Zappa remixed by Gotan Project

Chunga’s Revenge started out as a Frank Zappa tune

This is another article in a series about Chunga’s Revenge by the electro tango group Gotan Project – the complete series is listed here. This multi-cultural track connects different musical worlds. For me, it’s a chance to talk tango to people who may not know tango, and to talk about other styles to people who are only mad for tango.

Chunga’s Revenge may not be the most well-known track from Gotan Project‘s debut album La Revancha Del Tango released in 2001¹, but it is the one which tells us the most about the mix of influences behind Gotan Project. And Chunga’s Revenge has its origins a million miles from tango, because it is a cover version of a Frank Zappa jazz-rock tune.

Frank Zappa was called mad more than once in his life. Probably the result of records and live performances playing a unique blend of rock, jazz, blues, doo-wop and contemporary classical music – with just a touch of satire and plain old tomfoolery in there for good measure. His legacy is considerable.

Although old Frank is still generally classified as a rock musician, watch the 2-minute trailer from Alex Winter‘s 2020 documentary Zappa to get a glimpse of his eclectic musical style, personal charisma and celebrated quotability. Zappa‘s teen idols were Edgar Varèse and Igor Stravinsky, two major 20th century contemporary classical composers of whose music he said, in his own inimitable way : “I liked it a lot. Nobody had to explain it to me. It wasn’t like jazz. They were doing some noodling in there, but it sounded like they knew what they were doing.”

Is there a tango connection?

But let’s come back to Chunga’s Revenge, because you’re probably asking yourself who or what a Chunga is, and if there is a tango connection.

In fact, there is a link to tango. Well, okay, to Argentina, the land of tango. The Chunga is a long-legged Argentinian Cariama Bird noted for its loud, yelping calls and sharp claws with an extensible and very curved second toe claw.

Sounds like Chunga’s Revenge could be terrifying, but then Frank Zappa always loved wacky titles. Remember Baby take your teeth out ? Or Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow ? Maybe Zappa also knew that, among latino-speakers of English, Chunga could mean weird or ugly. Unless Chunga was just a word he liked the sound of ?

Generally Zappa was also an adept of sung-spoken lyrics – the above-mentioned Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow being an amusing example – but his original Chunga’s Revenge is an instrumental. The Gotan cover version starts out with an long instrumental part before three verses of sung-spoken lyrics in Spanish come in. Guest artist Willy Crook² chants the words. His is the warm voice of a soul-funk guitarist and singer from Argentina, which neatly builds a musical bridge between Zappa‘s world and that of electro tango.

Perhaps you’d like a chance to compare ? Here for your listening pleasure is Chunga’s Revenge in stereo : the Zappa original and the Gotan Project cover.

If you listen closely to the lyrics to the Gotan version³, you’ll pick up the group’s message : their music is not Chunga‘s but Tango‘s Revenge – each verse ends with the line Es la revancha del tango. In its time, electro tango was an attempt to fuse contemporary electro beats with elements from traditional tango with varying degrees of success.⁴

More than other groups working with the same genre, Gotan Project seemed to be saying that tango was not dead, but very much alive and wanting to be remembered. Chunga’s Revenge is the Gotan business card. My post Meet & greet with Gotan Project goes into the details of Verse 1 which presents the members of the band. The rest of the song lists influences and inspirations which went into creating their hybrid electro tango mix. Some of those named are tango figures – Anibal Troilo, Alberto Castillo, Osvaldo Pugliese and Astor Piazzolla – but the rest are a strange bunch of bedfellows from various, mainly electro, musical styles.

Frank Zappa is honoured as the original composer of Chunga’s Revenge and gets a name-check in Verse 2 of the new version. But why does he get mentioned alongside somebody called Mad Professor?

Meet Mad Professor

You can be forgiven for thinking that Zappa himself is the mad professor in question. In fact, Mad Professor is the stage name for musician, sound engineer and producer Neil Fraser. Born in former British Guyana in 1955, Fraser emigrated to England with his family in 1968. At the tender age of 13, he was already so mad about any sort of recording equipment – which he took apart, customised and reassembled for party sound-systems – that it didn’t take long for him to be given the nickname Mad Professor.

His genius for transforming sound made him an active contributor to the burgeoning art of dub in the reggae world of the 1980s. Dub fascinated people because it was unlike any other musical style on offer : it was deep, dreamy, dramatic and delirious at one and the same time.

Dub music was created by using multiple effects to modify the sounds of reggae instrumentals which had already been recorded. In the hands of ace studio producers such as Lee Scratch Perry et King Tubby, dub became an art in its own right. By remixing existing recordings, adding echo and reverb, emphasising bass and drums, these dubmasters created new music from old.

While Perry and Tubby worked from recorded material, young admirers like Mad Professor created dub performances live with musicians on stage. In a 2009 interview for the Paris Télérama Dub Festival, Neil Fraser explained his approach : “I’m searching for a sound. And when I get that sound, I mix it with the sound in my head and make a new sound. I’m always looking for new sounds.” ⁵ Cohen Solal and Müller from Gotan Project are admirers and users of the art of dub, making its loops and distortions an integral part of the Gotan group sound.

Zappa remixed with dub in the key of tango

And dub is the key which connects Frank Zappa and Mad Professor in this song by Gotan Project, and could be why they appear side by side in the lyrics.

As mentioned above, the original Chunga’s Revenge is an instrumental where the guitar is prominently featured, as you can hear in this 49-second extract from the Zappa original. This basic segment created by Zappa is given a dub treatment with a sprinkling of tango which owes a little to the influence of Mad Professor, as you can hear by clicking on this 49-second extract from the Gotan cover version we all know. In this new version, the solo guitar passages originally played by Zappa are given first to Nini Flores on Piazzolla-style tango bandoneon, and then further on to Line Kruse on jazzy tango violin which itself suggests the influence of Jean-Luc Ponty on Kruse‘s playing. This is Zappa remixed with dub in the key of tango.

To those who may be tempted to sneer at this cover version which only samples 49 seconds of the original track, the ¡YA BASTA ! Records webpage offers some food for thought about the approach chosen : “… we don’t simply recycle, we actually compose. We really wanted to created our own universe so Gotan couldn’t operate simply as a cover band. We did a few covers, but we based them around fragments, as with Chunga’s Revenge by Frank Zappa on our debut album.” ⁶

Still want more?

Try this enlightening, highly readable post from the Tanguito blog about Electrotango which indictaes where the genre came from and how it fits into the tango scene today.

There are other posts on my blog using Chunga’s Revenge as a starting point : Meet & greet with Gotan Project looks more closely at the Gotan band-members ; Gotan Project mix Piazzolla, Troilo and Xavier Cugat investigates the careers behind these three names who figure about the group’s musical influences. There are two more posts to come which, if you count this one on Zappa and Mad Professor, brings the total to five.

There’s a chance to hear more Gotan Project on their YouTube Channel.

Notes

1. That credit probably goes to Queremos Paz or El Capitalismo Foreaño. ↩︎
2. Here’s a clip of Willy Crook and Funky Torinos playing some very danceable music. ↩︎
3. Complete lyrics : Philippe, Christoph, Eduardo / Nini, Cristina, Gustavo / Edi, Line, Fabrizio / Es la revancha del tango // Piazzolla, Troilo, Cugat / Mad Professor, Zappa / Kruder, Dorfmeister, Pugliese / Es la revancha del tango // Thievery Corporation, Castillo, Castillo // Ana, Miguel, María / Noela, Mark, Rubén / Prisca, Arnold, Carlos / Es la revancha del tango. ↩︎
4. Have a look at the thread from this dance forum from 2024 where people discuss the question ElectroTango Yes or No? ↩︎
5. Quoted from Mad Professor‘s video interview during the 2009 Paris Telerama Dub Festival. ↩︎
6. Here is the original quote from Ya Basta Records : “…. nous ne nous contentons pas de recycler, nous composons. Nous voulions vraiment créer notre propre univers. Gotan ne pouvait pas être constitué uniquement de couvertures. Nous n’en avons fait que quelques-uns, et à chaque fois, il ne s’agissait que de vagues jalons, comme Chunga’s Revenge de Frank Zappa sur le premier album de Gotan Project.” ↩︎