Part of the West Coast, Left Coast Festival

This quintessentially Californian program features Marshall’s tape/brass evocation of foghorns and Partch’s individualistic hobo travelogue. Selections from Zappa’s last recording go all the way back to 1969’s Uncle Meat.

Ingram Marshall says that, “Fog Tropes was composed in San Francisco in 1981 at the behest of John Adams. A few years earlier I had put together a tape piece called simply “Fog” which used ambient sounds from around the San Francisco Bay. That ten-minute piece became the underlying “bed” for the live instrumental parts (six brass instruments, amplified and slightly reverberated).”

The subtitle of outsider Harry Partch’s piece, A Musical Account of Slim’s Transcontinental Hobo Trip, goes a long way to capturing the essence of this novel work, originally composed for voice and Partch’s home-made instruments (played here in an arrangement for Kronos).

The last album released while Frank Zappa was still alive was The Yellow Shark, a live recording created from seven concerts (1992) given in Europe by the acclaimed Ensemble Modern. The project involved a mix of new works and arrangements of older works – 18 pieces for a wide range of ensembles.