FIFTY years ago, Frank Zappa declared that: “The present day composer refuses to die.” How true, and half a century on from the release of his iconic Hot Rats LP, the drum-roll intro on the album’s opening track Peaches En Regalia still makes the hairs on the back of the neck stand up.

This six-disc boxed set from Zappa Records and his studio creation Utility Research Kitchen compiles every composition recorded in several days in July 1969 when the album was made and it's filled with unedited and studio mixes, outtakes, period radio adverts and nuggets from Zappa’s vaults.

He taped almost everything he ever did in a studio and on stage, which spawned hundreds of bootleg LPs, CDs and cassettes of live shows and radio broadcasts which still circulate among hardcore fans.

Described as groundbreaking at the time, Hot Rats remains Zappa’s most accessible album. Five of its offerings are instrumentals and vocal track Willie the Pimp features Captain Beefheart’s wild scat singing and Zappa’s best-ever extended guitar solo. It’s an unsurpassed fusion of jazz and rock.

Zappa used top west-coast session players — Paul Humphrey, Ron Selico and John Guerin on drums, Max Bennett and teenage guitar tyro Shuggie Otis on bass, Don “Sugarcane” Harris and French virtuoso Jean Luc Ponty on violin plus much overdubbing by ex-Mother of Invention Ian Underwood on woodwinds and keyboards.

Produced by his son Ahmet Zappa and the Zappa family’s “vaultmeister” Joe Travers, the vinyl version contains the original Hot Rats album pressed on a translucent hot-pink 180-gram vinyl disc featuring the 1969 mix mastered from the original analogue master tapes.

There is also a 28-page booklet, featuring unseen photos of the recording sessions, master tapes and tape boxes, and stunning outtakes from the iconic Hot Rats cover by photographer Andee Nathanson. Among the contributors to the booklet is Matt Groening, an avid Zappa fan and creator of The Simpsons.

The box set and vinyl album is on the UMC label and is available from udiscovermusic.com