Album Notes

Alexei Aigui - violin
Dietmar Bonnen - piano

DIETMAR BONNEN: It starts in a time when I stopped my classical education and said: "Now I want to play in bands and improvise and play rock music". And then I've heard, for me, the first Zappa CD, "Apostrophe", and I was very impressed about the percussion parts and the parts that sounded like academic contemporary music, but played by rock musicians. And I said: "If they can do that I want to do that too". You can combine different styles.
The "Black water" CD is in two parts: songs that are very close to the originals, that means that we play it very exactly. We had some scores, we made arrangements and we play it very originally, like "Idiot bastard son" or "Mom and dad". And another part is that we take some themes and play with it. We use it as a vehicle to improvise with it, to do very long improvisation. So we had, I think, a two part CD: original Zappa played with violin and piano and, like jazz, improvising on Zappa pieces.
We met Alexei Aigui in Moscow. We gave a concert there and after the concert we met. The end of the tour was again in Moscow. So we said: "Let's do one song together". We did it and stayed in contact from this time on. We were one or two times a year in Russia on tour with different projects and every time when we are in Moscow we work together. Alexei is married now in Paris. And he is half a year in France. So it's much easier to work.
He is more free with it because he only knows a part of Zappa's music. I think I know all his recordings. But Alexei knows only the pieces we are working on. Because normally he does only his own stuff as a composer. He has his in Russia very famous ensemble, it's called Ensemble 4:34, after the Cage piece. They do only Alexei Aigui music. This working on compositions of other composers is not his normal work. So I bring something and say: "What about this?" And he says: "Oh, not so interesting for me". Or he says: "Oh, I like it very much, let's do it." But he's not trained in historical hearing of all Zappa music.