Was Frank Zappa the most unique soloist in music?
The field of rock and roll guitar playing is an incredibly broad and varied landscape, dotted with bursts of intense arrogance and bitter rivalry. The chances are that, if you are a music fan, you already have your own opinions on who the greatest guitarist of all time is, and those opinions are likely staunch and unwavering. However, that has not stopped the debate from raging on ever since the dawn of rock and roll, with the unique tones of Frank Zappa regularly thrown into the conversation.
Frank Zappa was an endlessly unique figure within the world of rock music and guitar playing, thanks largely to his self-taught playing style and his seemingly endless ability to incorporate styles of jazz and fusion into his distinctive sound. If the answer to the question ‘Who is the greatest guitarist in history?’ is based solely upon technical ability, then Zappa likely is not the answer. After all, his music was never meant to be a self-aggrandising exercise in playing intricate riffs or scales; his music was all about improvisation, emotion and innovation.
Guitar solos are often hailed as the pinnacle of six-string proficiency, allowing guitarists to, essentially, brag about their ability through the medium of fast-paced melodic passages. Figures like Eddie Van Halen, Gary Rossington and Jimmy Page established themselves as titans of the guitar world largely through their awe-inspiring solos. As always, though, the debate over who exactly the greatest soloist is is a fairly contentious issue among guitar junkies.
It is difficult to truly evaluate Frank Zappa’s position as a soloist because, as he admitted, he did not play in the same way as many other guitarists. As a result of the fact that the Baltimore songwriter was entirely self-taught and didn’t care much about the boundaries and conventions of traditional rock and roll, Zappa does not really draw any comparisons to other guitarists in the field.
“I’m specialised,” Zappa once said of his guitar-playing skills, explaining, “What I do on the guitar has very little to do with what other people do on a guitar. Most of the other guitar solos that you hear performed on stage have been practised over and over and over again. They go out there and play the same one every night, and it’s really just spotless.” Conversely, the jazz devotee of Frank Zappa was much more enamoured with free improvisational techniques, which meant that no two performances were quite the same.
Luckily, Zappa was around to give his own take on the matter, sharing, “My theory is this: I have a basic mechanical knowledge of the operation of the instrument, and I got an imagination. And when the time comes up in the song to play a solo, it’s me against the laws of nature. I don’t know what I’m gonna play. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I know roughly how long I have to do it, and it’s a game where you have a piece of time, and you get to decorate it.”
It was this unique musical manifesto that helped to establish Frank Zappa among the greatest and most unique soloists of all time. Although his compositions might not have been as iconic or recognisable as somebody like Van Halen’s, the organic, improvisational nature of his playing style triumphed over virtually all other figures within the guitar world.
