Zappa - what a tight music arranger

[Harry_HH]

OK, interesting thing to know.
Those few comments I heard (mainly in Youtube), point to a different direction, what comes to Zappa's approch to his own music or "dictatorship". But I guess with such a huge production, he hadt different periods and styles, he tried different things. Who knows where he was now, if the cancer hadn't got him?

[jancivil]

Yeah, and I have seen a fair amount of pretty clueless people acting like they know some shit they do not know.

My research here really shows how f**ked-up it was for Albert Wing and these jazz guys in 1988 acting like Thunes could be replaced. As recently as, I think 2015 Thunes said in a Facebook thread 'f**k Albert Wing...'. And there are threads on youtube where people state their strong opinion on those events.

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[quote="herodotus"]Another great transformation is from this

[Sofa #2 One Size Fits All] to this:
[Live in New York, the SNL-derived horns band]

yes, and now it's a thing for big bands, I posted one or two in the official interesting other arrangements of thread

[jancivil]

so trying to claim that 4/4 is unnatural is simply self serving speculation based on ignorance.

Maybe Zappa was to uptight, to venture outside "foor to the floor", it pays to be a bit sloppy, some "accidents" adds mojo to the final result

Of course four to the floor is not the same thing as 4/4, it is merely a subset. Really though, I'm not sure what you're trying to say, but of that Zappa was uptight there can be little doubt.

An interesting read for those who are open minded enough to consider it is Mark J. Butler's book "Unlocking the Groove." He makes a case for the diversity and complexity of rhythmic structures in contemporary dance music, yes, especially with "four on the floor", and he does it through traditional methods, i.e. detailed analysis of transcriptions. Mark Butler is currently a professor in the department of music at University of Pennsylvania.

Sigh

Jesus F Christ there's some truly clueless shit. Also a perfect illustration of the well-known 'open-minded' fallacy. I definitely find an academic talking about 'contemporary dance music' hilarious, though, so thanks. Oh, and for 'diversity' given the context of the discussion. Dunning and Kruger have your number, don't they.).

You're with the closed mind, or you'd know better. It's so off-topic, too. Yeah, let's suit the discussion to your limited understanding.

'too'. An excess of is 'too'. "to" is an indication of direction. Seriously, how does a person get to where they'll just post some shit without any thought?

Foor on the floor? This is a guy who constantly toured with the ethos of 'a different show every night', which means improvisation, it means changing the words to songs on the spot based in some shit that happened that day they found hilarious ('the secret word for tonight is Dragonmaster'), and Frank is recorded as telling an interviewer (one of the more tuned-in ones) he didn't love a show that the guy thought was one of the best because it was too normal, because they did everything straight that night.

"Alright, here's how it works: There's a beat going on like this; That's a pedestrian beat. You don't dance to that beat, You dance to what George sings, okay? The little ones, okay? The little quick ones, okay? Ready? George, make them dance!" Bebop Tango (of the Old Jazzmen's Church). What is jazz, do you actually think?

WOW

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1984. Scott Thunes bass in support of Archie Shepp, particularly happening. I don't know if this is one of the 'volcano' solos from Zavod but it's pretty interesting. Zavod was discovered by Duke Ellington when he was just a kid... he passed in the last couple of years.

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I think Belew won

because instead of a cut it goes into the next song

[ghettosynth]

Jesus F Christ there's some truly clueless shit. Also a perfect illustration of the well-known 'open-minded' fallacy. I definitely find an academic talking about 'contemporary dance music' hilarious, though, so thanks.

I don't even have to demonstrate that you're closed minded when you so easily prove to everyone here that you are. Why can't an academic know about contemporary dance music? If you were open minded, you would have asked yourself that very question and looked it up.

Mark Butler is a young academic who experienced rave culture as a teenager and pursued an academic career. He demonstrates a concise understanding of the culture and of music theory in his book.

Oh, and for 'diversity' given the context of the discussion. Dunning and Kruger have your number, don't they.).

Again, you don't understand the phenomenon. You demonstrate it clearly yourself above. You aren't sufficiently educated or experienced to dismiss Mark Butler's dissertation, the content of which you are ignorant of, but you fantasize that your limited knowledge allows you to do exactly that.

You're with the closed mind, or you'd know better.

Like with Dunning Kruger, you don't understand the phrase. It's not an insult, it's simply an observed fact. You demonstrate repeated unwillingness to absorb new information that doesn't align with your views even when that information is reputable. You have no basis whatsoever to dismiss Mark Butler's work, nor more recent research on FM synthesis, or any of the other conversations where rather than engage the evidence with an open mind you resort to vitriol.

It's so off-topic, too. Yeah, let's suit the discussion to your limited understanding.

Topics morph and change, you well know that. It was a single comment based on a response to other assertions.

"Alright, here's how it works: There's a beat going on like this; That's a pedestrian beat. You don't dance to that beat, You dance to what George sings, okay? The little ones, okay? The little quick ones, okay? Ready? George, make them dance!" Bebop Tango (of the Old Jazzmen's Church). What is jazz, do you actually think?

You really should read Mark Butler's book, you will learn some things. You have a very narrow view of how people experience dance music and demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of music cognition. I'm not surprised that's how you dance, or danced, however, your experience does not generalize as well as you fantasize that it does, again, Dunning Kruger.

Anecdotally, what you have described is very common among newcomers to the dance scene before they understand and embrace a deeper concept of groove.

You can spew as much vitriol as you like, however, that won't change that fact that Mark Butler, among others, is eminently more qualified than you to write on this topic. As I said, I didn't ask you to take my word for it, I gave you the name of a qualified author, several actually, an open mind would appreciate that and at least try to understand the context and value before dismissing the work.

FWIW: Butler's work has been cited 259 times as of this post. You aren't qualified to dismiss that work and you should recognize that. Note, criticising specific aspects of its content is fine but that is not at all what you're doing here.

One of the works that cites Butler's book is an interesting study of the relationship between pleasure and groove.

"Syncopation, Body-Movement and Pleasure in Groove Music" by Witek et al.

While entropy was found to be a poor predictor of wanting to move and pleasure, the results showed that medium degrees of syncopation elicited the most desire to move and the most pleasure, particularly for participants who enjoy dancing to music. Hence, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between syncopation, body-movement and pleasure, and syncopation seems to be an important structural factor in embodied and affective responses to groove.

So this idea that complex music is automatically more "groovy" only holds to a point. However, this isn't even a new idea really. This is just a recent study relating to certain specifics of dance music.

In a classic study, Berlyne [48] proposed that an inverted U-shaped curve (also called the Wundt curve [49]) reflects a general relationship between aesthetic appreciation and structural complexity in art. According to this relationship, increasing complexity correlates positively with liking, arousal and pleasure up to an optimal point, after which a further increase in complexity reverses the effect.

The cited study [48] is from 1971, so there is really considerable work to refute this idea that complexity in art necessarily has value in and of itself. Moreover, you have no excuse for not knowing this if you are going to argue about it because it has been in the literature as an idea for decades. This fascination with complexity, again, for it's own sake, reflects IMO, a poor understanding of aesthetic in art.

So, if you can manage to stick a crowbar in your mind and get it open just a little bit, you would learn some things from Butler's book.

[jancivil]

Bullshit.jpg

So, this university professor on the intricacy of contemporary dance 4/4 is supposed to do something for a personal point-of-view, and the context is you don't like Frank Zappa as a person. And you've trolled this thread so_hard trying to make it look like your POV is something we should pay attention to. It isn't, except at this stage it's time to say something meaningful about your contribution here, as far as I'm concerned.

I wish I hadn't seen that. John quoted it to express resignation "sigh" and I didn't avert my eyes evidently.
It's such bullshit. You don't really have the argument this guy nobody's ever heard of here has written up, but if one has an open mind they will entertain this argument. I have no interest in it. You don't know who you're talking to here, and you don't know the music we're talking about. You're bullshitting us there, you stated you had enough of a *statistical* basis to be conclusive that you can never like anything Zappa ever made. If one were intellectually honest about this thread, one will have checked out some music with an open mind.
You wouldn't be here with all of this bullshit. NB: this "You"... kind of a mistake ultimately I think. I can't know what drives you, the process that makes the bullshit, and should focus on *how* it's bullshit. So this reveals this is a little personal, which really isn't compelling.

"Zappa is uptight, of that there can be no doubt." - there's actually a lot of energy in that remark. Never mind that it's at the level of gossip, it's talking about personality, the low grade quality of that is no problem for the bullshitter.
NB: it's there as a launch point to posture about the whatever quality of music that isn't even created to listen to per se. There's a whole lot of groove music we could analyze, in Zappa music even. But no, here's 'dance music'. (Where have I seen that before...)
You're all about persuading the room that this level of discourse is something else a lot more interesting. Bullshit.

This video really applies. It's coincidental, a friend posted it at Facebook last night. I would say learn from it, but... I've had you muted for a while, it's too much bullshit for me, I may see it in quotes but this is what I have for you from here on out.

[jancivil]

Ok. back to having a sense of humor

[ghettosynth]

It isn't, except at this stage it's time to say something meaningful about your contribution here, as far as I'm concerned.

Except that you still haven't. You're just spewing more vitriol. I'm talking about music and groove. You can disagree, but beyond that, again, you're just talking about me, and not about music.

There's a whole lot of groove music we could analyze, in Zappa music even. But no, here's 'dance music'.

You're way off base. I responded to someone else's comment on 4/4 and four to the floor, and also about comments on complexity, that's a part of conversational flow. In fact, this originally stemmed from your quote of Zappa's ignorant claim that 4/4 is unnatural. That's funny by itself but when combined with the comparison to speech it's hilarious.

You don't get to make statements like that in a conversation and then get mad when people disagree. It's about as dumb and uneducated of a statement as you could make with respect to understanding how the brain perceives rhythm and meter. You seemed to think that it was insightful or something, LOL! Try referencing scholars who actually know something about how we "naturally" perceive meter and groove.

This was a high level conversation about complexity, groove, and aesthetic in art. My comments were appropriate with respect to that level of discourse. If you want to analyze music, knock yourself out, nobody is stopping you. If you want to counter that Butler has something legitimate to say, you're going to have to do better than spewing vitriol.

You don't know who you're talking to here

Well, with respect to my comments that "you" would learn something, I think that I know enough from this thread alone. Your assertion regarding the long term variability on drummer time to be essential to groove is enough by itself for me to conclude that you have a fairly uneducated position on groove and music cognition.

I gave you some references that will help you understand why that belief is insufficient. If you don't want to read them, fine, but it's not hard to conclude from comments here that both you and Zappa are/were ignorant of music cognition.

you stated you had enough of a *statistical* basis to be conclusive that you can never like anything Zappa ever made. If one were intellectually honest about this thread, one will have checked out some music with an open mind.

First, that isn't what I said, but, you don't understand statistics, do you? I HAVE listened to music in this thread, hell, I even liked one of the pieces and commented as such. I don't listen to what you post because I think that, in general, I think that your tastes in music are a bit narrow, but, when other people post along with insightful comments I listen. I still haven't heard more than that one track that I like, and that's just from this thread. I've heard Zappa all of my life in various contexts, some not dissimilar to this in flavor. Zappa fans are certainly zealous.

But, we were talking about "groove", you even talked about groove, so, if you're going to talk about something, you have to be prepared that people are going to disagree with you. I don't think that you understand "groove" at all really. I'm not going to debate endlessly here, I gave you several references, if you have references by competent scholars who support your POV, I'll take a look. I've long ago, however, learned to dismiss viewpoints of internet cranks who are too lazy to provide scholarly references.

You simply need to learn to disagree agreeably. This isn't your thread and nor is this your website. Yes, I disagree with the premise of the thread. I think Zappa is vastly overrated as an artist, get over it. There are no threads on KVR that are restricted to comments that reflect the OP's POV, if that's what you're looking for, then create your own website, this isn't it.

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- to be as clear as I can, not liking something, well, people going for different strokes makes the world go round, they say. But to assert something is what it demonstrably is not, because one's filter has led one into a failure to grasp what it is, and then straining to persuade people you're right is kind of preposterous. And this would through itself involve coming up with bullshit.

anyway, arrangements

There will come a time when everybody who is lonely
Will be free to sing and dance and love
There will come a time when every evil that we know
Will be an evil that we can rise above


1967, Take Your Clothes off When You Dance, We're Only In It For the Money
Started out as a demo in 1961, some sort of Latin beat and jazz solos
"Never on Sunday"


the 1963 surf music rendition demo winds up on Lumpy Gravy


and in 1965 another demo known as "I'm So Happy I Could Cry"
which is pretty cheesy, totally different lyrics than the 'standard'.

but here's 1978, instrumental with a choice contribution by L Shankar
I love the grand Hollywood ending and the fantastic violin in the end.

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