“He wasn’t musically literate”: How would Frank Zappa have improved Jimi Hendrix?
They were both pioneers, but Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix occupied different realms of rock. The former was among the first to fuse the avant-garde with popular music, creating a technically complex sound topped with sardonic lyrics that often lampooned elements of culture he loathed. As for the latter, he changed his guitar playing for the better and, in almost direct opposition to his good friend from the Mothers of Invention, channelled intense emotion into his work rather than cerebral grandeur, influenced by the pure expression of the bluesmen who came before him.
Zappa and Hendrix shared many of the same blues inspirations, had eclectic tastes, and possessed generally innovative mindsets. Naturally, both were fans of each other’s sonic endeavours and played together numerous times, no matter the differences in approach. Zappa also revealed that he had a master plan for taking Hendrix’s skill to the next level: pairing him with someone classically trained who could score his ideas for other instruments.
Zappa once explained in an interview: “I had written in articles at that time that I thought what should be done since he wasn’t musically literate, he couldn’t write it down himself, that he should be put in some sort of working relationship with somebody who could write his ideas and have them scored for instruments other than the electric guitar, and I think that would have been something worthwhile to do but, no. He was too busy doing other things to ever sit down and take that approach.”
Although Zappa never saw his plan come to fruition due to Hendrix’s untimely 1970 death, it’s likely that had he lived, he would have been able to. After all, Hendrix was a big fan of classical music and admitted that he wanted to study it to shake off his autodidactic tendencies. He had grand plans for a new kind of music that was centred on learning the fundamentals of musicology.
In the 2013 book Starting at Zero: His Own Story, Hendrix says in an interview: “I’d like to take a six-month break and go to a school of music. I want to learn to read music, be a model student, study, and think.”
Explaining how his self-taught style was becoming a burden, he added: “I’m tired of trying to write stuff down and finding I can’t. I want a big band; I don’t mean three harps and 14 violins – I mean a big band full of competent musicians that I can conduct and write for.”
This mindset confirms Hendrix as an infallible pioneer who was always looking to push himself into new spaces. He wanted to be a frontrunner in the new musical expansion and knew that in order to do that, he had to find a fresh outlet for his music.
Although Hendrix never got to study music, he was an ardent lover of the classical composers Strauss and Wagner, even if the latter’s politics were famously antithetical to his own. He maintained that his new, mysterious form of music, which fused rock and classical, would have had both German composers at its foundation. You could argue that what Hendrix was essentially alluding to was prog.
