Guitarist Mike Keneally discusses forming the group, launching the tour, and performing unheard compositions penned by Frank Zappa.

The Zappa Band, an ensemble that includes musicians who previously performed alongside late influential guitarist and composer Frank Zappa, launched their first headlining tour in Homer, NY on Sunday and are scheduled to appear in New York City at Sony Hall tomorrow night.

The group, which includes guitarist and keyboard player Mike Keneally, long time Zappa guitarist Ray White, keyboard and saxophone player Robert Martin, bassist Scott Thunes, drummer Joe Travers and guitarist Jamie Kime will perform a slew of material from the legendary musician’s three-decade long career on the trek. All of the members save for Kime share vocal duties.

“We were formed, essentially, by [Frank’s son] Ahmet Zappa in 2018 as the band for a tour he conceived called ‘The Bizarre World of Frank Zappa,’ which came to be known as the ‘Hologram Tour,’” Keneally told The New School Free Press in a Zoom interview last month. “It was a very moving and heavy emotional experience.”

After the conclusion of the tour in 2019, the members of the group expressed a desire to continue playing Zappa’s music together, so they began to perform at various clubs, sans the elaborate visuals that were included in their previous tour. It was at the Baked Potato, a Los Angeles jazz club, where Ahmet dubbed the group as the “officially sanctioned Zappa Band,” according to Keneally.

The band’s first post-COVID lockdown endeavors included a run of dates with UK prog legends King Crimson last fall.

“It was an amazing experience to be able to play this music for Crimson’s audience,” Keneally said. “But it was also very tightly disciplined in terms of time; we only had 45 minutes and couldn’t go a second over. So, it’s nice with these headlining dates for us to be able to stretch out and relax, and not feel like we need to get off stage in time.”

Keneally describes his experience touring in a post-COVID landscape as “surreal,” after a nearly two-year long absence from live performance. 

“We were very careful about the tour bubble,” the guitarist said. “Our whole world was the bus and the venue.”

The format of the upcoming headlining tour allows the group to play around with their setlists, performing a myriad of material both popular and obscure from Zappa’s repertoire, and often including unreleased or seldom-performed compositions, some of which were interpreted from handwritten transcriptions. With such a large body of work to play around with, fans can expect a unique experience from night to night.

“Me and Scott Thunes spent several hours going through boxes of Frank’s handwritten manuscripts, and I found this one piece that was just called ‘Number 2,’” Keneally said. “I think in the 80’s Frank did a series of numbered compositions, 1-8, and this was 2. One bar of this composition ended up getting repurposed in a song called ‘Drowning Witch,’ but this was a completely scored out melody, with chord changes, song form and repeats indicated. It’s all stuff he specified really cleanly, which is a rare thing to find in these boxes. A lot of the stuff we found was just scraps, but this was a complete piece we could learn how to play. It’s a blessing. It’s a beautiful song and it’s a nice thing to be able to play for people.”

Frank Zappa’s music has been known to include complex arrangements and challenging instrumental parts. Keneally, who has been credited as a “stunt guitarist” during his time in Zappa’s band, denotes “Alien Orifice” as one of the more difficult songs to pull off live.

“’Alien Orifice’ involves having me go very quickly from playing some really crazy lines on the guitar, to stuffing the pick in my mouth and executing some crazy stuff on keyboard, and then back again to the guitar,” Keneally said. “It’s this sort of dance, going from one instrument to the other, and if I think about it, I’m screwed. It can’t be mindless, and it can’t be automatic.”

Because many of the members house their own projects and endeavors, the future of the Zappa band after this tour remains uncertain, so be sure to catch this group of incredible musicians live while you still can.

Tickets to The Zappa Band’s appearance at Sony Hall are available for purchase on Ticketmaster.