Ian Underwood

Biography

Ian Robertson Underwood (born May 22, 1939) is a woodwind and keyboards player, who was a member of the original version of Frank Zappa's band the Mothers of Invention. Following the original band's split in late 1969, Underwood continued to work with Zappa extensively during the 1970s.

Underwood graduated from The Choate School in 1957 and Yale University with a bachelor's degree in composition in 1961 and a master's degree in composition at UC Berkeley in 1966. He began his career by playing San Francisco Bay Area coffeehouses and bars with his improvisational group, the Jazz Mice, in the mid-1960s before he became a member of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in 1967 for their thi...