The Skrowaczewski Zappa partnership goes back to college days when both were attending a small liberal arts college in Vermont where on the faculty were Bill Dixon and MIlford Graves. The first recorded instance of Skrowaczewski and Zappa's work can be heard on the recording Visions. Since those early days Skrowaczewski and Zappa have performed with such fine notables as Catherine Sikora, Daniel Carter and more recently, Andrew Wedman. Skrowaczewski and Zappa are both Capricorns and animal lovers.
Surprising enough, the Untempered Festival of Dissonant Arts is a festival dedicated to Untempered, Dissonant music. There is usually a delicious food component and an intentional effort to keep the production as lo-fi and unprofessional as possible. Those able to attest to the lo-fi unprofessionalism include Tom Reimer, Matt Weston, Peter Walker and Jeremy Stewart. A reliable money loser for all involved. Because of this, Wedman and Zappa have branched off into UFDA productions. In that role, to the South Okanagan they have secured venues for such artists as Craig Pedersen / Sound of the Mountain, Brodie West, Anna Webber and Tatsuya Nakatani
MANZAP is the combination of Andrew WedMAN on keyboards and Stanley ZAPpa on Clarinet and Saxophone. It was Wedman's wildly untempered Bass Piano first caught Zappa's attention as being a herald of the next sound. Zappa was right! Together MANZAP bring the untempered and the dissonant to audiences all over the South Okanagan. Wedman and Zappa are also the organizational force behind UFDA--the sound, the festival, the promotion team, the lifestyle.
MANZAPPACZEWSKI is the totality of three semi-wasted lives rolled into one dynamic trio dedicated to the UFDA sound and way. As a group they have no particular musical agenda other than finding the most efficient, effective way to rid our collective improvisation of all accumulated cultural shibboleth. Their debut record Live a Little is, for creators and future listeners alike, a very close brush with the greater "it".