Frank Zappa - Waka/Jawaka (Remastered) (2012)

Confined to a wheelchair at the beginning of 1972, Zappa returned to the idea of composing jazz music, that had worked out well on "Hot Rats". Meanwhile Flo and Eddie, with no new projects announced for them, left the group and started touring on their own. In the summer of 1972, as a sequel upon "Hot Rats", "Waka/Jawaka" was released first, to be followed by "The Grand Wazoo" at the end of this year. At this time Zappa worked with trained session musicians, who could read sheet music. The members of the band were given a book, being a set of a dozen of scores of the pieces they were expected to play. See fig. E from the booklet that comes along with the 2007 "Wazoo" release by the ZFT. Relatively much handwritten sheet music by Zappa himself from this period is circulating. There are a couple of samples and thumbnails from the original scores included in this section and the following two. Apart from that Wolfgang Ludwig has transcribed much of the composed lead melodies from Zappa's jazz music in his study, using them frequently for his analysis.