A couple of days ago, I posted this picture to my Facebook feed:
I really enjoyed two albums by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention:
- the two-album set Freak Out, and
- Over-Night Sensation, with the classics "Montana", Camarillo Brillo, and Dynamo Hum".
After I posted that picture, Rebekah post a link to this Youtube feed of Frank Zappa as a guest on the Steve Allen show in 1963:
It's a 16-minute selection which concludes with a jumble of sounds that reminds me of London Ontario's own Nihilist Spasm Band. [NSB]
[The Nihilist Spasm Band] uses homemade instruments. Indeed, most of the NSB's instruments are modifications of other instruments, or wholly invented by the members. ... The range of the improvisation is such that instruments are not tuned to each other, tempos and time signatures are not imposed, and the members push the ranges of their instrumentation by engaging in constant innovation.
I knew several of the members of NSB, and back in the late 1970s, I had the "honour" of sitting in with them during a session. The description is accurate, and it is very much like what Frank Zappa was encouraging Steve Allen and the others to do back in 1963.
Zappa was a musical genius ahead of the times in many ways.