Andrew Hickey
speaker
2,253 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 3 Sep
Andrew Hickey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Marker was not going to hang around indefinitely while Van Bleet wrote an entire new album.
He'd also had a bit of a disagreement with Zappa during the recording session, as he said later in an interview with John French for French's autobiography.
He made some remark about something I did on the bass part.
I said, Well, you know, Frank, at least I don't have to watch my fingers while I play.
And that was it.
He didn't speak to me the rest of the night.
He always watched his fingers when he played, he had to watch what he was doing, he didn't know what he was doing on guitar.
You ever see any films of Zappa?
He watches his fingers when he plays.
And so in came Mark Boston, who had played with all three of the other instrumentalists in the band, and who moved in with the rest of them.
This was the lineup that would record the album that would become the magic band's defining masterwork.
By this point, Van Vliet, while still influenced by Blues music, was getting interested in a much wider range of music.
We've already seen how he was influenced by Steve Reich, but Marker had also played a Mornette Coleman's album Free Jazz, an album which consists of thirty seven minutes of completely free improvisation by two quartets simultaneously, one quartet in each channel of the stereo mix.
All the musicians on that album were people like Eric Dolphy, some of the most technically accomplished jazz musicians of their generation.
But its main immediate influence on Van Vliet was that it inspired him to play Sophano Saxon the new album, despite him never having played the instrument before.
As Marker later said, I think it made a big impression on him, and maybe it's when he mistakenly got the idea he could play a reed instrument.
He didn't really understand the Tornet wasn't just noodling randomly, there was actually some kind of organization.
As well as Van Vliet taking up the soprano sacks, he also brought in Victor Hayden on bass clarinet.
Hayden also couldn't play his instruments, much to the disgust of the other members, and
They respected Van Vliet for his ideas, despite his inability to play an instrument.
Showing 481–500 of 2,253 · page 25 of 113
← Previous
Next →