The following is an excerpt from "Chapter 2: Early Encounters with Jazz" of Zappa and Jazz: Did it Really Smell Funny, Frank? by Geoffrey Wills (Matador, 2015). Was Zappa being disingenuous here?

Frank Zappa may have said "jazz is not dead, it just smells funny" but looking at his life and music one does not get the impression that he really believed that jazz was decomposing or dying a slow ...

In October 1978, in what remains one of the worst episodes in the program’s history, Frank Zappa appeared on Saturday Night Live. The rock musician and controversialist worked through a trio of ...

Music legend and cultural provocateur Frank Zappa did a good number of interviews with the San Diego Union-Tribune over the years. So has his musician son, Dweezil, who is interviewed in the April 30 ...

If you grew up with Frank Zappa, and he loomed large in your youth-cultural pop rebel sandbox (as he did in mine), he seemed to be many things at once. The outrageous hippie with the thick black ...

It’s a happy “Franksgiving” for Zappa fans as director Alex Winter’s years-in-the-making authorized documentary Zappa has finally arrived. Touted as having unprecedented access to Zappa’s immense ...

Alex Winter's dense but accessible Frank Zappa doc doesn't capture all of who Zappa was so much as it conveys why that would be impossible. Sooner or later, any commercially viable documentary about ...

America in 1969 was nearly as weird as it is today. A seemingly endless war in Southeast Asia, the horrific assassinations of political progressives and creepy Richard Nixon’s presidency cast shadows ...

Moon Unit Zappa remembers the moment she became the voice of a generation. It was a school night in 1982 when musician Frank Zappa jostled his 13-year-old daughter awake. Frank needed her in the home ...

Dweezil Zappa had no idea he’d grow up to be a guitarist and band leader. But his famous father, the late Frank Zappa, certainly did. “It seemed predestined to my dad, because he wrote ‘musician’ on ...

Frank Zappa’s son Dweezil Zappa has again been forced to change the name of his upcoming band and tour after receiving a cease and desist letter from the Zappa Family Trust, which owns and administers ...