Frank Zappa’s unrealised dream of creating a “world orchestra”
When Frank Zappa wrapped up his disastrous 1982 stadium tour of Europe, he’d be forgiven for never wanting to get back on stage again. His shows were blighted by all kinds of technical issues as well as insect infestations, political controversies and even, on multiple occasions, riots. But he did return to the stage in Europe six years later for a mammoth 44-show run in 1988, where he played to stadium crowds in Paris, London, Rome, Berlin and beyond. Musically, the tour was a success, but financially, it was a bust.
Zappa even lost money putting the tour together, and he would never undertake such a trek again before his death in December 1993 at the age of just 53. But, in a half-hour conversation with Den Simms, Eric Buxton, and Rob Samler in 1990 ahead of their first instalment of the Zappa-fanzine Society Pages, the psychedelic songwriter revealed that he had been in negotiations to take part in a radical new tour across the continent, which would have been scheduled to go ahead in 1992.
“I was negotiating with these people in Spain” he said, “because they have the World’s Fair there in 1992, they got the Olympics, and they have the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus. That all happens in ’92, and there have been ongoing negotiations for over a year with the Worlds Fair and the Christopher Columbus organisation about either putting together a ‘World Orchestra’ that would tour, or, financing some sort of a tour of a rock band, and I’ll hear more about that after the first of the year”.
He added: “but there’s no way that I’d agree to do it unless 100% of all the expenses are picked up, and I am guaranteed that at the end of the thing, I walk away with a profit because in ’88, everybody else got paid, and they all got paid a lot of money, and I lost a lot of money, and I’m not going to repeat that experience again”.
While we’ll never get to hear what Frank Zappa’s touring World Orchestra would have sounded like on the proposed tour, we can get some idea of what he had in store by listening to his self-released 1979 live album Orchestral Favourites.
Made up recordings of five songs composed by Zappa and performed in 1975 by the 37-piece Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra, Orchestral Favourites is a radical departure from both Zappa’s own oeuvre and the regular classical canon owing to its blending of strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion with less common orchestral instruments like harmonicas, castanets and scorching guitar solos.
Zappa was no stranger to adding strings to his more conventional—if you can call them that—recordings. He continued to compose and work with orchestras, including the London Symphony and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestras, throughout his career.
While he never did get to conduct The World Orchestra, he did at least live to release an album of recordings of his songs and compositions as performed by the Ensemble Modern in 1992, titled The Yellow Shark. In the liner notes for the album, Zappa described The Yellow Shark as one of the most fulfilling projects of his career and also as the best representation of his orchestral work, which might urge more fans to check it out.
