After Don Preston visited us in 2019 for the last time together with Bunk Gardner as The Grandmothers of Invention, he is now coming to the Zappanale with his Piano Solo program. With this program he already celebrated the start of his 93rd (!) year of life on a European tour in September/October 2024.
Improvisatory, spontaneous, wild and yet sleepwalkingly perfect. The level of playing of the Mothers was unmatched at the end of the sixties. Preston and Zappa shared an irrepressible desire for the unconventional, for example odd time signatures. "We never played four/four or three/four, but rather fives, sevens, nines, elevens, and even nineteens." As the son of the house composer of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Don Preston had piano lessons at an early age, later studied orchestral arrangements and played with jazz greats such as Yusef Lateef and Elvin Jones in the 1950s.
And fascinated by electronic music, by composers such as Luciano Berio, Preston was part of the electronic avant-garde, as someone who drove development forward through constant experimentation. He was also one of the first to build his own synthesizer, long before such instruments came onto the market. But what most keyboard players were doing in rock and pop with the Moog synthesizer bored him. Preston: "I didn't get a synthesizer to play Bach or the latest hits. I wanted to produce sounds that no one had ever heard before."
Even after his time with Zappa, Preston continued to move in avantgarde areas. He played in the band of jazz composer Carla Bley, with Gil Evans and Nat King Cole, as well as with The Residents, Jack Bruce and Robbie Krieger, and became a sought-after film music composer, for example for Francis Ford-Coppola's Vietnam drama Apocalypse Now.
From the 1990s onwards, Preston released his own albums. So far, he has released eight albums that do justice to the creative openness that his name stands for. From jazz-rock escapades to electronic soundscapes to jazz with the Don Preston Trio, always with the necessary extravagance to escape any format. Preston continues to compose, experiments with new electronic tools, practices the piano for two hours a day, keeps fit with yoga and tennis, and breeds praying mantises, which fascinate him because they can turn their heads completely.
