimed the lives of two men, one very young, both way too young to be a loss to all of us. They have in common enormous legacies, both Artists, both Masters. The one revealed through journals, the other, Music. They have given all of us whose hearts have been touched by their profound influence boundless joy and a conspiratorial sense of wonder. We are in this together and they have created so much to share. And they have inspired at least two people who have acted through remarkable love stories of their own. The first is the mother of Dan Eldon. The second is the son of Frank Zappa.
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| When I first saw Dan’s journals - held them in my hand and felt the weight of their significance in documenting his ideas and his own existence on this planet - Kathy put them in my hands and told me how she planned to introduce them in a book. Their spines are about one-tenth the the width of the books’ outer edges stacked, so filled are they with Dan’s words, drawings, photos, observations, found objects, humor. The Journey is the Destination. I have been a witness to the transformation of her own life through her love for her children, examining her son’s self-imposed life mission and the incredible success of her own creative mission through activism, and I’m so grateful to her for permission to include Dan’s Elephants.
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| Zappa Plays Zappa is a feat no less inspired. To expose new, now and next generations to FZ’s music. To expand the audience and the opportunities for the Composer’s intent and the Music itself to be heard the way the Composer created it.And Dweezil’s own mastery of his prodigious talent through his deep dive into his love for his father and the music.
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| Kathy Eldon, Dweezil Zappa. Oh the lengths they go! They lick 30 tigers every day. It is one thing to get a book published but quite another to build a community around activism through art. And the guitar for some is taller than Mount Everest. Thousands have scaled it but few are the ones who live in that atmosphere and call it home. You take only what you can carry and only that which sustains you.
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| And why I’m telling you this? Because when I first saw Dan Eldon’s Elephants I knew this drawing was the cover for “Dance Me This”. The title of what is now FZ’s 100th album is an admonition by FZ himself. Show me how it moves through you. As it. As if it were a dance contest on FZ’s stage. But it isn’t. It is exactly as FZ left it more than 20 years ago. When digital was raw and unwieldly. And the aeons were closing ▶ for him. In his vision for a staged presentation for modern dance he described how he wanted to represent Wolf Harbor (do the research on this place which really does exist): Groups of dancers side by side would hold long rolled out lengths of black trash bags and “wave” them at waist (waste) height to signify the dark and murky polluted waters of sludgy Wolf Harbor.
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| Dance Me This.
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| And may we all do everything possible to ensure that Elephants will always be dancing here on our planet.
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| Album notes by Ralph Leighton
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| January 2, 1993 - Caltech, in Pasadena, California. The audience is ecstatic, transported to another world by the ethereal sounds of throat-singers from the lost land of Tannu Tuva - that Siberian Shangri-La once famous for its triangular stamps collected by a young Richard Feynman.
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| An earnest bearded man wearing glasses, with a determined look in his eyes, approached me after the concert: “My name is Matt Groening. Frank would like to meet the Tuvans”.
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| “Frank?”
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| “Zappa”
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| The next night, the Tuvans entered the UMRK. The Chieftains and Johnny “Guitar” Watson were already there. What ensued was captured by BBC TV which was producing a documentary about the living legend Zappa, who not only charmed the guests, but also managed to make the first studio recording of Tuvan throat-singers in the United States. (Frank’s ensuing composition “Calculus”, featuring the voice of Tuvan throat-singer Anatoli Kuular, is mind-bending!). The magical evening peaked with the Tuvans playing ♫ “The camel caravan song” - The Chieftains and L. Shankar adding Irish pipes and an Indian violin to the mix, while Johnny “Guitar” Watson chanted “Bringin’ home the sheep! Bringin’ home the sheep!” and Frank strummed happily on his guitar.
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 Art by Dan Eldon.jpg "(Front) Art by Dan Eldon")
.jpg "(Booklet)")
Songs list
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Title origin
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