The Stinkfoot Orchestra

Tribute to Frank Zappa

rock

The Stinkfoot Orchestra is a 14-piece Frank Zappa tribute ensemble from the San Francisco Bay Area, founded in 2019 by Nick Chargin, a longtime Bay Area musician who assembled the group to play Zappa's catalogue around what would have been the composer's 80th birthday. The band spent the pandemic transcribing the material, debuted in September 2021, and has toured the West Coast since the summer of 2022. The instrumentation is built for Zappa's unconventional scoring: a six-piece horn section, tuned percussion including xylophone and marimba, a full rhythm section and five vocalists, with players recruited from classical, jazz and salsa backgrounds because the charts demand orchestral reading rather than rock feel. Chargin has said he prioritised musicians comfortable with written arrangements for exactly that reason. What distinguishes the project from most tribute acts is that it is fronted alternately by three Zappa alumni who sang the songs originally: Napoleon Murphy Brock, Ike Willis, who toured with Zappa from 1978 to 1988, and Ray White. Sets run two full halves and span the whole arc of Zappa's work, from the early Mothers of Invention through Apostrophe, Roxy and Elsewhere, One Size Fits All, Bongo Fury and Sheik Yerbouti into the late-1980s material, including songs the guest vocalists recorded with Zappa and others they did not. The group plays theatres rather than clubs, among them the Alberta Rose Theatre in Portland and rooms along the California coast, and bills the shows as straight readings of the compositions rather than reinterpretations. Chargin has recounted that Brock, after sitting in with the band early on, told him Zappa would have been proud of the result.

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