Zappa Night In Antwerp

Peter of United Mutations dropped me a note about the upcoming Zappa Night in Antwerp, which is to take place this Saturday:

Antwerp Zappa Night

Details:

Doors will open at 21.00 h, and the opening band, Shit-Gun, will take the stage shortly thereafter. Main feature will be the concert by Captain CheeseBeard & The 7 Sisters Of Prevention, and this will probably kick off at around 21.40 h. In the meantime, there will also be some video screenings, and there will be a little market where you might be able to find that one little thing that you have been looking for for so long…

Looks to be a very cool initiative! Oh, and did I mention there be free tickets? Sharl and I would love to attend but, well, you know

Capt. CHEESE-BEARD & The 7 Sisters Of Prevention – Live In Brussels

Capt. CHEESE-BEARD & The 7 Sisters Of Prevention will be performing two hours of “Live” Zappa music on Friday, September 18th, 2009, starting at 8:30 PM, at Indigo Studios, a new venue in Brussels, Belgium, close to the old Wielemans Cuppens brewery.
Continue reading “Capt. CHEESE-BEARD & The 7 Sisters Of Prevention – Live In Brussels”

Zappanale (Then & Now) — Capt. Cheese Beard & The 7 Sisters Of Prevention



I had nearly forgotten about Capt. Cheese Beard & The 7 Sisters Of Prevention after Barry first posted their video of “Black Napkins” here at KUR back in 2007. Frankly, this ten piece band blows me away with their musicianship and their enthusiasm for the material they are playing (just check out the first two clips from their performance at Atelier210 – the aforementioned “Black Napkins” and “More Trouble Every Day”).

Captain Cheese Beard & the 7 Sisters of Prevention are a ten piece fusion band from Brussels, Belgium, formed by Johan De Coninck in May of 2006 after a year of pondering whether the whole project was actually feasible and worth all the trouble of managing a production of its size.

About three years ago, after riding pygmy ponies for many hours at the Pygmy Pony Riding club and smoking a whole pack of Wellfields (these are very dodgy Togolese cigarettes, by the way) Capt. Cheese-Beard went into a trance and had a vision in which he was visited by his long-time idol Frank Zappa who died in 1993. The great man himself told the captain that it was clear that his oeuvre was at risk of being lost, as it was not being exposed to the music listening youth of today. This was of course totally unacceptable. Maybe it was the side-effects of the Wellfields, temporally disabling the captain’s sense of reason, but during that cerebral meltdown he swore as a proud member of the pygmy pony riding club that he would do everything within his power to bring Zappa’s music back to life. Of course this was easier said than done. The media, regulated for many years now by the central scrutinizer, the sort of person who smells of cabbage, hired by so-called friends of the music biz, wasn’t going to be very receptive to the idea of putting the great composer’s “subversive” music back on the air. To make things worse, the central scrutinizer’s roll consists in making sure that the minds of our young consumers are continuously bombarded with tasteless, lukewarm, prefab pop. The captain, who by now had come back to his senses, realized he had to come up with a different, more daring plan. He decided he would find 9 other crazy musicians (preferably with prior pygmy pony experience) who would join him on a quest to go out there and attempt to play Zappa’s music themselves. He scratched his beard, put his fingers up his nose and smelled that it was good.

The Band:

Didier Demeestere – drums
Pascal Hauben – bass
Sara Corsius – keyboard
Johan De Coninck Corsius – guitar & voice
Rojah Lao – vocals (first 2 gigs only)
Abil Khazzaka – vocals
Vanessa Spy 007 – lead vocals
Katja Maes – melodic percussion
Ansje De Groef – flute
Thomas Van Gelder – alto & soprano sax
Kristof Kerremans – sax
Ludovic Jean-Mart – sax

This band certainly does have it’s groove down. From “Sofa #1” and “Sofa #2” (in German) to such Zappa classics as “Cosmic Debris“, “Inca Roads“, “Yo Mama“, “Andy“, “Pygmy Twylyte” and “Peaches En Regalia“.

The following rehearsals of “Cosmic Debris” and “Peaches En Regalia” show the band at work (and having fun):


Capt. Cheese Beard & The 7 Sisters Of Prevention will perform on Zappanale 20’s Main Stage on Friday, 14. August 2009.