‘The Black Page’: The Frank Zappa song meant to terrify musicians
By the time he was staring down his third decade in music, Frank Zappa was well-established as something of a mad genius. Equally influenced by classical works, avant-garde, and rock and roll, Zappa managed to fuse more than 50 years of compositions through his uniquely warped worldview. While early bands like The Mothers of Invention were rock acts by design, Zappa’s backing musicians became more classically inclined as Zappa’s own compositions became more and more complex over the years.
By the end of the 1970s, Zappa began to pick up on the dread that some sessions musicians felt when entering the studio. Whether they were working for him or some other eccentric composer, Zappa learned that some musicians began to fear what they referred to as “The Black Page”: a piece of sheet music so dense with a notation that it would be incredibly difficult to play accurately. Always one to find the humour in situations like these, Zappa decided to compose his own “Black Page”.
“He wrote it because we had done this 40-piece orchestra gig together and he was always hearing the studio musicians in LA, that he was musing on that, talking about the fear of going into sessions some morning and being faced with ‘the black page’,” drummer Terry Bozzio later explained. “So he decided to write his ‘Black Page.'”
Zappa’s ‘The Black Page’ was mostly a percussion-based piece with a full melody attached to it. His nesting of tuplets within different bars would make any musician have to pay close attention in order to play the piece correctly. At times, Zappa’s compositional decisions were meant to purposefully obfuscate the piece and throw off whoever was playing it – at one point, instead of laying out sixteenth notes in a standard way, Zappa opted to nest them in tuplets of five, five, and six. Bozzio was the first to actually master the piece.
“Then he gave it to me, and I could play parts of it right away. But it wasn’t a pressure thing, it just sat on my music stand and for about 15 minutes every day for 2 weeks, before we would rehearse, I would work on it,” Bozzio explained. “And after 2 weeks I had it together and I played it for him. And he said, ‘Great!’, took it home, wrote the melody and the chord changes, brought it back in. And we all started playing it.”
The first appearance of ‘The Black Page’ came on the 1978 live album Zappa in New York, where the song was split into two parts. The first was part Bozzio drum solo and part percussion spotlight, while the second was rearranged in a disco style. By the late 1980s, Zappa had once again rearranged ‘The Black Page’ into a “new age version” that incorporated elements of reggae and easy listening into the song’s complex rhythms.
After Zappa’s death, ‘The Black Page’ continued its notorious reputation. Zappa’s son Dweezil opted to resurrect the song for his 2006 ‘Zappa Plays Zappa’ with some ringers – Bozzio returned to perform the piece alongside virtuoso guitarist Steve Vai.
Check out one of the performances of ‘The Black Page’ from that tour down below.
