Artists in tur­bu­lent times often must resort to extreme mea­sures to com­pen­sate for the gen­er­al state of cul­tur­al dis­or­der. How can one be heard over the sounds of civ­il unrest? Dada and sur­re­al­ist artists adopt­ed an arch­ly gib­ber­ish music hall idiom dur­ing World War I. Amidst the tumult of the 60s, some avant-gardists like Frank Zap­pa used more pop­ulist means, an osten­si­bly rock and roll for­mat and image, as a vehi­cle for his influ­en­tial clas­si­cal-prog-jazz.

Like the first Dadaists, how­ev­er, Zap­pa was a phys­i­cal artist. He start­ed small in the ear­ly six­ties, if you can call an appear­ance on the Steve Allen Show small. The act cer­tain­ly seems so at first. A young Zap­pa, clean-shaven with a well-tai­lored suit and dap­per hair­cut, appears solo on Allen’s show. He’s tac­i­turn at first dur­ing the inter­view, admit­ting that he can play gui­tar, vibes, bass, and drums. He has cho­sen, how­ev­er, to help the audi­ence recov­er what he sug­gests is a child­hood delight, play­ing the bicy­cle. “How long have you been play­ing bike, Frank?” Allen asks. “About two weeks,” says Zap­pa, get­ting his first big laugh.

Zap­pa also talks about an ear­ly, pre-Moth­ers of Inven­tion project, scor­ing the 1962 film The World’s Great­est Sin­ner, which he calls “the world’s worst movie.” The film, it turned out, didn’t air until 50 years lat­er (Mar­tin Scors­ese names it as a favorite). But the men­tion gives Zap­pa a chance to show off how much he knows about com­pos­ing for a 55-piece orches­tra. Allen seems unim­pressed, and remains so when Zap­pa begins his per­for­mance art. Then the gag strays into a Sal­vador Dali spoof via a John Cage per­for­mance, with Zap­pa as the weird, debonair straight man to Allen’s mouthy com­ic.

Zap­pa plays both the right-side-up and the upside-down bike, which involve dif­fer­ent tech­niques. Though it all, he keeps up the pat­ter of a sea­soned show­man, the direct­ness of a deter­mined band­leader, and a straight face. And per­haps that’s real­ly what’s on dis­play here—not the bicy­cle as a musi­cal instru­ment, but the phys­i­cal act of play­ing and con­duct­ing, using pre­cise move­ments and sequences to elic­it spe­cif­ic effects. For all the humor, there’s no rea­son not to think Zap­pa isn’t com­plete­ly seri­ous about all of this, as it expands into the kind of orga­nized chaos only he could so mas­ter­ly orches­trate.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Frank Zappa’s Exper­i­men­tal Adver­tise­ments For Luden’s Cough Drops, Rem­ing­ton Razors & Port­land Gen­er­al Elec­tric

The Bizarre Time When Frank Zappa’s Entire­ly Instru­men­tal Album Received an “Explic­it Lyrics” Stick­er

Hear the Musi­cal Evo­lu­tion of Frank Zap­pa in 401 Songs

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

1959 was a water­shed for jazz, a form of music that often looks back­ward and for­ward at once. That year, vir­tu­oso com­posers and soloists like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charles Min­gus, Dave Brubeck, and Ornette Cole­man pulled jazz in all sorts of tem­po­ral and spa­tial dimen­sions, giv­ing new shape to bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, and what­ev­er Ornette Cole­man was up to. 1959 also brought us per­haps one of the most tra­di­tion­al records by a jazz great that year, Louis Armstrong’s Satch­mo Plays King Oliv­er, a trib­ute album to his “ear­li­est musi­cal hero,” writes All­mu­sic, “and the man who enabled two of his break­out gigs” in 1918 and 1922.

Arm­strong reached back to those years in his selec­tion of mate­r­i­al, with his All-Stars play­ing such clas­sic Oliv­er com­po­si­tions as “New Orleans stomp” and “Dr. Jazz,” along with a hand­ful of tunes Arm­strong “admit­ted with a sly smile, ‘Joe [Oliv­er] might have played.’” The record­ing ses­sions for that album end­ed up on a “33-minute, 16mm film,” writes The Guardian. “The record pro­duc­er, Sid Frey, had the film pro­fes­sion­al­ly shot but wound up not doing any­thing with it or telling any­one about it.” Just recent­ly, that film was dis­cov­ered in a stor­age facil­i­ty and acquired by the Louis Arm­strong House Muse­um. It’s the only known footage of Arm­strong in the stu­dio.

See Arm­strong and his All-Stars record “I Ain’t Got Nobody” at Audio Fideli­ty in Los Ange­les above. Here, as in the oth­er cuts, Arm­strong revis­its his New Orleans swing and rag­time roots, in stark con­trast to the for­ward-look­ing wave of records from a new gen­er­a­tion. But in doing so, he also cre­at­ed an instant clas­sic trib­ute that “deserves to be placed on the shelf along­side Arm­strong Plays W.C. Handy and Satch Plays Fats,” writes Jaz­zviews, “and in some aspects is supe­ri­or to them both.… ‘I Ain’t Got Nobody’ is a tune that could have been writ­ten by Louis and the group, it fits them well. The whole group are in top form and Louis’s vocal is a gem.” It cer­tain­ly puts David Lee Roth’s ham­my ver­sion to shame.

This rep­re­sents one of “two com­plete takes,” The Guardian notes, pre­sum­ably the first. After­ward, at 4:22, watch Louis and the band take five and talk things over. There’s no audio, but it’s cool nonethe­less to see them casu­al­ly lounge around smok­ing cig­a­rettes and crack­ing jokes. “For now, the muse­um will post one com­plete song on its web­site and social media”—it’s cur­rent song being that above. “It plans to show the com­plete film at a future date.” For now, it’s housed at the museum’s Coro­na, Queens loca­tion, “in the mod­est brick build­ing where Arm­strong lived for 28 years and died in 1971.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Louis Arm­strong and His All Stars Live in Bel­gium, 1959: The Full Show

The Clean­est Record­ings of 1920s Louis Arm­strong Songs You’ll Ever Hear

Louis Arm­strong Plays His­toric Cold War Con­certs in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

Watch the Ear­li­est Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong Per­form­ing Live in Con­cert (Copen­hagen, 1933)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness