Album of the Day

Jazz from Hell, by Frank Zappa (1986): Talk about misleading titles. The music on this disc isn't jazz and I'm pretty sure it didn't come forth from hell (since, as Zappa himself said, "there is no hell - there is only France"). What it is is nearly an album's worth of music performed by the Synclavier, a programmable synthesizer that Zappa used for some of his most hair-raising compositions. These were, supposedly, things he could not get real humans to play (although Ensemble Modern's take on "G-Spot Tornado" puts lie to that idea). If you can get past the obviously mid-80s synth sounds involved, the music is pretty good. So good, in fact, that the one real live musician piece, the guitar solo vehicle "St. Etienne," is superfluous.