Surely, this is not grooving much, but what a stunt. Look at that piece, all is made of unconventional rhythmic notation. Be aware you can have headache, but don't call it crap. Still, I prefer Crazy Mama.

Here is the intro



Here is the correspendant midi trancription

[www.zappa-analysis.com]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Black Page is a piece by American composer Frank Zappa known for being extraordinarily difficult to play.

Originally written for the drum set and melodic percussion, the piece was later rearranged in several versions, including a disco and a so-called New Age version.

Terry Bozzio says[1]: 'He wrote it because we had done this 40-piece orchestra gig together and he was always hearing the studio musicians in LA that he was using on that talking about the fear of going into sessions some morning and being faced with 'the black page'. So he decided to write his 'Black Page'. Then he gave it to me, and I could play parts of it right away. But it wasn't a pressure thing, it just sat on my music stand and for about 15 minutes every day for 2 weeks before we would rehearse, I would work on it. And after 2 weeks I had it together and I played it for him. And he said, "Great!" took it home, wrote the melody and the chord changes, brought it back in. And we all started playing it.'

On the live album Zappa in New York, Zappa noted the "statistical density" of the piece [2]. It is written in common time with extensive use of tuplets, including tuplets inside tuplets. At one point there is a half note triplet in which each beat is counted with its own tuplet of 5, 5 and 6. The song ends with a whole note tuplet of 11 and then two half note tuplets of 11. The result is that the melody is played and then played two more times, twice as fast.

Michael Brecker said that
he couldn't play it..

I remember back around 1989- 1990 a friend who lived in California went through one of the Zappa song books, I cannot recall exactly which one, but it was one where FZ did the transcriptions. My friend found mistakes and through friends of friends got to meet FZ at his house and he offered to re-transcribe his books. FZ was not interested and acknowledged the errors when pointed out. It was not worth the expense in reprinting considering the very few people who would actually catch the error.

Quote
trainarollin
I remember back around 1989- 1990 a friend who lived in California went through one of the Zappa song books, I cannot recall exactly which one, but it was one where FZ did the transcriptions. My friend found mistakes and through friends of friends got to meet FZ at his house and he offered to re-transcribe his books. FZ was not interested and acknowledged the errors when pointed out. It was not worth the expense in reprinting considering the very few people who would actually catch the error.

WOW!

Zappa was a master.

.

His son Dweezil is doing fine in representing his father's work with Zappa Plays Zappa.

yep. saw the Dweezil show back in September (I think it was Sept) Steve Vai was not in the line-up.