Ed Palermo may have gained an international following with his ingenious   
   orchestral arrangements of Frank Zappa tunes, but he’s hardly a one-trick   
   pony. Earlier in the year, the saxophonist released an uproarious double album   
   The Great Un-American    
   Songbook Volumes 1 & 2, a project celebrating an expansive roster of songs by   
   successive waves of British invaders, from the Beatles, Rolling Stones and   
   Jeff Beck to King Crimson, Traffic, and Jethro Tull.   
      
   With his new big band project, slated for release on Cuneiform Records on   
   October 6, 2017, Palermo is back on his home turf, but the landscape feels   
   strange and uncanny. He’s reclaiming the Zappa songbook, filtering Frank   
   through the emotionally    
   charged lens of the polymathic musical wizard Todd Rundgren in a wild and   
   wooly transmogrification, The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren. Working with the   
   same stellar cast of players, Palermo somehow captures the essence of these   
   iconoclastic masters, making    
   Zappa Zappier and Todd more Rundgrenian.   
      
   He sees the Zappa and Rundgren as embodying a ying and yang approach to life   
   that played an essential role in helping him navigate the minefields of   
   teenage angst in the 1960s. “For most of my high school days my favorite   
   musicians were Zappa and Todd    
   Rundgren,” Palermo says. “Rundgren had his songs about self-pity, which   
   were exactly what I needed back then. I’d go out with a girl and whatever   
   party I brought her to she’d go and hang out with another dude. Todd   
   understood. At the same time,    
   Zappa had these snarky songs like ‘Broken Hearts are for Assholes.’ It was   
   tough love. You gotta broken heart? Deal with it. Todd Rundgren’s music was   
   there to give you a hug. I wanted to contrast the hard-bitten Zappa followed   
   by a bleeding heart    
   Rundgren ballad.”   
      
   Though the title suggests a forced merger, The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren   
   doesn’t mashup the oeuvres of the two masters. Rather, the album mostly   
   alternates between the composers, creating a deliciously dizzying whipsaw as   
   the two diametrical stances    
   sometimes blur or even switch. Zappa’s soaring fanfare “Peaches En   
   Regalia” is more inspirational than smarmy, with a particularly eloquent   
   alto sax solo by Cliff Lyons, while a brisk and forthright version of   
   Rundgren’s “Influenza” showcases    
   the muscular lyricism of violinist Katie Jacoby, one of the orchestra’s   
   essential voices.   
      
   Palermo reaches deep into the Rundgren songbook for “Kiddie Boy,” a   
   stinging blues from 1969’s Nazz Nazz, the seminal second release by his   
   underappreciated band Nazz (an album which originally bore the Zappaesque   
   title Fungo Bat). Drawing directly    
   from the maestro’s original horn arrangement, Palermo displays some   
   impressive guitar work on a vehicle for Bruce McDaniel’s blue-eye vocals.   
   Napoleon Murphy Brock delivers a poker-faced rendition of Zappa’s surreal   
   “Montana,” the tune that    
   turned a generation on to the lucrative potential of floss farming, and   
   McDaniel and Brock join forces on Rundgren’s deliriously silly “Emperor of   
   the Highway,” an homage to Gilbert and Sullivan.   
      
   The contrasting sensibilities of the Zundgrens comes into sharp focus in the   
   center of the album. While Palermo has recorded Zappa’s “Echidna’s Arf   
   (Of You)” this time he replaces the horns with McDaniel’s intricately   
   layered vocals via the    
   miracle of multi-tracking. From Zappa’s playfully odd metered work out the   
   big band saunters into Rundgren’s greatest ballad “Hello It's Me,” an   
   arrangement for McDaniel’s most impassioned crooning based on the original   
   version from 1968 album    
   Nazz (not the hit from his solo Something/Anything? album).   
      
   Tenor saxophonist Bill Straub swaggers through Rundgren’s “Wailing   
   Wall,” which is sandwiched between two slices of Zappa at his snarky best,   
   “Big Swifty Coda” and “Florentine Pogen,” another superb feature for   
   Brock. Palermo spotlights a    
   dark and wondrous Zappa obscurity with “Janet's Big Dance Number,” a brief   
   piece recovered from 200 Motels featuring Ben Kono’s noir tenor solo. From   
   that unified hedgehogian arrangement Palermo unleashes the multifarious fox on   
   Rundgren’s “   
   Broke Down and Busted,” a portmanteau arrangement that touches on   
   Rundgren’s “Boat on the Charles,” the Ramsey Lewis hit “The ‘In’   
   Crowd,” Zappa’s “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,” and even traces of   
   Steely Dan’s “Pretzel Logic.”    
   It’s a tour de force that feels like stream of consciousness journey, though   
   the id truly emerged on the closing hidden track. In what has become a Palermo   
   tradition, he includes yet another version of an enduring lament about the   
   difficulties of    
   relationships, arranged this time in Nazzian style by McDaniel.   
      
   The seamless ease with which Palermo and his crack crew navigate between the   
   Zappa and Rundgren shouldn’t come as a surprise. Over the years Zappa’s   
   music has proven supremely pliable in Palermo’s capable hands, as evidenced   
   further by a recent    
   concert at Iridium that paired his songs with standards indelibly linked to   
   Ol’ Blue Eyes (is there an album The Adventures of Zinatra in the future?).   
   Everything he brings into the big band is a labor of love.   
      
   “Todd Rundgren holds a very special place in my heart,” Palermo says. “I   
   realized I was in love with my girlfriend (now wife) listening to his album   
   Something/Anything? It was about 2 years ago doing our regular hit at The   
   Falcon that I decided to    
   have Zodd Zundgren night. A lot of people who like the music of Zappa also   
   like Rundgren and Steely Dan, but there are enough Steely Dan cover bands out   
   there.”   
      
   Born in Ocean City, New Jersey on June 14, 1954, Palermo grew up in the   
   cultural orbit of Philadelphia, which was about an hour drive away. He started   
   playing clarinet in elementary school, and soon turned to the alto saxophone.   
   He also took up the    
   guitar, and credits his teenage obsession with Zappa to opening his ears to   
   post-bop harmonies and improvisation.   
      
      
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