9. Frank ZappaJazz From Hell
This record was made on the synclavier, it’s like a really weird electronic record, in a way. And I think at that time, as a young teenager, I was into a lot of rock music, I was really interested in how a lot of my heroes, such as Hendrix, dabbled with jazz related sounds, and that excited me. So just hearing the name made of this record made me excited. But, of course, the record is not jazz at all.
Zappa is kind of an annoying character, but sometimes he made music that I think is really gorgeous. It’s something that I listened to when I was young, and absolutely didn’t want to know about it for a long time. And now I’m kind of checking a lot of it out again, you know, and one thing that really surprised me was going back to Jazz From Hell, and I was really obsessed with in the first track, ‘Night School’, it sounds like a Lovely Music record, like David Behrman on speed… maybe that’s just in my head. A lot of that influenced my new record as well, there’s subtle things there – I’m not trying to emulate it, but it’s coming out in a weird way – maybe some of that’s coming from this stuff that I used to listen to, like the first track on this album.
