JOE'S DOMAGE

1971 ended badly for the MOI and for Zappa in particular. During the Montreux festival in December the festival hall burned down, remember Smoke On The Water, and the Mothers lost all their material. Two weeks later during a concert in London Zappa was pushed off the stage by an angry audience member and spend the first part of 1972 in a wheelchair. Good news: during this period he composed some of the most amazing music of the JR field, for a small big band JR orchestra : Waka Jawaka and for a bigger ensemble : The Grand Wazzoo. The two records were released in 1972 and Zappa organized a small tour in September 1972 (eight dates only: check out the excellent 2CD set of the Boston concert!

So far, so good : prior to the recording of Waka Jawaka the band rehearsed this highly complicated music as Zappa put it himself in the last track until "it feels natural" to enter the recording studio. Joe's Domage presents the rehearsals of this famous record. and one might say, especially in regard to the titles: Wow, lots of unreleased jam sessions in hiFi quality .not really!!

First: the band did not rehearse in a recording studio and apparently without a recording facility and my guess Zappa himself recorded the rehearsals on his trusty Uher portable tape recorder, but while the recorder works OK in quiet passages it starts to distort as soon as the amps and the drums come in. The overall sound quality is bad!

Second: the Waka Jawaka material is composed and arranged for a small orchestra and this recording dates apparently from an early stage of the rehearsals. The musicians have no score, but maybe just a lead sheet and often Zappa just plays the melody line on guitar for the concerned instrument. To make it a little more presentable most tracks contain a rough form and then a part of the arrangement. Still in some cases mainly The Frog Song which is the working title for It Just Might Be. you listen to some slow and painful birth of a musical structure : play - stop -explanation - play -stop and so on for 17 minutes !!!..we are not talking here about new material or major variations but the rehearsal of written out music that was to be released the same year. These recordings are of hardly any particular interest and I am quite sure that Zappa himself would have never released these recordings.

The only interesting tracks IMO are tracks 8 & 9, a rehearsal of Think It Over, a song from the musical comedy Hunchentoot that Zappa never finished, but some of the parts were integrated in other records. Think it Over was renamed The Grand Wazoo and released as the title track of the same record and the main interest here are the vocals, being so far the only sung version of this song and the track contains an interesting solo by Zappa.

Under the line: this material is really not worth being released on its own. It would have made a nice third CD for the Vaulternative Wazoo 2CD Boston 1972 concert release as a document. As a release on it's own without any further infos on the cover it could be a huge disappointment for someone who doesn't know Zappa's catalogue. For collectors and hardcore fans acceptable for the others: buy in priority Waka Jawaka and The GrandWazoo.

Ever since the Zappa Family Trust started releasing archived recordings from "The Vault", some of the most requested material (after the Roxy" videos) has been performances of The Grand and Petit Wazoo bands (both of these have since been covered by "Wazoo" and "Imaginary Diseases:).

This was the first hint of Wazoo material. The CD, almost an hour long, covers the rehearsals of material that became "Waka Jawaka" and "The Grand Wazoo". There are not many full songs. What we hear is an insight into one of the ways Zappa worked with his bands. Here, he chose not to give out sheet music, but to giive each musician his parts by singing or playing them on his guitar, forcing them to memorize each section.

The result is fascinating, but not easy to listen to often, as much of the disk consists of the band playing short sections of the songs over and over. On the other hand, there are some differences in the arrangements, roughly played, from the final versions.

For a Zappaphile, this is a must-have CD. For everyone else, get "Waka Jawaka" and "The Grand Wazoo".

I don't usually review albums on first listen, but trust me, I'm probably never going to listen to this album ever again, unless I'm trying to listen to every Frank Zappa album ever released.

This album is a rehearsal of Frank and his newly formed Wazoo band, practicing before going into the studio to record Waka-Jawaka. That's it. We hear Frank talking, and showing the band members their parts, there are run-through of sections of the music, but many times, Frank cuts everyone off to correct any mistakes the band made. And this goes on for about 55 minutes or so.

I will admit, there is a tiny bit of unique music on here, but it's only tidbits, which is what all the music contained here is. There is no full run-through of the tunes, or any real jams. Sure, there is a nice little guitar solo during a run-through of "Blessed Relief/The New Brown Clouds", which seems to be a hybrid of Big Swifty and Blessed Relief and Greggary Peccary (which itself is interesting; Frank must have re-written a bunch of the music right before the band entered the studio), but the very short moments of brilliance do not make this worth releasing, in my opinion. However, a little bit of this album is interesting from a historical perspective, such as the aforementioned Blessed Relief/The New Brown Clouds track shows that the music was composed differently before the recording sessions.

I don't think Frank would have ever let this see the light of day. Purchase at your own risk. Even the Zappa albums that are more for completists still have some worthwhile and/or unique music, and would get at least 2 stars, but this album is truly ONLY for those who must own every Zappa album ever released, as there is not much on this album to even LISTEN to.

This one is definitely only for hard core FZ fans. This was recorded during rehearsals for the Waka/Jawaka and the Wazoo sessions. It is a very interesting insight into the rehearsals of FZ and his band, and helps to show that Zappa's music wasn't just a bunch of sounds thrown together, but that the very technically difficult parts of his music were not just accidents, but were structured and well composed pieces.

On the second track, we have mostly a rehearsal of "Little Brown Clouds" which somehow got a snippet of "Big Swifty" in there. When it hits that spot, it sounds almost like a bad edit in there, so I question as that was one specific session or not. The third track (all 17 minutes of it) is the band trying to rehearse the very challenging section of "One Shot Deal" from "Waka/Jawaka". This is the section that bookends the instrumental section of that song, and if you are familiar with it, you know the strange section I'm talking about, the part that is unbelievable that the musicians were able to ever play together. For those not familiar with this material, this will mean nothing, and this is why this is a recording only for completionists, because it won't make sense to anyone that isn't extremely familiar with Zappa's music, or only of interest to a musician who understands some theory or who has had to deal with rehearsals and know what the band is going though. The entire 55 minute run time of this album is only rehearsals all the way through. Don't expect to hear any full run thru's at all, it's all about Frank coaching his band how to play his difficult music and them practicing over and over those difficult sections in the music that was created during this time period.

This period of FZ's career is one of my favorite periods, but that doesn't help this recording. You must get the original studio albums "Waka/Jawaka" or "The Grand Wazoo" to know how excellent this era in his career really way, but "Joe's Domage' is not the way to listen to this era unless you are already familiar with it, and even then, it is not entertainment as it is a curiosity for completionists. Acoording to Gail Zappa, these recordings were all taken off of a rehearsal tape that FZ carried around with him during the tours supporting this part of his history. The recording is bad, the subject matter is only good for occasional interest and not for entertainment so to speak. 1 star.

As much of a fan as I am of Mr. Zappa's music and would hate to think ill of the people entrusted to curate his oeuvre, I can't help but shake off the impression that those people sometimes abuse their position to rip off gullible fans, and this utterly pointless, worthless CD release, chronicling a rehearsal session from the early 70s featuring the same big band with which Zappa recorded the albums "Waka/Jawaka" and "The Grand Wazoo", is one of the most egregious examples of this. I might have been able to forgive how the music is regularly interrupted by barely audible spoken directions and random banter and I might have even been able to forgive the abysmal sound quality of the recording which constantly clips and cuts out, but I cannot forgive the fact that there aren't even any actual songs featured on this album: instead we get a mind-numbing collection of failed takes, musicians practicing short snippets of melodies without accompaniment and the band generally just messing around, randomly divided into multiple tracks and only occasionally interspersed with brief prototypes of songs that would eventually end up on the aforementioned studio albums. Maybe a few minutes of all of this stuff would have been cute to fill up an album featuring actual full takes of these songs; even releasing it in full for free on YouTube might have been interesting, but no one can convince me that the people who decided to release and sell CD copies of this recording could have honestly believed that anyone would willingly shell out 20 dollars and listen to 55 minutes of this crap if they weren't suckered into it. Do not buy this unless you're the most dogmatic of Zappa fans and need to hear absolutely everything that the man ever spat out onto tape.