Frank Zappa: Black Page #1 & #2 (with embedded score) REACTION | The Daily Doug (Episode 366)

it's the daily dog hey y'all welcome back to the daily doug i am thankful that you are joining me today it is the middle of the week it is a wednesday and this week that means y'all that we are returning to a special episode of weird wednesday and we are doing that by returning to music by frank zappa now zappa isn't weird but it's different and so that is what is making me go back to zap today since my very first time that i included frank zappa on the channel that piece was inca rhodes that was the first one i did i have been inundated by people far and wide to include frank zappa's black page and i didn't know what that was until people started telling me and so today is the day it's finally here on a weird wednesday we're going to be looking at frank zappa's black page we're going to be looking at number one and number two y'all so we got you covered at both ends one of the things that i have noticed about frank zappa is that he seems to be at ease writing complicated uh rhythmically dense compositions and i have noticed that he expects his expert players to play exactly what has been written for them both in the rehearsal process and on stage and uh to me that that reminds me of a classical influence that frank is bringing into this uh within this rock and roll context and what i mean by that uh you know classical musicians we adhere to we try to stay um you know truthful to the notes and rhythms that have been written for us written on the page and try to reproduce them as close as we possibly can to the schematic that the composer has laid out for us with rock and roll my my observation is that there is a lot of improvising uh and on improvising riffs improvising melodies uh improvising lyrics even over these progressions that are written and get played so uh it's a it's an interesting sort of dichotomy to me that it's it's kind of a rock and roll instrumentation but it's a classical approach to writing composing and then having your expert musicians do exactly what you have written for them right and get instead of giving them free reign to introduce their own um musicality in solos and what and whatnot um so the musicians that uh worked with frank started to refer to his charts as black pages because there's so many notes on them right so what does a a witty uh guy like frank do when he figures this out he writes a real black page he says oh you want a black page i'll give you a black page so uh this piece first appeared on zappa in new york it was a live album recorded in 1976 he wrote it first as a drum solo uh from what i have read and i have a quote here from terry bozzio uh the drummer uh back in the day and he says this he says frank wrote it because we had done this 40 piece orchestra gig together and he was always hearing the studio musicians in la that he was musing on that talking about the fear of going into sessions some morning and being faced with the black page and so frank decided to write his black page then he gave it to me and i could play parts of it right away but it wasn't a pressure thing i it just sat on my music stand for about 15 minutes uh and every day for two weeks before we would rehearse i would work on it and after two weeks uh i had it together and i played it for him and he said great he took it home wrote the melody and the chord changes and brought it back and we all started playing it so what a crazy thing right he's like okay the these musicians they they think that i am asking too much of them well let me write a piece just to see what i could ask of them and can they do it and he does it for drum solo and so he writes this piece he gives it to his drummer and his drummer takes a couple weeks to figure it out and he says great this is going to be a piece now and so he writes a melody and some chord changes to it so that's what i want to listen to first uh black page number one i found a a youtube video of this that has the um the score kind of embedded along with it so let's take a look uh i will try to resist the temptation to try to perform along with this uh i'm just gonna be watching i have not heard this yet y'all i have done my reading in and i have uh i think gotten uh the right uh video for for what we're gonna see this is called the black page number one and it says sheet music and audio goes like this here we go black page number one okay we're going to equal 60. [Music] i'm gonna follow along two quarter notes are pretty consistent [Music] that's first ending wow one two [Music] [Music] wow [Music] okay okay this is gonna repeat back to somewhere four one three four one two [Music] three [Music] okay second ending two three four [Music] wow [Music] the cool thing about it is that it's so hard it's difficult to see if they're actually doing it right but this is staying relatively consistent this under beat okay now comes the melody back to like measure one [Music] interesting [Music] wow the major seventh chord with an added second [Music] there's that same pattern before but now it's got melody [Music] [Applause] i would have not done well i would have gotten some of it but i would have not done well at sight this is not easy oh where are we there it is interesting to harmonize an e natural and a c-sharp over a b-flat chord b flat's gonna be way down below to make those notes fit into the extensions cool little brass licks yeah they have to know exactly when to come in y'all and not be afraid to be wrong okay that's all of that one [Laughter] holy crap is all that i have to say about that that's amazing you know we do things in music school y'all uh to we do these rhythmic trainings uh where uh we do rhythmic dictations we do rhythm drills just to get students used to identifying how the notation that they see feels internally rhythmically to them within a given tempo and so what zappa did there is set a pretty slow tempo underlying tempo that i think the left foot with the hi-hat was just kind of reintroducing uh and keeping steady most of the time during that and you have all of these complex rhythmic divisions that are fit into that that length of time that a beat takes in this instance he said i think a quarter note equals 60 which is 60 beats per minute so every quarter note lasts exactly one second and so there's an amount of time that we have and we used to do these um these drills these rhythmic drills with our students where we would go back and forth just in a basic thing just dividing that amount of time between uh different um rhythmic patterns so if i take that amount of time right and if i i could do one one one that's easy one subdivision i can do two one and two and about like that right so that's duples we can do triplets right one two three one and so on we keep the same pulse we can go to 4. right so we've got ones twos threes and fours all within that same beat right it gets funky you go to five so how do you do fives i uh tell my students uh think of a five letter word that you can say in tempo with every syllable equal right so like university university university right and so you go five ya da da da da da da you can go from five to four to three to two to one we do sixes you can even do sevens i wonder if should i try it let's see if i wake if i work up to it where's fours think like double triplets da da da da da da da da da you go from eights to sevens to six to five to four and you have to go back and forth between each one so one time we'll go from four to five or we'll go from five to two or from two to six and just mess up with the students uh minds and see if we can get them to to internalize how each of those subdivisions feel within this course of a beat takes practice takes a lot of practice for it for some folks and so drummers are people that can do this like instincts instinctively or with a lot of practice or both and do it with different limbs of their body at different times uh drummers astound me uh i have pretty decent rhythm but uh a drummer i am not um let's go on to i want to hear the black page number two y'all so this one is the one that zappa later adapted and he called it the easy teenage new york version so i think this one is a little more groovy and it's got a little uh um easier you know entrance into so let's hear the zappa black page part two here we go new york version disco black page don't don't get down with your bad self i am gonna get down with my bad self thank you frank [Music] from buddy sorry i'll stop just reading it it's so cool [Music] a 13 lit again with those added second chords that frank likes to use big triplets two three four one three four one two [Music] some extensions over that b blackboard it reminds me of a cousin of the same piece [Music] crazy [Music] foreign [Music] blackboard he's using these extensions of these chords [Music] listen how the band is all together amazing we're here major seventh of that c chord drum break all right a lot of a lot of fibers there the trick stuff like this is really not easy to commit to that that quintuplet with a rest to start off [Music] it sounds like an ending to me yeah he repeats this three times ends on the c chord and then they're gonna go off and do other things but that's the end of that it's an amazing piece it's an amazing piece i'm so happy that we've we've looked at it and uh i can never be the same so now i've heard the black page y'all and uh it makes sense to me uh as as a tool for what he needed uh as a leader of a band it makes sense to me uh he expected expert musicianship from his players and this is one way y'all that he can keep pretenders in the lobby and keep the experts in the rehearsal room with him um i'm i'm flashing back to some teaching that i've done a lot of what i taught at the college level was freshman and sophomore undergraduate music theory classes where we would do keyboard harmony we would do dictations we would do rhythm drills not quite as hard as this one but rhythmic dictation and learning all of the the key signatures and notes and scales and chords and inversions and how to put them all together and all that sort of stuff the nuts and bolts and it becomes a real academic endeavor instead of just being a person that enjoys uh the way the music emotionally makes them feel we go into being a professional in uh understanding what it means how it works and how to to recreate it ourselves and it occasionally would uh exalt and put on the fast track those that could really do it and it would uh sort of we would hinder those until they really could do it from going forward and it sort of provides this mechanism that you know if if as a university if we're going to put our name on your diploma then we want the world to know that that we have taught you correctly and that you know what what you're doing so like when you get your music diploma it's not only the ins the institution saying to everybody else this person knows what they're doing it's it's the institution telling everybody else is that we put our faith in this person that they're going to live up to what we expect of a musician to know and be able to talk about be able to do as a musician and of course there are different specialties that people can go into for me my specialty and what i particularly studied was composition was theory i minored in voice and uh so orchestration goes into that counterpoint goes into that and all that sort of stuff uh and it's it's just a way sometimes for musicians to say you know if i have decided to um to do this music and to do my music at this sort of level this is a level that i want to do i want to be a pro i want to be doing very complicated rhythmic stuff because that's my personality you want to make sure that you find musicians that can hang with you right and so the black page seems like a the perfect thing he's like okay you want to be in the band uh play this he's like it's like okay you're in and or he's like try again next time uh fascinating fascinating stuff and as always sounds like frank zappa it's it's uh it's quite uh a fun thing i am glad to have done this today this was fun uh the black page number one and number two finally on the channel it has been several months but we finally got to it today thank you to all of you zappa fans for staying on me and this has been fun thanks everybody we'll see you next time on another edition of the daily dog

Channel: Doug Helvering

Views: 129,489

Keywords: The Daily Doug, Daily Doug, R. Douglas Helvering, Doug Helvering, reaction, reaction vid, reaction video, music analysis, lyrical analysis, analysis, commentary, composer, composer reacts, classical composer reacts, Frank Zappa, Frank Zappa The Black Page, Frank Zappa reaction, Frank Zappa analysis, Zappa, Frank Zappa The Black Page No 1, The Black Page, The Black Page No. 1, The Black Page #1, The Black Page #2, The Black Page No. 2, Frank Zappa The Black Page #2, score

Id: Y_YX5zozzgU

Length: 21min 23sec (1283 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2022