December of 1971 was extremely eventful for the Mothers of Invention. First, during a show in France, some dickhead in the audience fired a flare gun that burned down the casino. As everyone knows, this incident was immortalized in Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”. The band lost $50,000 (equivalent to $320,000 today) worth of equipment and had to rent equipment for the rest of the tour, which wouldn’t last much longer anyway BECAUSE, secondly, a week later, Frank himself was attacked and knocked off stage by a member of the audience in London. He landed in the orchestra pit, which severely injured his head, neck, back, and one of his legs. This was the best thing to ever happen to Frank Zappa!

I mean, no, not really. He was wheelchair-bound for almost a year, suffered permanent back pain for the rest of his life, and a crushed larynx that changed his voice. He couldn’t tour during recovery, and THAT’S the good part, because it meant bye-bye Flo & Eddie! They didn’t want to wait for a recovery that may never happen, so they scooped up some Mothers members and went off on their own to continue their wildly unsuccessful frontman careers. Meanwhile, not content to sit around doing nothing, Zappa put his brain to some paper and started composing some jazz fusion music reminiscent of the immediate pre-Flo & Eddie era. In my mind, he picked up where he left off. After jotting down some freshly composed music, he assembled a team of session musicians (and some of the old Mothers alumni) and put together his own big band combo. Waka/Jawaka is the spiritual second installment of the trinity of jazz fusion records that are often lumped together in discussions about Zappa’s foray into jazz fusioning; the first being Hot Rats, the second being The Grand Wazoo. I like this one the best.

Four tracks total, 36 minutes. “Big Swifty” is the album’s 17-minute grand entrance; a jaw-dropping display of hyper-fast technical noodlings, layered instrumentation, and complex, professional, and mature compositional flexing. In fact, you could say the same about the title track “Waka/Jawaka”, which is the album’s 11-minute grand exit! Both tracks feature some of the most impossibly intricate and demanding jazz fusion outside of Miles Davis’ electric period, but Frank didn’t load up these arrangements with atonal, nonsensically avant-garde filler either. The album is at its most experimental during the more spacey sections of “Big Swifty”, but it never feels like the music completely disappears among trippy sludge like your average Sun Ra record. Anyone going into Waka/Jawaka with hesitations over the immense track lengths, worried about expansive John Zorn freak-outs or even, godforbid, Chick Corea or Pat Methany elevator muzak, they will be pleasantly surprised to find none of that here. After the opening theme and about a minute of tasteful full-band improvisation, “Big Swifty” features George Duke soloing on keyboard, then Sal Marquez soloing on trumpet, then Zappa himself improvising with guitar while Duke and Marquez continue noodling in the background. All these instruments lazily swirl around each other, creating moody and suspenseful atmosphere. I think the 17 minutes go by fast, but I also hit my head on concrete about 250 times as a child.

Gotta get back to the title track for a few comments. That bombastic staccato brass intro, followed by that raw, yet smooth and fluttery, trumpet solo over slightly exotic acoustic guitar accompaniment, followed by the dreamy and hazy Moog synthesizer solo? *chef’s kiss* Exquisite. Absolutely phenomenal. If anyone knows anything out there among early-’70s jazz fusion that hits the mark like the first five minutes of “Waka/Jawaka” please let me know, because I need more of this in my life. The next few minutes of Zappa’s guitar soloing, just like any other Zappa guitar solo, is excellent. After a brief drum solo, we come to a closing reprise that hits the major melodies introduced at the beginning of the piece, although slower. Fade to black. Fantastic.

The middle two tracks are vocal pieces with inoffensive lengths. “Your Mouth” is blues rock gone delightfully, horribly awry, with odd swaggering vocals and some cool horn parts. It feels like a demented alternate-universe Chunga’s Revenge cut (“Your mouth/Is your religion/You put your face in a hole like that“). “It Just Might Be a One-Shot Deal” fuses jazz with country-western music in an inconceivably perfect combination, ending with a blissful pedal steel guitar solo that could have been 45 minutes longer and I would have been on board for every single second. Any Zappa skeptic should at least hear this one, it’s one of the greatest underrated achievements of Zappa’s oeuvre and it’s buried here forever on one of his jazz fusion albums. As far as I’m aware, the track was never performed live in its entirety. Usually parts get chopped up for the “Greggery Peccary” suite, most notably the “You should be digging it while it’s happening” jump before the solo.

I think this whole album is a masterpiece. The immediate follow-up The Grand Wazoo does not hit any of the same ultra-highs for me despite its wider range of styles and motifs. Thank fucking God that Zappa was nearly crippled or else we would’ve had 100 more Flo & Eddie albums to sift through instead. I can’t even imagine that, it’s too painful.

VERY GOOD