The thing I hate most about Zappa is his utter contempt for pop music. He thought he was making it interesting by throwing in all those crazy time changes and throwaway scatological lyrics. It's obvious that he thought he was too good for pop music, though, but not confident in himself enough to attempt other types of music (for good reason, I might add). What a tool.

Zappa = Boring to me. What little I've heard of it. My bandmate and I were joking recently about what a nightmare it would be if we suddenly found ourselves in a Zappa cover band.

Turns out I got it from Hayden's favorite source(!),

Stopped clock. Twice a day.

I made a jazz mix for a co-worker recently, which is always a bad idea. Jazz mixes just don't work; the artists, at least, the good ones, are too idiosyncratic to mix with each other well. Anyway, she's (my co-worker, that is) interested in learning about jazz, so I tried to put lots of different phases and sounds on the mix. I threw a track from Ornette's The Shape Of Jazz To Come on there, and noted that the rule of thumb for Ornette is if Charlie Haden's on bass, it's probably an excellent Ornette album for neophytes. The other stuff can be a little, uh, difficult, even for those of us who love the man's sound.

I'm going to sound like a tool here: do any of the Charlie Haden/Ornette Coleman albums you guys are talking about have singers? I really can't listen to instrumental music. I mean, I *can,* but I don't retain anything from it -- it's almost always complete wallpaper to me. (E.g., I know I have heard "Kind of Blue" many hundred times in my life, but I could not hum it or name the tune if I heard it now. The only instrumental album I have ever bought is the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack. Yeah, I know I suck.)

The Ornette albums with singers are on the more difficult scale. I don't know about Charlie Haden. His interests are pretty widely flung.

I am 'eh' about Zappa. I recognize his huge role in various wacky subcultures and rock history, but I can't really listen to a lot of his work.

t tangent I have a ticket for the May 9th Rasputina show! Tomorrow morning I'm buying my ticket for the May 23rd Peter Murphy show! Now I just need Placebo to tour the states ...

t /tangent

I don't exactly know who Charlie Haden is

He's a white guy with a country background, who played in (I think) country or western swing groups before he hooked up with Ornette

Charlie Haden. He was part of his family's radio show (they were the Missouri equivalent to the Carter Family) from very early childhood, long before he picked up a bass. There's a great picture of him onstage in his cowboy get up when he was about five, but a quick search didn't turn it up.

[Zappa] said that he only writes lyrics because he needs to sing something. He only really cares about the music.

For me Zappa's whole endeavor is poisoned by that attitude. And it's not because I love lyrics (I often ignore them) and take offense at what he said. It's that there's this whole air of contempt permeating everything he did that I find it hard to get past. I have a lot of friends whose opinions I trust who swear it's worth getting beyond that reaction, but it's a really visceral revulsion for me. No doubt he was a smart guy & a really talented musician, and the way he conducted himself (no pun intended) was quite admirable in a lot of ways, but his apparent delight in looking down that Roman nose of his at, well... everything, just rubs me the wrong way. Not to speak ill of the dead or anything.

There was a big fannish write-up about Zappa in the latest Rolling Stone, which is why I was thinking abouthim. The BF is a big fan, but I think that's mostly nostalgic love left over from when he was 13 and discovered his work and played it obsessively.

I think Mr. H is a Zappa fan, but I'll have to tear him away from the PSP to get him to tell me why, and that's become nigh unpossible since he got it Wednesday.

I just tried him and got nothin'

As far as Zappa goes, for what he was trying to do, I'm with Hayden in preferring Beefheart.

I also think Robert Fripp in his various incarnations did a lot of the things Zappa was trying to do without being condescending about it (probably muy pretentious and stuffy at times, but in his case I find it kind of charming because there always seemed to be a certain bone-dry wit about it, and he never seemed to be a snob about it).