Napoleon Murphy Brock (born April 23, 1943)[2] is an American singer, saxophonist and flute player who is best known for his work with Frank Zappa in the 1970s, including the albums Apostrophe ('), Roxy & Elsewhere, One Size Fits All, and Bongo Fury. He contributed notable vocal performances to the Zappa songs "Village of the Sun," "Cheepnis," and "Florentine Pogen."
Career
2006 Zappa Plays Zappa concert
Brock's musical career began in the San Francisco South Bay Area in the late 1960s with a seven and eight piece band he had organized named "Communication Plus". He was the lead singer, songwriter, and arranger of the band's strongly R&B-influenced rock performances. He also played the saxophone and flute. He played in a variety of local clubs including The Brass Rail, The Mecca, and Gary R. Schmidt's, The Odyssey Room. He was discovered playing for a dance band in Hawaii in the early 1970s by Zappa's road manager. The participation of George Duke and Jean-Luc Ponty convinced Brock to join the band as lead singer.[3]
Brock's numerous performances with Zappa include the role of the "Evil Prince" on the Thing-Fish album. He has also performed with George Duke, Captain Beefheart and more recently with Neonfire and [1]. He remains a regular performer at Zappanale.
He is most frequently seen fronting The Grand Mothers Of Invention with Roy Estrada, Tom Fowler and Don Preston (the only Frank Zappa alumni from The Mothers of Invention regularly performing the music of Frank Zappa), performing over 91 times since 2002.
His own most recent release is the 2003 album Balls.
Brock is mentioned in the 2007 memoir My Lobotomy by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming, which describes Dully's experiences before and after undergoing an icepick transorbital lobotomy in 1960, at 12 years of age. Brock, while studying psychology and music at San Jose State University, was employed in the mid-1960s as a counselor at Rancho Linda, a "residential center for special education" where Dully lived after having the procedure and being released from juvenile hall and a mental asylum. Dully had fond memories of Brock, and described him as "cool" and having "played all kinds of instruments."
