Frank Vincent Zappa was an American musician, composer, and bandleader. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa composed rock, pop, jazz, jazz fusion, orchestral and musique concrète works; he also produced almost all of the 60-plus albums that he released with his band the Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist. His work is characterized by nonconformity, improvisation sound experimentation, musical virtuosity and satire of American culture. Zappa also directed feature-length films and music videos, and designed album covers. He is considered one of the most innovative and stylistically diverse musicians of his generation.
We're Only in It for the Money is the third album by American rock band the Mothers of Invention, released on March 4, 1968, by Verve Records. As with the band's first two efforts, it is a concept album, and satirizes left- and right-wing politics, particularly the hippie subculture, as well as the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was conceived as part of a project called No Commercial Potential, which produced three other albums: Lumpy Gravy, Cruising with Ruben & the Jets, and Uncle Meat.
Uncle Meat is the sixth album by the Mothers of Invention, and seventh overall by Frank Zappa, released as a double album in 1969. Uncle Meat was originally developed as a part of No Commercial Potential, a project which spawned three other albums sharing a conceptual connection: We're Only in It for the Money, Lumpy Gravy and Cruising with Ruben & the Jets.
Civilization Phaze III is the sixty-third album by Frank Zappa, released posthumously as a double album on October 31, 1994. It was the first studio album of new material from Zappa since 1986's Jazz from Hell. The album marks the third part of a conceptual continuity that started with We're Only in It for the Money (1968), with the second part being a re-edited version of Zappa's 1967 album Lumpy Gravy. Zappa described the album as a "two-act opera", but in lieu of traditional recitatives and arias, it alternates brief spoken word passages with musical numbers created on a Synclavier using a combination of sampled and synthesized sounds. Much of the sampled material in the second half of the album was originally recorded by Ensemble Modern and other musicians to Zappa's specifications.
Lumpy Gravy is a 1968 solo album by Frank Zappa, written by Zappa and performed by a group of session players he dubbed the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra & Chorus. Zappa conducted the orchestra but did not perform on the album. It is his fourth album overall: his previous releases had been under the name of his group, the Mothers of Invention.
Cruising with Ruben & the Jets is the fourth album by the Mothers of Invention, and fifth overall by Frank Zappa, released under the alias Ruben and the Jets. Released on December 2, 1968 on Bizarre and Verve Records with distribution by MGM Records, it is a concept album, influenced by 1950s doo-wop and rock and roll. The album's concept deals with a fictitious Chicano doo-wop band called Ruben & the Jets, represented by the cover illustration by Cal Schenkel, which depicts the Mothers of Invention as anthropomorphic dogs. It was conceived as part of a project called No Commercial Potential, which produced three other albums: Lumpy Gravy, We're Only in It for the Money and Uncle Meat.
Quaudiophiliac is a compilation album featuring music by Frank Zappa, released in DVD-Audio format by Barking Pumpkin Records in 2004. It compiles recordings he made while experimenting with quadraphonic, or four-channel, sound in the 1970s. Zappa prepared quadraphonic mixes of a number of his 1970s albums, with both Over-Nite Sensation (1973) and Apostrophe (') (1974) being released in discrete quadraphonic on Zappa's DiscReet Records label.
Thomas Joseph Tedesco was an American guitarist and studio musician in Los Angeles and Hollywood. He was part of the loose collective of the area's leading session musicians later popularly known as The Wrecking Crew, who played on thousands of studio recordings in the 1960s and 1970s, including several hundred Top 40 hits.
Läther is the sixty-fifth official album by Frank Zappa. It was released posthumously as a three-CD set on Rykodisc in 1996. The album's title is derived from bits of comic dialog that link the songs. Zappa also explained that the name is a joke, based on "common bastardized pronunciation of Germanic syllables by the Swiss."
Orchestral Favorites is an album by Frank Zappa, released in May 1979 on his own DiscReet Records label. The album is entirely instrumental and features music performed by the 37-piece Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra. It reached No .168 on the Billboard 200 album chart in the United States.
London Symphony Orchestra is a pair of albums by Frank Zappa, featuring his original symphonic compositions conducted by Kent Nagano. They were recorded at the same sessions in January 1983, and originally released as London Symphony Orchestra, Vol. I in 1983, London Symphony Orchestra, Vol. II, in 1987, and later combined and reissued on a Rykodisc CD as London Symphony Orchestra Vol. I & II in 1995.
The Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra was a group of Hollywood session musicians organized by Frank Zappa in 1967 to record music for his first solo album Lumpy Gravy. Some of these musicians are thought to have worked together in various combinations under the leadership of Ken Shroyer as far back as 1959. However, it was Zappa who gave them the name several years later.
Emil Richards was an American vibraphonist and percussionist.
Paul Thatcher Smith was an American jazz pianist. He performed in various genres of jazz, most typically bebop, but is best known as an accompanist of singers, especially Ella Fitzgerald.
"Duodenum" is a song by Frank Zappa that first appeared as part of "Lumpy Gravy Part One" on the Verve Records edition of Lumpy Gravy. A surf music instrumental, it runs for approximately 1:32 and is the second identifiable track on the album, preceded by "The Way I See It, Barry" and followed by "Oh No". Documentation purports that this piece was likely produced and recorded by Zappa sometime between 1963 and 1965.
Vincent Ned DeRosa was an American hornist who served as a studio musician for Hollywood soundtracks and other recordings from 1935 until his retirement in 2008. Because his career spanned over 70 years, during which he played on many film and television soundtracks and as a sideman on studio albums, he is considered to be one of the most recorded brass players of all time. He set "impeccably high standards" for the horn, and became the first horn for Henry Mancini, Lalo Schifrin, Alfred Newman, and John Williams, among others, with Williams calling him "one of the greatest instrumentalists of his generation." DeRosa contributed to many of the most acclaimed albums of the 20th century, including some of the biggest-selling albums by artists as diverse as Frank Sinatra, Barry Manilow, Frank Zappa, Boz Scaggs, Ella Fitzgerald, Harry Nilsson, Stan Kenton, Henry Mancini, The Monkees, Sammy Davis Jr., and Mel Tormé.
The Lumpy Money Project/Object is a compilation album by Frank Zappa. Released posthumously on January 23, 2009 as Official Release #85, it compiles the releases Lumpy Gravy and We're Only in It for the Money with previously unreleased material, with the overall package serving as an audio documentary of the production of the two albums, which share conceptual continuity themes. It is project/object #2 in a series of 40th Anniversary FZ Audio Documentaries, following MOFO (2006).
The Old Masters is a box set series by Frank Zappa, released in three volumes on Barking Pumpkin Records from April 1985 to December 1987, consisting of studio and live albums by Zappa and The Mothers of Invention originally released from 1966 to 1976 on other labels, as well as "Mystery Discs" which contained previously unreleased material. The graphics on all three sets was airbrush illustrated by Larry Grossman. 200 Motels was not included in the series, as it was the only Zappa/Mothers album for which Zappa was unable to secure the rights.
This is the complete discography of the main 12-inch (8000) series of LPs issued by Verve Records, a label founded in 1956 by producer Norman Granz in Los Angeles, California. Alongside new sessions Granz re-released many of the recordings of his earlier labels Clef and Norgran on Verve.
Charles Curtis Berghofer is an American double bassist and electric bassist, who has worked in jazz and as a session musician in the film industry for more than 60 years, including working on more than 400 movie soundtracks.
