Frank Zappa [ tickets ] can be, admittedly, an acquired taste. You can be suckered in by the airhead charm of "Valley Girl," only to turn around and be throttled by an instrumental like "Drowning Witch." Every possible musical or comedic genre is fair game, and the faithful (and those with adventurous ears) know that this stuff jumps out of the speakers.

Frank's son Dweezil knows it, too, which is why he decided to take a talented group of young musicians, plus a few special guests (like Frank alums Steve Vai and Terry Bozzio), on the road to play his father's music.
Which they do, and do well. With guitarist Dweezil fronting the proceedings, he leads the rocking teenage combo/chamber orchestra through faithful versions of rockers like "Tell Me You Love Me," funkers like "I'm The Slime," classics like "Peaches En Regalia," bluesy stories like "Cosmik Debris," and more difficult numbers like "St. Alfonso's Pancake Breakfast" and "The Black Page #2." The stars shine, and core bandmembers like Aaron Arntz (trumpet, keyboards, vocals) and Scheila Gonzalez (saxophone, flute, keyboards, vocals) cover a lot of ground.

That said, I'm going to make a suggestion that might seem surprising: do not buy the CD.

The CD is a soundtrack to the double-DVD concert film directed by Pierre and François Lamoureux, and it's not so much that the DVD has more than double the CD's edited list of a dozen songs; it's that, much like Frank's live-band releases, a simple rule applies here: audio is good, video is better. You just get a much better sense of the skill and, more importantly, the unadulterated joy the band exudes when you see the beast itself.

But make no mistake: they don't make beasts, or bands, like this any more.