On 17 September 1992, Frank Zappa walked out on to the stage of the Alte Oper in Frankfurt to conduct a German new-music group, Ensemble Modern, playing his music. He was 51 and seriously ill with prostate cancer, and it showed.
At the end of the night he conducted “G-Spot Tornado”, a piece he had first released in 1986 as a computer performance, with no musicians playing it at all. The music writer Philip Wilding, who interviewed Zappa the following year, described what came next: a standing ovation that lasted 20 minutes.
Zappa’s own verdict was about the players. “I’ve never had such an accurate performance at any time for that kind of music that I do,” he told Wilding.
Within a week he was back in Los Angeles, and he never performed in public again. And the yellow fish on his living-room wall that gave the concerts their name is a story of its own, further down.
The diagnosis he kept quiet
Zappa learned he had prostate cancer in 1990. By the time it was found, it was inoperable. The news stayed private until November 1991, when his daughter Moon confirmed it at a press conference for Zappa’s Universe, a tribute concert in New York that her father was not well enough to attend.
He kept working. By then much of his energy was going into composition rather than rock records, and into music that needed players good enough to perform it.
Years of orchestras that didn’t rehearse
Fans who know Zappa from “Valley Girl” or the Mothers of Invention are sometimes surprised by how seriously he took orchestral writing. As a teenager in California he went to great lengths to track down a record of Edgard Varèse’s music, and for his 15th birthday he asked his mother for a long-distance phone call so he could try to speak to the composer.
As an adult he paid for orchestras to play his scores and was rarely happy with the result. His 1983 London Symphony Orchestra recordings needed dozens of edits to hide out-of-tune notes, and he called the 1984 Paris premiere of his music by Pierre Boulez and the Ensemble InterContemporain under-rehearsed.
Two weeks in Los Angeles with Ensemble Modern
In April 1991 two visitors flew to Los Angeles: Dieter Rexroth, director of the Frankfurt Festival, and Andreas Mölich-Zebhauser, the manager of Ensemble Modern, a Frankfurt group specialising in new music. They wanted Zappa as a featured composer at the 1992 festival.
What made the difference was time. That July the ensemble spent about two weeks in Los Angeles, rehearsing with Zappa at Joe’s Garage, his rehearsal space, and in smaller groups at his home studio. More rehearsals followed in Frankfurt in September 1992, just before the concerts.
The conductor Peter Rundel prepared the players and led most of the programme. The arranger Ali N. Askin transcribed the ensemble’s improvisations and arranged Zappa’s material for the concerts.
A surfboard that became a shark
The title came from a sculpture in Zappa’s house: a yellow fibreglass fish that the Los Angeles artist Mark Beam had carved from a surfboard. It sat by the fireplace in his listening room.
When Mölich-Zebhauser saw it, he took its fin for a shark’s dorsal fin and decided it should be the symbol of the whole project. Zappa gave him the fish, along with a little deed declaring it his “personal fish”. The concerts became The Yellow Shark.
Frank Zappa’s three nights in Frankfurt
The premiere on 17 September went out live on the German pay-TV channel Premiere. Zappa conducted several pieces himself, including the opening “Overture”, “Food Gathering in Post-Industrial America, 1992” and “Welcome to the United States”, and closed the night with “G-Spot Tornado”.
That piece first appeared on Jazz from Hell (1986), which Zappa made almost entirely on the Synclavier, a computer music system, and that album won him the only Grammy of his lifetime. In Frankfurt, dancers from the Canadian company La La La Human Steps performed alongside the ensemble as it played.
Zappa was too ill to appear on the second night. He came back on 19 September, but his strength gave out. On 22 September he went home to Los Angeles, and the ensemble played Berlin and Vienna without him.
Frank Zappa’s last album and a one-line goodbye
The Yellow Shark was released on 2 November 1993. It was the last album Zappa released in his lifetime.
He died at home in Los Angeles on 4 December 1993, aged 52, with his wife Gail and their four children with him. The family’s announcement was one line: “Composer Frank Zappa left for his final tour just before 6:00 pm on Saturday.”
Frankfurt, 1992, in short
Zappa spent decades paying orchestras that never rehearsed his music enough. In his last working years, a Frankfurt ensemble flew to Los Angeles, rehearsed with him for two weeks, and played a piece he had made on a computer so well that the Alte Oper stood and applauded for 20 minutes. He was already ill, he made it to two of the three Frankfurt nights, and it was the last time he stood on a stage.
To hear it, start with The Yellow Shark itself, and go straight to “G-Spot Tornado” at the end. Then play the Synclavier original on Jazz from Hell and listen for how much warmer the same lines sound in real hands. If you only know the rock records, Hot Rats (1969) is the jazz way in.
There’s more on the full range of his music in our guide to Frank Zappa songs, and for a lighter chapter, read how his 14-year-old daughter gave him his only US Top 40 hit.
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Which do you prefer: “G-Spot Tornado” on the Synclavier, or Ensemble Modern’s version from Frankfurt?
