Dweezil Zappa wants to be a good son.

When your late father happens to have been one of the legendary musicians in rock, though, you have to go with your heart.

Frank Zappa was claimed by prostate cancer in 1993, cutting short one of the pioneering careers in contemporary music, one that explored not only rock, but also jazz, classical and other forms as well with innovative flair.

Legacy was not one of the subjects on his mind, his musician son says.

“He wasn’t interested in anyone remembering him. If you had asked him, ‘How do you want people to remember you?’ he would have said, ‘I don’t.’ That’s a hard wish to respect for me. I’m so proud of what he has done. I feel it has to be seen and heard by as many people as possible. He is so unique. Nobody did anything like he has done. The music is 40 years old and it still sounds ahead of its time. You can’t say that about hardly any music.”

And so the son is honoring his father in what he believes is one of the most appropriate ways possible: taking his music to the people. It stops at Providence Performing Arts Center, Providence, R.I., Oct 25; and Chevrolet Theatre in Wallingford, Ct., Oct. 29.

In a labor of love he has dubbed Zappa Plays Zappa (ZPZ), he is leading a band playing Frank’s music live for what Dweezil says is the first time in its original form since the artist’s death.

It is not an attempt to re-create the experience of a Frank Zappa show, but to play the music as close to how Frank would have presented it as possible. Dates are booked well into 2007.

Somewhere, his dad must be smiling, Dweezil implies. “He definitely would be amused by the lengths we have gone to to get things the way they were supposed to be,” he explains. Some of Frank’s musical parts don’t have any transcriptions, but because Dweezil has his dad’s master tapes he says he can get the right textures “so we can create it, make it as close to the sound as people are hearing on Frank’s records.”

With his father, each small detail was in the music for a very specific reason, he explains. “That was part of the overall musical puzzle,” he adds.

When the songs are dissected, they are very complex. “But that’s the joy of putting this together, trying to get the sound the way he would have wanted it to be. We know it does sound that way against the masters (tapes).”

He is proud of the band that he has put together. “They’ve done a lot of homework and have a lot of motivation to do it right,” he says. There is a band unification and solidarity to “Let’s do it the way Frank would have wanted it done,” Zappa says.

There is no selfishness, no attempt to put an individual spin on it, he adds. “They want to play what’s supposed to be played and not try to change it,” he said.

There is a lot of music to learn. “That itself is a tremendous undertaking,” Dweezil says. “It’s so much fun, but it also requires a lot of attention to detail and there is a lot of skill involved in being able to play it.”

Band member Joe Travers (drums and vocals) is impressed with the effort, saying that Dweezil presents his father’s music with such love and honesty.

Could there be any other way? “For, me, I grew up listening to it and watching him do it and knew there was nothing else he would have rather done,” Dweezil says. “So it was obvious that this was something that was his life’s work. I wanted more people to understand it from a better perspective. He is widely misunderstood.”

Dweezil senses that most people became familiar with Frank Zappa’s music through what small amount found its way onto radio, often songs that had a humorous, satiric, bent like “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” and “Valley Girl.” “He was sort of known to some people almost as a Weird Al kind of guy who didn’t take the music seriously. That is really the exact opposite.”

Dweezil: “For him to be able to put humor into music, and all the embellishments those kind of songs had, it was out of pure love of music and being able to do some things a little bit out of the ordinary. That humor is still minute in comparison to the rest of his material. This is a guy who was a serious composer. He had several classical CDs and his music is being played on a serious music circuit and being studied by up and coming conductors and musicians at universities. He is garnering more respect in that aspect and certainly should. In the world of rock music and on the popular level, people are not that familiar with what he really does.”

That’s why this tour is a good thing, he says. It gives people a chance to hear his music played in an authentic fashion.

Dweezil says audiences are able to hear a strong assortment that showcases Frank at his best: arranging a rock band in unique ways. “He treated rock bands as an ensemble. He would put them together like an orchestra. It was some incredibly difficult music, yet very beautiful and very energetic things. And there’s some humor.”

There’s a lot of emotional value to his music, not only for him but for fans as well, he adds. “Rabid Frank Zappa fans have really connected with this. Almost all of them say his work changed their perspective on music and changed their life in some ways,” Dweezil says.

He hopes it will motivate someone hearing it for the first time to explore the music in depth. “It does change their perspective. They didn’t know he did all that stuff on purpose. He was a composer. It was not just studio trickery like they do today with special effects. Frank wrote and conducted everything.”

He says there was a lot of cynicism before he began the Zappa Plays Zappa tour. “As is popular to do for any son or daughter of a celebrity using their family name, some people instantly assume it will be bad, that it’s gonna suck and all this kind of stuff.”

He knew it wouldn’t, he insists. “The fact this music is so hard and we spent so much time on it, you’d kind of have to be an idiot to not recognize the dedication that went into it,” he said. “You can’t just go out and play this stuff. You have to really dedicate a lot of time and have some serious background before you play this. I knew when people saw how I approached it, they would respect it.”

It is very important to do it in an authentic fashion, he adds. “I know not a lot of people are doing what I am doing. I had a lot of confidence it would turn out well. I’m really hoping to have a lot of younger people get into Frank’s music.”

He believes it is important to expose young listeners to his dad’s music “because they are not used to hearing so much creative freedom” in today’s music. “And he has so much to say musically, as well as political things. The way he writes, it’s coming from a different place. With the amount of vacuous music readily available today, someone who wants some good repeat listening value for their hard earned money would enjoy listening to Frank’s music.”

Dweezil says that music is inspiring for other musicians too. It’s very sophisticated music with odd time signatures. “What I got from his music is he had no boundaries, and he loved everything about sound, and the science of sound, and being able to combine arrangements, things that sometimes shouldn’t be together, but they work. It was very cool,” he says. “He’s got everything I would ever want and more to find and enjoy in his music. It’s caused me to want to learn other things I can apply to my own music. I like the science of sound, the same way Frank was fascinated by it.”

The overall sound of all of Frank’s records is important for people to listen for, as well as producers and those just interested in the sonic landscape, he adds. “He was ahead of his time in so many ways with his music. Music production people need to hear and realize it’s all being played by real people. He was so far ahead of technology, how he was able to get all these tracks into the music, relative to the available technology at the time, and make it sound like it does, with so much clarity. He was a brilliant arranger.”

Those coming to hear those arrangements at the Zappa Plays Zappa show can expect a long program. It’s three hours, says Dweezil. “We are playing songs from a very popular era of Frank’s music and my particular favorite era, the middle ‘70s,” he informs. “A lot of people who have seen the show have called it their dream set. All the songs they had hoped to get to see in one of Frank’s shows, we are kind of doing.”

It is not necessarily a chronological time machine, he adds. The repertoire includes early ‘60s to later ‘70s material. “It jumps around a lot in terms of where it is chronologically, but still focusing on that period,” he explains. “People are enjoying it.”

…Not the least of those is an eldest son honoring a father too soon taken from him, and the world