Napoleon Murphy Brock

Tribute to Frank Zappa

rock

Napoleon Murphy Brock is an American singer, saxophonist and flautist, born April 23, 1943, in San Jose, California, and best known as a frontman in Frank Zappa's band during the 1970s. He sang in church choirs from the age of five and went on to play saxophone, clarinet, flute and keyboards. In the late 1960s he led the San Francisco group Communication Plus as vocalist and arranger, and by the early 1970s he was working in Hawaii with his band Gregarious Movement, where one of Zappa's road managers saw him perform. Brock initially turned down the offer, citing his jazz leanings and existing obligations, and joined only after the tour in question had finished; the chance to work alongside George Duke and Jean-Luc Ponty was what changed his mind. He appears on more than two dozen Zappa releases, among them Apostrophe ('), Roxy & Elsewhere, One Size Fits All and Bongo Fury, and took the role of the Evil Prince on Thing-Fish. After Zappa's death he became a fixture of the ensembles that carry the repertoire forward, performing with The Grandmothers and Grande Mothers Re:Invented, Project/Object, the Ed Palermo Big Band and Dweezil Zappa's Zappa Plays Zappa; his performance of Peaches en Regalia with Dweezil Zappa and Steve Vai, a tune first heard on Hot Rats in 1969, won a Grammy in 2009. He has appeared in several documentaries about Zappa's work and has supported music education through the Paul Green School of Rock Music. In recent years he has fronted the Stinkfoot Orchestra, a 14-piece Zappa ensemble formed in San Jose in 2019 by Nick Chargin that played its first show in September 2021 and began touring in 2022, sharing frontman duties with fellow Zappa alumni Ray White and Ike Willis.

Official site

Past shows