mugwumpnazz

“Alright, Whip It Out”: The Behind-the-Scenes Life of Ian Underwood

Underwood was born in 1939 in New York City and had attained both a bachelors from Yale and a master’s degree in music composition from Berklee by 1966. Despite his composition education, he ended up making a career out of performing, and in the 60s played with his own jazz group – The Jazz Mice – before joining Zappa’s band The Mothers of Invention (who didn’t play jazz) in 1967 for their third album – the great, experimental, and pseudo-psychedelic We’re Only in it for the Money. Zappa, who was no doubt at the time suffering from the perennial problem of having more musical ideas than he did people to play them, probably needed a multi-instrumentalist like Underwood. He speaks about meeting Zappa’s group on the track Ian Underwood Whips it Out from the album Uncle Meat, a conversation that also features Zappa’s consistently strange dialect, which I have dutifully transcribed below:

My name is Ian Underwood and I’m the straight member of the group. One month ago, I heard the Mothers of Invention, at the theater. I heard them on two occasions, and on the second occasion, I went up, to Jim Black [the drummer for The Mothers], and said, “I like your music. I would like to come down and play with you.” Two days later I came up to the recording session, Frank Zappa was sitting in the control room, I walked up and said “How do you do, my name is Ian Underwood, and I like your music, and I would like to play with your group.” Frank Zappa says, “What can you do that’s fantastic?” I said “I can play alto saxophone and piano.” He said “Alright. Whip it out.”

In his time with Zappa, he has been featured on several of his iconic recordings. On Hot Rats, one of the earliest jazz fusion albums ever, he played multiple instruments and is listed as the only other main contributor along Zappa. His woodwind and keyboard sounds add a lot to the colorful and diverse sound of the album that sets it apart from the more well-known jazz fusion albums that came later. He also performed on many of the early albums with the original lineup of the Mothers, and followed Zappa’s ever-changing personnel into the 70s to perform on his most popular record Apostrophe(‘), which includes the infamous Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow suite (the album unfortunately doesn’t spotlight Underwood’s skills as much as the earlier ones do). On these albums, he can be seen playing woodwinds such as saxophone, flute, and clarinet; as well as doing keyboards and singing.

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Ian Robertson Underwood (born May 22, 1939)

Around this time, frontman Frank Zappa’s compositions were growing in scope and ambition, and if he could find a utility player who could help him realize his vision and take the music to greater heights, he knew he’d get somewhere.

Well, as recounted on “Ian Underwood Whips It Out”, Ian went up to Jimmy Carl Black and asked about playing with the band, with The Indian pointing him in Frank’s direction and the rest is history.

As brilliant as the Mothers already were, they became that much more brilliant upon Ian’s arrival. In Ian, the band had yet another brilliant wind player to work alongside Bunk Gardner and bring a greater emphasis on the influence of free jazz giants like Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk.

Ian Underwood is a woodwind playing, keyboards recording, multi-instrumentalist jazz machine best known for being a member of Frank Zappa’s backing band in his early years. He is lesser known for his work as a session and film musician later in his life, from which each has accumulated many (but not always obscure) credits to his name.

After retiring the name the Mothers of Invention in the late 1970s, Zappa withdrew from explicit political commentary and released, under his own name, the enormously influential jazz-rock fusion album Hot Rats (1969), which featured a memorable vocal from his old friend Don Van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart. Throughout the 1970s Zappa released instrumental albums that featured orchestral music, jazz, his own guitar improvisations, and, later, synthesizers and sequencers.

Zappa was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and he was a 1997 recipient of the Grammy Award for lifetime achievement.

Avant-guard composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varèse attracted him alongside interest in doo-wop/R&B and modern jazz.

Frank Vincent Zappa, born in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 21, 1940, was a prolific workaholic who released more than 60 albums in his 30-year career. His first release with the original Mothers of Invention, the conceptual double album Freak Out! (1966), was a key influence on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released the following year. By way of wry acknowledgment, the cover of the Mothers’ third album, We’re Only in It for the Money (1968), parodied that of Sgt. Pepper’s, just as the music challenged the Beatles’ visions of love and beauty with the deliberate “ugliness” with which Zappa assailed what he saw as the totalitarian philistinism of the establishment and the vacuous fatuity of many aspects of hippie subculture. Zappa was not a hippie, he claimed. He was a “freak.”

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 21, 1940, Frank Zappa was largely a self-taught musician, whose 30-year career embraced a wide variety of musical genres, encompassing rock, jazz, synth and symphonies.

Avant-garde composers, as well as math and chemistry from his father's work, all fell into Zappa's mix of influences and comprised his unique approach to his art, coupled with a flouting of convention.

Zappa also directed films, designed album covers and spoke about social issues. Although his unconventional aspect often overshadowed his brilliance, Zappa is highly respected as a musical pioneer. He died from prostate cancer on December 4, 1993, at age 52.

Ian Underwood Whips it Out from the album Uncle Meat, a conversation that also features Zappa’s consistently strange dialect:

"My name is Ian Underwood and I’m the straight member of the group.

One month ago, I heard the Mothers of Invention, at the theater. I heard them on two occasions, and on the second occasion, I went up, to Jim Black [the drummer for The Mothers], and said, “I like your music.

Photo by George Rodriguez

In late July 1968, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention brought a three-ring circus to Los Angeles’s Whisky-A-Go-Go nightclub. They had some history at the club. They had played there early in their careers, but by this point they were an established act: they’d toured Europe, released four records and Zappa was in the process of starting his own record label. This July evening was a showcase not just for the Mothers, then, but also for acts he’d signed: The GTOs, a group of singers who doubled as groupies, street musician Wild Man Fisher and Alice Cooper. The show was recorded for possible release.

That album never materialized in Zappa’s lifetime, but some 56 years later this evening’s events are here on Whisky-A-Go-Go 1968. It’s not the full night, just the Mothers sets, boiling down a five-hour show to just under three.

"Black Tie White Noise"