Ed Palermo
may have gained an international following with his ingenious orchestral
arrangements of Frank Zappa tunes, but he’s hardly a one-trick pony. Earlier in
the year, the saxophonist released an uproarious double album The Great
Un-American Songbook Volumes 1 & 2, a project celebrating an expansive
roster of songs by successive waves of British invaders, from the Beatles,
Rolling Stones and Jeff Beck to King Crimson, Traffic, and Jethro Tull.
With his new
big band project, slated for release on Cuneiform Records on October 6, 2017,
Palermo is back on his home turf, but the landscape feels strange and uncanny.
He’s reclaiming the Zappa songbook, filtering Frank through the emotionally
charged lens of the polymathic musical wizard Todd Rundgren in a wild and wooly
transmogrification, The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren. Working with the same
stellar cast of players, Palermo somehow captures the essence of these
iconoclastic masters, making Zappa Zappier and Todd more Rundgrenian.
He sees the
Zappa and Rundgren as embodying a ying and yang approach to life that played an
essential role in helping him navigate the minefields of teenage angst in the
1960s. “For most of my high school days my favorite musicians were Zappa and
Todd Rundgren,” Palermo says. “Rundgren had his songs about self-pity, which
were exactly what I needed back then. I’d go out with a girl and whatever party
I brought her to she’d go and hang out with another dude. Todd understood. At
the same time, Zappa had these snarky songs like ‘Broken Hearts are for
Assholes.’ It was tough love. You gotta broken heart? Deal with it. Todd
Rundgren’s music was there to give you a hug. I wanted to contrast the
hard-bitten Zappa followed by a bleeding heart Rundgren ballad.”
Though the
title suggests a forced merger, The Adventures of Zodd Zundgren doesn’t mashup
the oeuvres of the two masters. Rather, the album mostly alternates between the
composers, creating a deliciously dizzying whipsaw as the two diametrical
stances sometimes blur or even switch. Zappa’s soaring fanfare “Peaches En
Regalia” is more inspirational than smarmy, with a particularly eloquent alto
sax solo by Cliff Lyons, while a brisk and forthright version of Rundgren’s
“Influenza” showcases the muscular lyricism of violinist Katie Jacoby, one of
the orchestra’s essential voices.
Palermo
reaches deep into the Rundgren songbook for “Kiddie Boy,” a stinging blues from
1969’s Nazz Nazz, the seminal second release by his underappreciated band Nazz
(an album which originally bore the Zappaesque title Fungo Bat). Drawing
directly from the maestro’s original horn arrangement, Palermo displays some
impressive guitar work on a vehicle for Bruce McDaniel’s blue-eye vocals.
Napoleon Murphy Brock delivers a poker-faced rendition of Zappa’s surreal “Montana,”
the tune that turned a generation on to the lucrative potential of floss
farming, and McDaniel and Brock join forces on Rundgren’s deliriously silly
“Emperor of the Highway,” an homage to Gilbert and Sullivan.
The
contrasting sensibilities of the Zundgrens comes into sharp focus in the center
of the album. While Palermo has recorded Zappa’s “Echidna’s Arf (Of You)” this
time he replaces the horns with McDaniel’s intricately layered vocals via the
miracle of multi-tracking. From Zappa’s playfully odd metered work out the big
band saunters into Rundgren’s greatest ballad “Hello It's Me,” an arrangement
for McDaniel’s most impassioned crooning based on the original version from
1968 album Nazz (not the hit from his solo Something/Anything? album).
Tenor
saxophonist Bill Straub swaggers through Rundgren’s “Wailing Wall,” which is
sandwiched between two slices of Zappa at his snarky best, “Big Swifty Coda”
and “Florentine Pogen,” another superb feature for Brock. Palermo spotlights a
dark and wondrous Zappa obscurity with “Janet's Big Dance Number,” a brief
piece recovered from 200 Motels featuring Ben Kono’s noir tenor solo. From that
unified hedgehogian arrangement Palermo unleashes the multifarious fox on
Rundgren’s “Broke Down and Busted,” a portmanteau arrangement that touches on
Rundgren’s “Boat on the Charles,” the Ramsey Lewis hit “The ‘In’ Crowd,”
Zappa’s “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It,” and even traces of Steely Dan’s “Pretzel
Logic.” It’s a tour de force that feels like stream of consciousness journey,
though the id truly emerged on the closing hidden track. In what has become a
Palermo tradition, he includes yet another version of an enduring lament about
the difficulties of relationships, arranged this time in Nazzian style by
McDaniel.
The seamless
ease with which Palermo and his crack crew navigate between the Zappa and
Rundgren shouldn’t come as a surprise. Over the years Zappa’s music has proven
supremely pliable in Palermo’s capable hands, as evidenced further by a recent
concert at Iridium that paired his songs with standards indelibly linked to Ol’
Blue Eyes (is there an album The Adventures of Zinatra in the future?).
Everything he brings into the big band is a labor of love.
“Todd
Rundgren holds a very special place in my heart,” Palermo says. “I realized I
was in love with my girlfriend (now wife) listening to his album
Something/Anything? It was about 2 years ago doing our regular hit at The
Falcon that I decided to have Zodd Zundgren night. A lot of people who like the
music of Zappa also like Rundgren and Steely Dan, but there are enough Steely
Dan cover bands out there.”
Born in
Ocean City, New Jersey on June 14, 1954, Palermo grew up in the cultural orbit
of Philadelphia, which was about an hour drive away. He started playing
clarinet in elementary school, and soon turned to the alto saxophone. He also
took up the guitar, and credits his teenage obsession with Zappa to opening his
ears to post-bop harmonies and improvisation.
Palermo
caught the jazz bug while attending DePaul University, and took to the alto sax
with renewed diligence inspired by Phil Woods, Cannonball Adderley, and Edgar
Winter (the subject of an upcoming EPBB project). Before he graduated he was
leading his own band and making a good living as a studio player recording
commercial jingles. But like so many jazz musicians he answered New York’s
siren call, moving to Manhattan in 1977. After a year of playing jam sessions
and scuffling Palermo landed a coveted gig with Tito Puente, a four-year stint
that immersed him in Afro-Cuban music.
An encounter
with trumpeter Woody Shaw’s septet at the Village Vanguard in the late 1970s
stoked his interest in writing and arranging for larger ensembles, and by the
end of the decade he had launched a nine-piece rehearsal band with five horns.
Between Don Sebesky’s well-regarded book The Contemporary Arranger and advice
from Dave Lalama and Tim Ouimette, “I got a lot of my questions answered and
I’ll love them forever,” Palermo says. “Then the real education was trial and
error. I lived in a little apartment with no TV or furniture. All I had was a
card table, and once a week I’d rehearse my nonet, then listen to the cassette
of the rehearsal and make all the changes.”
Palermo made
his recording debut in 1982, an impressive session featuring heavyweights such
as David Sanborn, Edgar Winter and Randy Brecker. As a consummate studio cat
and sideman, he toured and recorded with an array of stars, including Aretha
Franklin, Eddie Palmieri, Celia Cruz, Lena Horne, Tony Bennett, Mel Tormé, Lou
Rawls, Melba Moore, The Spinners, and many others. As an arranger, he’s written
charts for the Tonight Show Band, Maurice Hines, Eddy Fischer, and Melissa
Walker. Employed frequently by bass star Christian McBride for a disparate
array of projects, Palermo has written arrangements for a James Brown concert
at the Hollywood Bowl, a Frank Sinatra tribute featuring Kurt Elling, Seth
McFarland, and John Pizzarelli, and a 20-minute medley of Wayne Shorter tunes
for the New Jersey Ballet.
Palermo had
been leading his big band for more than a decade before the Zappa concept
started coming together. Inspired by electric guitar master Mike Keneally, who
performed with Zappa on some of his final concerts before his death in 1993,
Palermo decided to arrange a program of 12 Zappa tunes. When the time came to
debut the material at one of the band’s regular gigs at the Bitter End in early
1994, a sold-out crowd greeted the band.
He earned
international attention with the ensemble’s 1997 debut The Ed Palermo Big Band
Plays Frank Zappa on Astor Place Records, which received a highly-prized 4-star
review from DownBeat. With Palermo’s brilliant arrangements and soloists such
as Bob Mintzer, Chris Potter, Dave Samuels, Mike Stern, and Mike Keneally, the album
made an undisputable case for the Zappa jazz concept. In 2006 he released
another collection of Zappa arranged for his jazz big band, called Take Your
Clothes Off When You Dance, on Cuneiform, thus beginning an ongoing
collaboration with that label. While Palermo has written more than 300 Zappa
charts, he’s cast an increasingly wide net for material. Recent releases like
2014’s Oh No! Not Jazz!!, 2016’s One Child Left Behind and 2017’s The Great
Un-American Songbook Volumes 1 & 2 - all on Cuneiform and all recipients of
DownBeat’s coveted 4-star ratings - featured a bountiful selection of his
original compositions and material by composers not named Frank Zappa.
Nothing
demonstrates the ensemble’s ongoing vitality better than the stellar cast of
players, with longtime collaborators such as violinist Katie Jacoby, baritone
saxophonist Barbara Cifelli, drummer Ray Marchica, and keyboardist Ted
Kooshian. Many of these top-shelf musicians have been in the band for more than
a decade, and they bring wide-ranging experience, expert musicianship and
emotional intensity to Palermo’s music.
The band’s
following continues to expand with its monthly residency at Iridium and
bi-monthly gigs at The Falcon. In addition, performances (some headlining) at
jazz festivals across the USA are winning new fans of all ages for the band.
Palermo’s profile in the jazz press is also rising fast, with articles and
feature stories appearing this past year in such publications as Jazz Times and
Jazziz. Regarding recordings, albums by The Ed Palermo Big Band have been
critically acclaimed and also embraced by the general public-jazz and rock fans
alike. Palermo has already recorded dozens of new tracks for The Great
Un-American Songbook Volumes 3 & 4, and is hoping Zodd Zundgren helps
introduce Rundgren’s ingenious, heartfelt music to a new generation.
