Music

Grandmothers of Invention

Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline

Rob Adams

FOUR STARS

The Grandmothers of Invention at Carnegie Hall has a certain resonance. Currently touring as a trio but often sounding like a bigger band, the Grandmothers do a remarkable job of keeping their inspiration and former boss, Frank Zappa’s music alive. And since Zappa’s own sole appearance at the other Carnegie Hall, the New York one, had to wait until almost twenty years after his death, and forty years after the event, to be released on disc, the location added to the treat of hearing the immensely characterful King Kong played by two of its original participants.

Zappa’s promoter had to persuade the New York venue’s administration that he was a serious musician. His flame carriers had no such trouble here. The famous Zappa-style humour was well to the fore and his offbeat lyrics present, if slightly underpowered, but at the ages of eighty-three and eighty-two respectively, keyboardist Don Preston and saxophonist-multi-instrumentalist Bunk Gardner are as agile and dexterous as the music demands.

Grand themes and nimble, time signature switching passages were dispatched with an assurance bordering on nonchalance as drummer Chris Garcia aided the music’s flow and precision with marvellous musical presence and superbly channelled energy.

Props including Preston swapping his hat for a hippie wig and reminiscences such as the tales behind Pound for a Brown and Holiday in Berlin, neither of which has dated at all, made a presentation that was far from formal all the more intimate, and if Zappa’s music should really always have a guitar solo somewhere, we got one. Not on guitar, as it happens, but courtesy of Preston manipulating his iPhone and sounding uncannily Frank-like.