From: bilh@pd.jaring.my   
      
   An article foreshadowing concerts to be held 25-26 January at the Roulette in   
   Brooklyn. Musicians from the Lucerne Festival Alumni, conducted by Matthias   
   Pintscher.   
      
   The story "Repo Man" is by Russell Platt. Text goes something like this:   
      
   Repo Man   
      
   Frank Zappa swept pop, jazz, and   
   modernist music into a raucous whole.   
      
   The now common commingling of rock,   
   jazz, and classical streams in American   
   composition was pioneered by Frank   
   Zappa (1940-1993). A virtuoso guitarist,   
   an indefatigable bandleader, a tenacious   
   businessman, and a maddening iconoclast,   
   his prolific output ranges from hit   
   pop singles (“Valley Girl”) to orchestral   
   works of formidable modernist complexity   
   (“Bob in Dacron”), with trippy jazzrock   
   instrumentals (“Peaches En Regalia”)   
   and much else in between. A Los   
   Angeles icon, his work is also well appreciated   
   in Europe; his ghost doesn’t quite   
   haunt New York, though, which makes   
   a pair of Zappa-themed concerts at   
   Brooklyn’s Roulette (Jan. 25-26), offered   
   by the fantastic young musicians of Switzerland’s   
   Lucerne Festival Alumni, seem   
   all the more necessary.   
      
   Zappa’s lack of posthumous presence   
   here may be regrettable, but the composer’s   
   music and personality contain problematic   
   elements that could give anyone   
   pause. While Zappa’s protean catalogue   
   can be idealized as an awesome, unitary   
   composition, individual works, for all their   
   raucous energy, can pale in comparison   
   to those of the modernist icons he revered.   
   His music lacks Varèse’s pitiless severity,   
   Boulez’s fine-grained intellectualism,   
   Stravinsky’s happy embrace of aesthetic   
   discipline — or, on purely American terms,   
   the joyful, uncompromising originality of   
   a fellow Southern Californian, Harry   
   Partch. (“For Your Eyes Only,” a piece by   
   John Zorn that’s included in the concerts,   
   reveals a composer with a more refined   
   ear for instrumental color, a keener grasp   
   of harmony, and a more convincing sense   
   of narrative.) And, while one can admire   
   Zappa as a vibrant satirist of American   
   life and as a tribune in the fight against   
   censorship, such deliberate provocations   
   as the singles “Bobby Brown Goes Down”   
   (with its cascade of homophobic lyrics)   
   and “Jewish Princess” would not advisably   
   be released today.   
      
   But at the Lucerne concerts, featuring   
   the conductor Matthias Pintscher and   
   the vocalist Della Miles, all is forgiven.   
   The selected works—including “Dupree’s   
   Paradise” and “G-Spot Tornado,” which   
   gleefully mash up pop and modernist   
   elements—represent the classical Zappa at   
   his best. And the most recent pieces, by the   
   gifted Olga Neuwirth (“Eleanor,” which   
   uses texts by Martin Luther King, Jr., and   
   June Jordan) and Tyshawn Sorey (“Sentimental   
   Shards,” a nod to both John   
   Adams and Duke Ellington) give a contemporary   
   political focus to Zappa’s antiestablishment   
   rage.   
   —Russell Platt   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)