Win Tickets to See Zappa Plays Zappa

The Dweezil Zappa-led celebration of the music of his father Frank comes to Tipitina's on Saturday, May 2, and we have a pair of tickets to give away.

Dweezil Zappa brings Zappa Plays Zappa to Tipitina's on Saturday, May 2 at 9 p.m. This tour will include Frank Zappa's 1975 album One Size Fits All in its entirety.

In 2008, I interviewed Dweezil about the Zappa Plays Zappa project, and at the time he said the music from this period is important to him. "The first year's tour focused mainly on my favorite period, which was the middle '70s," Dweezil said. "I grew up listening to that music and watching Frank work on Over-Nite Sensation, Apostrophe on into some stuff from Zappa in New York and Sheik Yerbouti, and a few things like that."

As technical as the music is, he said knowing it and playing it properly is only part of the challenge:

Certain eras of the music, getting the sounds to sound like the right timbre of instrumentation to recreate the era that the record came from is another part of what we do to make stuff really sound right. To me, the character of the record is every bit as much a part of the song as the song itself, so we try to create those elements as best as we can, as well.

One of the hardest elements is to then also get all the vocal things happening because it's hard to find really, really good singers. None of us are the world's greatest singers, but combined we can make it sound pretty good. That's where some of it gets a little trickier because at times Frank had at least four or five really good singers in certain bands; if you do material that comes from that era, it's hard to recreate what's going on there because the vocal parts are so hard.

We have a pair of tickets to give away to see Zappa Plays Zappa. Register here for a chance to win. The contest closes Friday at 5 p.m.