The term "musical genius" is casually thrown around far too often these days. However, few would dispute that Frank Zappa is richly deserving of such a title.
This is a new offering from the Zappa camp, which is billed in the liner notes as "...an audio documentary of Frank Zappa's multichannel recordings and mixes from 1970 to 1978," according to son Dweezil Zappa. The music can be best described as jazz fusion, and it's quite engaging to listen to. No surprise, there.
Unlike most DVDs, there's no motion footage! You see a photograph, accompanied by the "Quadio", (which may sound cool when played on home theatre system, but sounded unexceptional on my modest setup.)
Essentially, they stumbled across some old tapes that were meant for a 4-channel project that never saw the light of day, and they turned it into this DVD.
From a multimedia perspective, the results are underwhelming. I can't imagine too many people sitting around their living rooms, watching still photos of Zappa with his music. The track listing is:
1. Naval Avation in Art?
2. Lumpy Gravy
3. Rollo
4. Drooling Midrange Accountants on East Hay
5. Wild Love
6. Ship Ahoy
7. Chunga Basement
8. Venusian Time Bandits
9. Waka/ Jawaka
10. Basement Music # 2
The entire disc clocks in at 50:37.
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Article comments
1 - Loring
Hi,
Here is the link to QuAUDIOPHILIAc
Loring
2 - Eric Olsen
thanks Loring, got it
3 - Lerch
It should be mentioned that this isn't only a DVD, it's also DVD-Audio for those with capable players. For those that don't have capable players, there's a DTS track on the regular DVD side that provides the hi-res multi-channel mix.
I agree that the still pictures are underwhelming, but that video portion of this disc (and Zappa's Halloween DTS DVD/DVDA) isn't the point. It's the high-res, multi-channel audio as the composer intended it, well before its time. Rollo is a particularly cool listen.