Review: JUST ANOTHER BAND FROM SA - LÄTHER PLAY THE MUSIC OF FRANK ZAPPA - ADELAIDE FRINGE 2023 at Governor Hindmarsh Hotel

Reviewed by Ray Smith, Sunday 26th February 2023.

I was already excited at the prospect of hearing Läther perform at Adelaide's iconic and award-winning venue, The Governor Hindmarsh Hotel but, arriving quite early, the sound of the band playing for their sound check sent a shiver of anticipation up my spine.

This was probably the most inaccurately named event in the 2023 Adelaide Fringe, or any other festival for that matter, because Läther is anything but "just another band from South Australia", for it is, in fact, a collection of some of the most talented musicians to be found anywhere on the planet, performing some of the most complex and difficult music ever conceived for such an ensemble as this.

As we entered the capacious venue to find ourselves some seats, we could see that the audience space had been arranged with its usual dining tables and peripheral seating, but with a large open area in front of the stage as if cleared for dancing. There was unlikely to be any dancing however, because the music that was about to erupt from the stage would not be some form of steady, strict tempo offering that would allow an audience to bop along, but would be rather a mind-blowing, polyrhythmic smorgasbord of exquisite precision that would move the brain rather than the body. The venue managers had wisely cleared the space in order to allow a mass of people, very familiar with the music that was about to be played, to stand in reverent concentration as they gleefully allowed it to wash over them.

I have seen Läther perform many times before, and many of the members were very familiar to me, but there were a couple of new faces performing tonight. While they were new to this particular lineup, they were certainly not new to sophisticated music audiences from all over the world, and their addition to this extraordinary ensemble added yet another layer of excitement to the eager anticipation of the diverse crowd, in an atmosphere that was already electric before the first note had been played.

Läther is the brainchild of Tim Hogan, one of the finest guitarists to ever walk onto a stage, and it was he who had transcribed and arranged the material in a superhuman labour of love, and it was he who had carefully recruited the members of the ensemble, and that recruitment process had to be a careful one because, quite frankly, there are very few musicians around that could pull it off.

Gerry Masi on vocals, Jez Martin on bass, Ryan Simm on vibraphone and percussion, Dave Saunders on alto sax, and Gareth Davis on trombone, I knew from personal experience could definitely pull it off, and tonight they were to be joined for the first time by Craig Lauritsen on drums and Chris Norton on keyboards and vocals.

Craig Lauritsen has been the primary player among my favourite musician for decades, and he has been a personal friend for just as long. I have even been lucky enough to have performed with him in a number of ensembles, which granted me the opportunity to observe his process and prowess in the way that he approaches the music that he performs. His fluency and machine-like accuracy are breathtaking, but it is his ability to interpret the written music in a way that allows for subtle nuances that simply cannot be transcribed to the page, and I was very keen to see how he would apply his extraordinary skill set to the madness and genius of Zappa's works.

Chris Norton is an American musician who is no stranger to the music that he was about to be part of, since he had played with Frank Zappa's son Dweezil for ten years, in the band "Zappa Plays Zappa", an extraordinary homage to a father from his brilliantly talented son. While that association offers great authenticity and 'street cred' to his place in Hogan's Läther, Norton's credentials go far further than that, having also led a Cirque de Soliel ensemble. As the podcast, the Keyboard Chronicles put it, "Chris Norton has arguably been part of two of the more stressful gigs a keyboard player can be involved in, band leading a Cirque du Soleil show, and playing as part of Dweezil Zappa's Zappa Plays Zappa. Chris has not only managed to pull off both with aplomb, but has a career full of highlights and lots more on the horizon." This is a player of such high stature that he has nothing left to prove, and keyboard nerds (like me) can enjoy this tour of his rig and an interview.

It was interesting, dear reader, to observe these remarkable musicians' body language just before they took to the stage, because it was clear that they were not so much nervous or anxious about the challenges that they were about to face, but fully aware of the complexity of their individual roles and that they would all have to be ready to deviate from the written works in an instant, as the underlying unpredictability of Zappa's music unfolded in real time.

The capacity crowd roared with delight as the band took the stage with an opening gambit of three vocal pieces, Heavy Duty Judy, Andy, and Dog Breath, that allowed Masi's incredible voice to slide effortlessly through an octave or six, his eyes twinkling as mischievously as ever. He's a delightfully funny and thoroughly naughty man who takes great delight in his irreverence and Zappa's crazy lyrics. As a band member, who shall remain nameless, said to me, "the voice is perfectly trained, but the singer not so much".

There were, of course, instrumental solos aplenty but the inclusion of Lauritsen and Norton allowed for new ground to be trod, and the band would break down into a trio of Norton, Lauritsen, and Martin giving a master class in improvisation and silent communication as they wheeled and spiralled their way through previously unheard melodies, rhythms and bass harmonies composed on the fly.

Straight into a saxophone solo from Saunders, his flurry of notes one minute barking insistently and the next whispering like water over stones, as the drums and bass shift with him, holding a steady but amorphous support to his audible train of thought, Ryan Simms' vibraphone bursts in, the speed of his sticks rendering them invisible as he flicks between the bubbling blur of the vibes to the punctuating attack of an array of tuned cowbells as all the while Hogan assembled impossible sequences of notes on his guitar, while calmly and silently conducting everything and everyone from behind it.

The Grand Wazoo opened with Gareth Davies's trombone doing things that trombones should really not be able to do, and if they could it should be illegal because it must dishearten brass players across the globe. His playing simply defies description because not only is it superbly controlled and utterly fresh but it seems to operate outside normal space-time as his physical actions on the instrument do not appear to correspond to the sounds emanating from it. There is obviously some form of magic involved and the results are indeed spellbinding.

There was a slight downside to the set, and I have to say it was inevitable and unavoidable. There were calls from the audience of "more horns" or "more drums" or "more something else" from different areas of the venue, and while Hogan suggested reductive rather than additive mixing, there was nothing that the audio engineers could do to appease everyone. While the Governor Hindmarsh has superb audio equipment and very experienced and skilled audio engineers, the very architecture of the building creates acoustic dead spots that simply cannot be overcome. Most musicians who have played there are aware of it and, while it is one of the best venues in the country in which to perform, from a player's viewpoint, it can be a difficult venue in which to hear intricate music.

During the short intermission, I was able to have a brief chat with Craig Lauritsen who confessed, very uncharacteristically, that the next set contained what he described as his nemesis. It is a short piece entitled, T'Mershi Duween, which Frank Zappa once described as a Yugoslavian kind of song, and went on to explain that a very close, and very short friend of his had told him that T'Mershi Duween was the Queen of the desert, "and I believe her" he added. In the liner notes of the 1999 album, Everything is Healing Nicely, Gail Zappa explains that T'Mershi Duween is a camel and has a friend named Sinni. Why a camel named T'Mershi Duween should instigate the composition of a short tune with a ridiculous number of time, tempo, and key changes that would in 2023 intimidate one of the greatest musicians I've ever known, I do not know, but I do know that it was a character invented by the then four-year-old Moon Zappa, Frank and Gail's daughter, which also inspired an English Frank Zappa fanzine in 1988.

It's a funny old world isn't it, but, just for the record Lauritsen and Läther nailed that nemesis camel to the back wall of the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel on the 26th of February 2023 with great precision, and you should have been there to witness it.