Frank Vincent Zappa was born in Baltimore, Maryland. His mother, Rose Marie, was of Italian and French ancestry; his father, Francis Vincent Zappa, was an immigrant from Partinico, Sicily. Zappa, the eldest of four children, was raised in an Italian-American household where Italian was spoken often by his grandparents. The family moved often because his father, a chemist and mathematician, worked in the defense industry. This had a profound effect on Zappa, and references to germs, germ warfare and the defense industry occur throughout his work. In December 1971, while performing at Casino de Montreux in Switzerland with the Mothers of Invention, the Mothers equipment was destroyed when a flare set off by an audience member started a fire that burned down the casino. Immortalized in Deep Purples song Smoke on the Water. Zappa grew up influenced by avant-garde composers such as Varèse, Igor Stravinsky, and Anton Webern, R&B and doo-wop groups and modern jazz. Zappa was a practitioner of underground music and of his later distrustful and openly critical attitude towards mainstream social, political and musical movements. Frank Zappa died from prostate cancer on December 4, 1993, he was 52 years old.
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 12:59:48 +0000
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