AV High School grad Frank Zappa was a true musical genius

Frank Zappa, a former AV resident — who you might never have heard of, is famous all around the world for his extraordinary musical accomplishments.

In fact, a new movie, “Zappa” is now being played on multiple platforms, including the iTunes store, Play, Amazon Video, PlayStation, Fandango and YouTube.

His dad worked at Edwards Air Force Base and Zappa attended Antelope Valley High School where his immense talent was on display as a true musical genius.

The documentary film, “Zappa” was made by actor and filmmaker Alex Winter. Ann Hornaday reviewed the film for the Washington Post.

“Frank Zappa became famous as an iconoclast, his note-heavy, hyper-orchestrated instrumental riffs meshing with satirically pointed lyrics to create a cerebral, funny, musically mind-blowing genre all his own,” she wrote.

In his wildly productive 52-year lifetime he produced 62 musical albums and 53 more were done posthumously.

His biography on Wikipedia prints out to 23 single-spaced pages.

Zappa graduated from AV High in 1958.

Winter was given the keys to Zappa’s vast and varied

personal archive. The filmmaker used the visual material

to work with and he luckily completed interviews with Zappa’s wife Gail, before her death in 2015.

Hornaday wrote that Winter gives Zappa pride of place among the most important composers of the

20th century, sharing some extraordinary performances of his little-known classical work.

“The most moving sequence in the film might be former Mother of Inventions percussionist Ruth Underwood performing one of Zappa’s most exquisite and difficult compositions, ‘The Black Page.,’” she wrote. “In that moment, it becomes clear that for all of Zappa’s earthbound appetites and flaws, he was blessed with the ability to tap into something cosmic, lasting and true. In May 1982, Zappa released his biggest selling single ever, the Grammy Award-nominated song ‘Valley Girl.’”

In her improvised lyrics to the song, Zappa’s daughter Moon Unit satirized the patois of teenage girls from the San Fernando Valley, which popularized many “Valspeak” expressions such as “gag me with a spoon,” “fer sure, fer sure,” “grody to the max” and “barf out.”

“Zappa” tries to wrap itself around the life and enormous career of Frank Zappa, who died of prostate cancer in 1993 at age 52.

His work has been described as theater comedy, avant-garde performance art, visual design, animation and film-making.

Despite plenty of criticism, Winter doesn’t believe Zappa ever became bitter, either about the earlier reception to his work or about facing mortality at 52.

“Toward the end of his life, he realized that people were beginning to get the substance of who he was as an artist,” Winter wrote. “And to him, on a deep level, that was very t.”