For that was how I came to see out of the corner of my eye that unmistakeable symbol, “ZAPPA”, on a poster amongst other posters clustered around a door. I jerked to a halt and exclaimed out loud, “Jesus!” The door turned out to be that of the HMV Picture House – which I didn’t even know existed – and the poster was advertising the upcoming tour date – which I didn’t even know was happening.

Zappa Plays Zappa: Tour de Frank came to Scotland on June 18th, and I am overjoyed to be able to say I was there. I have been a fan of Frank Zappa since my teenage years, when I got my hands on my Dad’s cassette of the album Apostrophe. I feel like his music infuses me, and that both his  compositions and his guitar improvisation have influenced how I play the saxophone and how I listen to all music. I cannot overestimate what Zappa means to me, and I say this not as a fan blinded by devotional infatuation, but just as a man acknowledging a huge and inescapable presence in his life.

Frank Zappa died in 1993, and this tour, which has been going on for a few years (off and on), is organized by his son Dweezil, who is a guitarist too, and leader of the band. It seems that he decided to dedicate himself to keeping his father’s music alive. One might question whether the music depends on such efforts for its survival, but I’m certainly not complaining. Perhaps it is true that Zappa’s music, while brilliant, was never very influential in either rock or classical music, because it awkwardly bestrode the two. He was dismissive and contemptuous of both musical worlds, an attitude born of his frustration in dealing with people in the business who never had music as their top priority. Partly because of this, he was always an outsider.

But judging from the reception Dweezil and his band received last month here in Scotland, his music continues to move and excite new generations. The crowd were raucous and loud and radiated pure joy. That’s certainly how I felt, never having been able to see Frank in concert, now hearing those songs rendered wonderfully by a band bursting with stupidly talented musicians.

Zappa made around sixty albums, and I love all of the twenty-five or so that I have, from all the eras of his career. But I am particularly fond of the version of the Mothers of Invention band he had in the early to mid 70s – which included George Duke, Ruth Underwood, Napoleon Murphy Brock, Chester Thompson, and Bruce and Tom Fowler – producing albums like Roxy & Elsewhere, One Size Fits All and Apostrophe.

The band had a warmth in sound and personality that is probably unmatched in Zappa’s output. It was one of those magic synergistic combinations of musicians: when you listen to those albums they seem capable of anything, and you love them. At that stage there was still a luxurious and fuzzy jazziness in his music, and the way they play those intricate pieces with relaxed discipline and a sense of humour is quite special.

The great thing about this concert, then, was that it was dominated by that stuff, and the general sound and personality of the band was very similar. Contributing most to this were percussionist Billy Hulting, who was very prominent on vibes and marimba, and insane multi-tasker Scheila Gonzalez, who did an amazing job on keyboards, sax and vocals, sometimes uncannily replicating the soaring sax and vocal lines of Napoleon Murphy Brock.

Here’s the set list:

Black Napkins
Magic Fingers
Wind Up Working In A Gas Station
Montana
Village of the Sun
Echidna’s Arf
Inca Roads
Pygmy Twylite
King Kong
Bamboozled By Love
Outside Now
Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow / St Alfonso’s Pancake Breakfast /
Father O’Blivion
Zomby Woof

Encores:

Peaches En Regalia
Bobby Brown Goes Down
Willie The Pimp

(thanks to Rob at Eine Kleine Nichtmusik)

This music is hard to play, so all of the musicians were top class. Each one was stunning in his or her own right. I have to mention lead singer Ben Thomas, who has a remarkable voice that doesn’t seem to quite fit his body; Pete Griffin on bass, somehow charmingly self-absorbed; Jamie Kime on guitar, who was inevitably eclipsed by Dweezil but when given the spotlight was revealed to be a beautiful player; Joe Travers on drums, whose power and stamina were awesome to behold; and of course Dweezil, who has become a great guitarist and graceful front-man.

Thanks to Paul, my companion at the gig and another long-time Zappa fan.

Taken from a private collection of fairly new art, it was a mixed bunch. I enjoyed a few of the pieces (but, let’s face it, good reviews are boring, so feel free to skip a few paragraphs.) Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s Man Looking out of a Window and Arch together were fascinating. The arch, really half an arch, made of heavy laquered wood, was almost the full height of the room, and was propped against the wall in the corner by a window. In the adjacent black and white photograph, Man Looking out of a Window, which also took up most of the height of the room, the titular man stands under the very same arch. This simple device, including an object from the picture in the exhibition space itself, was surprisingly interesting and almost disorientating, in a way that reminded me of the visual games of Magritte. The sheer physicality of the huge arch, in itself an attractive object, made the photograph come alive and prompted me to take on the identity of the man, who was gazing outside oblivious to the arch looming over him.

There was a sculpture made from sheets of glass by Kitty Kraus, all flat intersecting planes and sharp angles. It appealed to me in the same way that Toby Paterson‘s work does: the way it recalls both the beauty and the ugliness of everyday modernist architecture, which – by way of multi-storey car parks, pedestrian precincts, social housing and schools – became just as much a part of me as I grew up as the mossy rocks, fast-flowing streams, conifer plantations and moors of the North Ayrshire countryside.

I was very drawn to the tiny cardboard models of Manfred Pernice, but I wonder if it wasn’t their cuteness that appealed to me (cuteness and kitsch have been on my mind lately, so I’ve been guarding against their dubious attractions.) But I think it takes more than dinkiness to make something cute in the way that I mean here – the bad way that appeals to one’s base sentimental responses.

There were some other quite attractive and interesting works, including paintings and other sculptures, but what I really want to write about is the bananas. The first thing I noticed on entering the room was the smell of over-ripe bananas, and then I saw them: on a window sill, a bunch of them, quite blackened but definitely just a bunch of bananas. I didn’t have a handout guide, so at this point I didn’t know what anything was or who it was by. A young couple examining them, obviously also lacking the means to identify the works, were prompted by mirth and puzzlement to ask the staff whether they were part of the exhibition or not.

This situation is interesting in itself. Without the description supplied by the gallery’s handout (which I soon obtained) the work is not complete. It turned out to be listed as “Untitled, Bananas, urine (injected),” by Andreas Slominski. The artist wanted us to know that the bananas, apparently just normal bananas, were in fact full of urine. So part of this work is the gallery’s description of it, of the form “[title], [media],” and, following that, the question whether or not urine really has been injected into them.

The artist is playing a game, but it’s much more boring than the games of Magritte. His paintings explore philosophical questions about representation and perception. The bananas seem to me tricksy and facile. Where Magritte’s games were about human nature, Slominsky’s bananas are about the practice of showing things in a gallery. They are a work of nihilism, sabotaging their place in the exhibition by questioning our decision to go there in the first place. I suppose that it’s an intellectual game, but to me it’s not a very interesting one, and it does give me the feeling that I have been treated with contempt by the artist. I might even say that these bananas left a really nasty taste in my mouth.

The other important characteristic of this work, which it has in common with all conceptual art, is that the artist didn’t make it himself. He had a concept and a set of instructions for gallery staff on how to put it together. What is it about this, exactly, that I find so repugnant? Perhaps it is simply that such activities are self-evidently stupid and unartistic, and are especially insulting when they are lauded as important by the art establishment.

I didn’t intend here to embark on a general critique of conceptual art, but I will say this. It might be objected that every generation of artists faces hostile critics, that there have always been grumpy old men screaming “you call that art?” But I think there is a big difference between those who were indifferent or hostile to Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso and so on; and those of us who attack conceptual art. And that is because there is, objectively, a big difference in the art. Conceptual art says “what is art?” All other art says “this is art.”

UPDATE: According to Tim Cornwell in the Scotsman, the bunch of bananas is worth £15,000. You may, like me, wonder who would pay for a bunch of bananas that needs to be replaced and injected with urine every time they go bad, but apparently the value lies in the artist’s certificate.

In my seat in the upper circle I waited for the first chord, which begins the piece in a strangely unassuming way, catching you unaware, as if the orchestra is picking up a performance midway through – which helps give it an eternal, cyclical quality. But when the performance started I was puzzled. I didn’t recognize it at all. I mean, yes, it’s an unassuming opening for sure, and I’d listened to it only twice in the days approaching the concert, but there would have been some spark of recognition even in the first few bars – wouldn’t there?

Shit. I was sure it must have been Messiaen, because when I was booking my seat on the website I’d clicked book now almost as soon as I’d seen his name, but because of my haste I hadn’t taken in who was performing it, and now I thought perhaps I’d read the title of the work wrongly. After all, I reasoned, I don’t know French and many of his works have similar themes, and therefore maybe similar names. On top of this I hadn’t bought a program. “Programs? Pah!” Well, as the music continued I quickly realised that I had certainly not heard it before, but the only thing I could do was sit back, watch and listen.

It lasted around 20-25 minutes and it was mesmerizing and exciting and organic. After buying a program at the interval – and I had to satisfy myself that it was an interval, and not just the end of the concert, by noting the people heading for the bar – I discovered that the main event was preceded with Tevot, a new work by Thomas Adès. Well, what a bonus. Now I’ve discovered a new composer.

I’m going to have to listen to Tevot again, because I can’t recall it in detail, but it was a powerful experience. I always wonder about the difference between listening at a concert and listening to a recording – and there is a huge difference – and in this case I am very happy that I was introduced to it this way. As I watched the players perform, a strange thing happened. The music was mainly strings at this point, a confusing, tense storm of a sound, and I began to see only the string-players’ hands, as if disembodied and riding on the waves of a dark sea. And because, if I remember correctly, the string players were not at all playing in unison but were divided into groups, it actually looked as it sounded, a battle of swelling and subsiding forces, the hands rising and falling in all kinds of directions, but smoothly and wave-like in overall effect. It was like some kind of alternative Mexican Wave.

Then later on, at some point in Illuminations, the same thing happened, and it was interesting to compare the experiences. This time it was not a swelling sea but a churning, choppy, angry sea, with hands being thrown all over the place by crashing waves.

There may not be any explicit connection between either piece of music and the sea, but in this case it serves as a useful metaphor, a way of describing and picturing the sound, of making sense of it.

As I say, I had listened to Illuminations a couple of times in preparation for the gig, and I couldn’t find any affection for it, except for the odd delicious chord or sonority here and there. On the whole I found it dull, disjointed and over-long. I was brought to the piece through getting to know two of Messiaen’s other works, the Quartet for the End of Time and the Turangalila Symphony. These are amazing, immediately ear-catching pieces, with serene beauty, fearsome monolithic harmonies and rhythms, and rich otherworldly sounds, as befitting the themes of religious ecstasy and love, as seen through Messiaen’s particular mystical lens. But Illuminations seemed to me to be a lesser child of these two pieces.

The good news is that the concert changed my mind. The bad news is that I can’t really say how or why. I think the dynamic subtleties really came out at the concert. The recording seemed quite flat, but at the concert the extremes of loud and soft were clear and essential.

That particular benefit was maybe to do with the acoustics of the Usher Hall. Although the sound might be a bit messy when there’s a lot going on, it’s nice and loud. It was much preferable to the performance of the Turangalila Symphony I saw in the vast Royal Festival Hall in London, where the sound was clean but quiet and the musicians were half a mile away.

The presence of a fidgeting man in front of me; an unidentified farter; several people who left noisily at the beginning of the last of the eleven movements, of a 65-minute piece of music; none of that spoiled it for me.