On Waka/Jawaka Transparency Is Key

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Frank Zappa Available Now

Not long ago we discovered the secret to separating the men from the boys on side one: TRANSPARENCY.

On the lively, punchy, dynamic copies — which are of course the best ones — you can follow the drumming at the beginning of ‘Big Swifty’ note for note: every beat, every kick of the kick drum, every fill, every roll.

It’s all there to be heard and appreciated. If that track on this copy doesn’t make you a huge fan of Aynsley Dunbar, I can’t imagine what would. The guy had a real gift.

Big Swifty!

The 17-plus-minute-long Big Swifty is a suite in which each section slowly, almost imperceptibly blends into the next, so that you find yourself in a completely new and different section without knowing how you got there — that is, until you go back and play the album and listen for just those transistions, which is what makes it worth playing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.

Big Swifty is a jazz suite with amazingly innovative work by Sal Marquez on trumpet. He single-handedly turns this music into a work of brilliance. I can’t imagine a more talented player.

Zappa on guitar is excellent as well. Aynsley Dunbar plays his ass off, only falling short when it comes time to do his drum solo on Waka/Jawaka.

The interplay of each of these rock musicians is in the tradition of the greatest jazz artists stretching all the way back to the 50s.

And since the drumming throughout this record is so crucial to the music itself, a copy that really gets that right is one that probably gets everything right.

Zappa’s Jazz-Rock Fusion Masterpiece

What an incredible album. I know of no other music like it in the world. It’s not big band, it’s not rock, it’s not jazz, it’s a unique amalgamation of all three with an overlay of some of Zappa’s idiosyncratic compositional predilections (say that three times fast) thrown in for good measure.

In our opinion it’s nothing less than Zappa’s Masterpiece, the summation of his talents, and a record that belongs in every right-thinking audiophile’s collection. (We say that about a lot of records audiophiles don’t know well, but we’ve been doing it for most of our 27 years in this business and don’t see much reason to stop now.) Most copies, especially the WB brown label reissues, are dull and smeary with not much in the way of top end extension, failing pretty miserably at getting this music to come to life. Our most recent shootout winning copy gets as much of what we like about the sound to actually come through the speakers as any copy we have ever played, and that makes it a very special copy indeed.

A Desert Island Disc

What more can I say? If you love Zappa you need this record. If you want to expand your musical horizons and hear big band like you’ve never heard it before, this is the record for you. I’ve listened to this album literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times. It gets better every time I play it.

Blue Labels and Reissues

By the way, the Blue Label originals are quite a bit better than the later Warner Brother reissues. I would avoid any reissues for Zappa’s albums; we’ve never heard a good one. And that includes the Classic Records reissue of Hot Rats.

We recently compiled a list of records we think every audiophile should get to know better, along the lines of “the 1001 records you need to hear before you die,” with the accent on the joy these amazing audiophile-quality recordings can bring to your life.

The list is purposely wide-ranging. Yes, it includes some well-known albums (Tumbleweed Connection, The Yes Album), but we’ve also gone out of our way to choose excellent titles from famous artists that are less well known (Atlantic Crossing, Kiln House, Dad Loves His Work).

Which simply means that you won’t find Every Picture Tells a Story or Rumours or Sweet Baby James on this list because Masterpieces of that caliber should already be in your collection.

Many of these may not be to your taste, but they certainly are to ours.

Out of the thousands of records we have auditioned and reviewed, here are a hundred or so that maybe are less well known but have stood the test of time for us. As such, we think they are more than deserving of a serious listen.

Waka/Jawaka checks off a number of boxes for us here at Better Records

Further Reading

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