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STEFANO BOLLANI QUARTET
Sheik Yer Zappa
Switzerland 2015 [no label, 2CD]
Festival da Jazz, Dracula Club, St Moritz, Switzerland; July 14, 2015. Excellent satellite radio broadcast.
Frank Zappa - a musical genius with a point of view, was vocal and provocative, it’s really unfortunate he passed away only at 52 in 1993. Just think about the number of musicians, [many of who are jazz artistes], who routinely cover his music. Here is one of them.
Italian pianist and jazz musician Stefano Bollani, interview with swide.com:
How was the idea of “Sheik Yer Zappa” born?
Well, this is a live album and the live factor is a very important aspect of the whole project. It was assembled using concerts recorded in 2011… back then, while booking the dates, me and my agent thought of forming a completely new live band to back me up. It was a bunch of guys I didn’t know so well and they weren’t Zappa fans at all – except for one – so they didn’t know the original songs by Zappa. And probably this made it all a lot funnier and enjoyable for them. What I wanted to catch, in this tour and album, was the spirit of Zappa, his genius. But I wanted to do it in a funny and ironic way. So this album is mostly improvisation based on parts of Zappa originals.
So is this a tribute or…?
It’s more a homage, it’s something radically different. It took me two years to decide to bring these recordings to my label, to see if they thought it could be released as an album. And when they agreed, I did exactly what Zappa used to do for his live releases: I took a number of recordings from different performances and made some kind of patchwork, taking something from each to build the best tracklist possible.
What about the title: “Sheik Yer Zappa”?
Actually I regret about choosing this title. Mainly because I get asked about it all the time and it’s pretty difficult to explain its meaning. It’s a reference to Zappa, since he once dressed as a sheik for his song “Shake your booty”, to play with the sound of the words “shake” and “sheik”; I took this thing and changed it a little bit.
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John Fordham, reviewing Stefano Bollani’s Sheik Yer Zappa (2014) in the Guardian:
Italian pianist Stefano Bollani’s duo with Brazilian bandolim player Hamilton de Holanda was one of the big hits of the last London Jazz festival, but though this live set often has the same breakneck effervescence, its focus is very different. It’s an extensively improvised tribute to Frank Zappa, featuring Bollani on piano, Fender Rhodes, vocals and whistling; Josh Roseman’s blustery trombone; hard-hitting percussionist Jim Black; vibraphonist (and former Peter Brötzmann sideman) Jason Adasiewicz; and plummy-toned Brad Mehldau bassist Larry Grenadier. Mixing Zappa classics and originals, Bollani celebrates the arts of improv and Zappa’s legacy as both a great melodist and a cultural subversive. He plays (and whistles) Peaches en Regalia as a multi-idiomatic solo extravaganza, sings the explicit original lyric to Bobby Brown (US radio stations wouldn’t touch it in Zappa’s prime) and, on the long, winding hook of Eat That Question, with Black’s choppy drumming behind it, delivers the killer track of a real one-off venture.
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Thanks to unclewolfi for sharing the show at Dime.
Lineage:
dvb-s > techno trend tt-premium s2-6400 twin hd > hdd > nero wave editor > flac
(mpeg1 layer 2/256 kbps) [radio station - srf 2]
Click on the highlighted tracks to download the MP3s (224 kbps). As far as we can ascertain, these tracks have never been officially released on CD.
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Disc 1
Track 101. Cosmik Debris/Eat That Question 16:02 (26.9MB)
Track 102. Announcement - Stefano Bollani 0:48 (1.3MB)
Track 103. Bobby Brown 5:15 (8.8MB)
Track 104. Blessed Relief/Let’s Move To Cleveland - Part A 7:34 (12.7MB)
Track 105. Blessed Relief/Let’s Move To Cleveland - Part B 12:28 (21.0MB)
Track 106. Announcement - Stefano Bollani 0:27 (756k)
43 mins
The track, Blessed Relief/Let’s Move To Cleveland has been arbitrarily split for easier access.
Disc 2
Track 201. Cocksucker’s Rag 5:08 (8.6MB)
Track 202. Bene Bene 8:43 (14.6MB)
Track 203. Peaches en Regalia/Lumpy Gravy 16:42 (28.1MB)
Track 204. Announcement - Stefano Bollani 1:04 (1.8MB)
Track 205. I Have Been In You 15:27 (25.9MB)
47 mins
Lineup:
Stefano Bollani - piano
Jason Adasiewicz - vibraphone
Paul Santner - bass
Jim Black - drums
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