Album Review - Frank Zappa - ZAPPAtite: Frank Zappa’s Tastiest Tracks
When you’re dealing with a discography as deep - more than 100 albums - and diverse as Frank Zappa’s, compiling a representative retrospective is an impossibility.
So the folks at the Zappa Family Trust, led by curators Ahmet Zappa and Joe Travers, decided to put together a food-centric cross section of the late musician’s songbook to give potential new fans a taste of the eccentric composer’s output. The resulting ZAPPAtite: Frank Zappa’s Tastiest Tracks features 18 songs and 85 minutes of music and is largely successful as a sampler of the many musical concoctions Zappa, who died in 1993, cooked up over the years.
Divided into three sections - Appetizers, Entrees and Desserts - ZAPPAtite works like a walk-through cafeteria; listeners may not want to stack everything on their turntable, but they’ll find plenty to fill their ears.
There are novelties like “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” (Single Version) and “Valley Girl.” There are epic instrumentals like “Peaches En Regalia” and “Zoot Allures.” There’s straight songs (“Joe’s Garage”), non-straight songs (“Bobby Brown Goes Down”), songs that would never make it on the radio (“Titties & Beer”) and songs that should have (“Sofa No. 1”). There’s also Synclavier-created “jazz from hell” in the form of “G-Spot Tornado” and London Symphony Orchestra-created classical in the form of “Strictly Genteel.“
Frankophiles needn’t bother with this one; they’ve heard all this before. But for neophytes, ZAPPAtites is an ample smorgasbord from which to choose the Zappa that works best for them.
Grade card: Frank Zappa - ZAPPAtite: Frank Zappa’s Tastiest Tracks - B