Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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Here's a sound that my friend Gurlitzer might enjoy; a jazz waltz of sorts. From a surprising source.



Gurlizer knew me back when I thought it was hip to smoke blueberry Tiparillos and wear railroad-striped bell bottoms. And that was when Frank Zappa recorded this song, a year or two after flower power had flared into full-fledged revolt in some major cities. But I was "enjoying" all that at a distance during high school, vicariously, through music, underground comix, black-light posters, incense, and other lifestyle accessories. This was the same general timeframe when a Mothers concert in West Berlin ended in a fairly violent riot instigated by German revolutionaries affiliated with the Red Army Faction, not to mention the Altamont Speedway deaths and mayhem. This recording was actually left over from the Hot Rats sessions, which produced a late 1969 jazz album of the same name. It's an odd inclusion in the Burnt Weeny Sandwich album, which is mostly avant garde rock-jazz with some straight-ahead comedy blues and other miscellany.

Zappa could have written sweet, lyrical compositions like "Twenty Small Cigars" until the cows came home. Not that he should have, necessarily. And furthermore, he might have authorized his effective but ethically dubious manager of the time, Herb Cohen, to spread around some payola---or at least some fellatiola---to get tracks like this aired on FM "underground" stations during the late '60s and early '70s. By all accounts I've read, though, Zappa always refrained from payola. But maybe he shouldn't have. And so now, maybe because he shied away from his gentle side and mostly wrote compositions better suited to frame his endless social satire and raunchy comedy, Zappa is remembered by the general public not for his astonishing writing and performing capabilities, but for novelty songs like "Don't Eat The Yellow Snow," "Dinah-Moe Humm," and "Valley Girl." And also for eating one of his own turds live on stage during a mid-'60s concert. (The last item being someone's invention, of course, and one that annoyed FZ.)

"Twenty Small Cigars" belongs to a very small category of Zappa recordings that not only documents songs that he composed with emotion, purely for beauty of melody and setting, but also performed without any of the clowning or sarcasm that marred most recordings of such compositions. There are few others like this one in Zappa's catalog. I think it's a gem

Twenty Small Cigars, Frank Zappa (1970, from "Chunga's Revenge," reissued 1995 as RykoDisc RCD 10511), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.