This album of orchestrated Frank Zappa arrives, as such albums tend to, with a fawning booklet-note by a classical composer – hello Philip Cashian, who’s clearly in love with the Zappa mythology. As Cashian points out, Zappa was indeed a ‘guitarist, songwriter, composer, film-maker, satirist, writer and social and political commentator all rolled into one’ and while, fair comment, it’s true that ‘you could never tell which combinations of those elements would come out in Zappa’s music’, that doesn’t mean everything he touched turned to gold. The big feature here is The Perfect Stranger, which Zappa, with characteristic chutzpah, managed to persuade Pierre Boulez to record in 1974.

With the best will in the world, though, one can’t envisage Boulez really digging its Stravinsky-meets-film score orchestral clutter, structural flaccidity and harmonic inertia. Zappa’s professed models were Stravinsky, Varèse and Xenakis. He was very quick to pounce on what he perceived as the ‘bourgeois’ failings of others, so it’s fair enough, I feel, to point out that The Perfect Stranger probably wouldn’t have got anywhere had it not been by Zappa. The RAM Manson Ensemble deliver a glossy, seamless performance of this relentlessly ‘so what’ music.

The remainder is a mixed bag of Zappa transcriptions. Jon Nelson’s brass quintet realisation of Big Swifty creaks at its many edges, while Little Umbrellas, Twenty Small Cigars et al sound like melodically insignificant doodles stretched around indulgent Broadway-infused orchestrations. Ali N Askin’s take on G-Spot Tornado at least injects some fun into this po-faced homage and his arrangement of Peaches en Regalia, with its grooving rhythm section and unruly wind parts, challenges the players. Then again, there was never anything wrong with the brilliantly idiomatic playing. It’s the music that stinks.