Dweezil Zappa is still surprised by his father’s music.

That’s no small feat, considering he has made Frank Zappa his main focus since forming Zappa Plays Zappa in 2006. Dweezil’s group has survived multiple lineup changes and a nasty inter-family battle over Frank’s estate in the mid-2010s, during which time he dropped the Zappa Plays Zappa name.

He estimates he and the group have learned more than 500 of Frank’s songs — which is just scratching the surface when you’re talking about a man who in his lifetime released more than 60 albums spanning psychedelic rock, blues, pop, improvisational jazz, classical and more.

“I always tell people that this is the music from the future,” Dweezil said recently from home in Los Angeles, where he was prepping for the next leg of his Hot Rats Live tour. The tour, which will feature the titular 1969 album performed in its entirety alongside a second set of Frank’s songs, stops at The Tower Theatre on Friday.

“This is music that you will always find surprises in — the different textures, the different elements that put it all together,” he continued. “And having learned so much of it over the last 15 years, I’m constantly amazed that there — I’ve never detected a template or a pattern where he’s taken something and he’s said, ‘Oh, OK, I’m gonna rehash this idea.’ He really starts with a blank canvas with everything and makes a completely new thing.”

“Hot Rats,” made up of five instrumentals and one vocal track, “Willie the Pimp,” sung by Captain Beefheart, is one of the best examples of Frank’s adventurousness. Released in 1969, about one month after Dweezil was born, the album was Frank’s first after dissolving the original Mothers of Invention, whose releases such as “Freak Out!” and “We’re Only in it for the Money” became cornerstones of the ’60s counterculture and psychedelic movements.

“Hot Rats,” which was dedicated to Dweezil, found Frank stepping out of his guitar comfort zone and into jazz, classical and improvisational composition. That’s one of the reasons the album has become a fan favorite, Dweezil said. The recording techniques Frank pioneered during the sessions have also allowed the album to stand the test of time.

“It’s also if not the first record, one of the very first records to have a stereo drum sound,,” Dweezil said. “It’s crazy that at that time, stereo was just becoming a thing — it’s ubiquitous now, but at that time it would have been like putting on 3D glasses. … He was manipulating tape speed to change the pitch of different instruments to increase their range — like saxophones and woodwinds — so that they could hit notes that they wouldn’t be able to hit otherwise.”

In setting out to recreate the album live, Dweezil wanted to get as close to the recording as possible, going so far as to tour with a “unique gold top Les Paul just like the one (Frank) used to make the album,” he wrote in his online blog. That of course meant learning certain songs note-for-note, but also deciding where to keep improvisational moments.

“As a general rule, my dad’s music when he performed it live, there are things that are meant to be improvised,” Dweezil said. “So even if he was to play some of the songs from ‘Hot Rats,’ he would not try to re-create them at all the way they are on the record.”

“Peaches En Regalia,” one of the elder Zappa’s most popular compositions, is already pretty structured on-record. Dweezil and his band have been playing that song for the last 14 years, going back to the start of Zappa Plays Zappa — the band won a Grammy Award in 2009 for their live recording of the tune. But Dweezil also meticulously learned guitar solos on longer songs such as the almost nine-minute “Son of Mr. Green Genes.”

“That took a lot of time to memorize a seven-minute solo,” he said. “It’s like trying to memorize the phone book. … But then there are other things that remain improvisational. The song ‘Gumbo Variations’ is a fully improvisational song on the record, so we kept that fully improvisational live.”

Two songs, “Little Umbrellas” and the rhythmically complex “It Must Be a Camel,” were never performed live by Frank Zappa. That wasn’t necessarily due to the challenging nature of the songs as much as available instrumentation and the nature of how the songs were composed, Dweezil said.

“I think (‘It Must Be a Camel’ is) one of these in-studio compositions where he had a sketch of a lead melody and then he just decided to add all these colors to it in the studio,” he said. “It’s more of a studio-built idea than a composed idea where he would be sitting and writing at the piano. This one was I think more of an experimental type of thing, so I don’t know that he ever really went and looked back at that. … I think it’s probably the most interesting song on the record because the structure of it is — you listen to it and you think, ‘This is so weird; how did he come up with this and why?’”

Dweezil, who released his debut, Eddie Van Halen-produced single when he was 12, has a number of projects he’d like to accomplish apart from his father’s music, including finishing the long-in-the-works, 75-plus minute opus “What the Hell Was I Thinking?,” a recording that now spans three decades and includes guests ranging from Angus and Malcolm Young of AC/DC to Van Halen to Queen’s Brian May. He also mentioned wanting to collaborate with St. Vincent and Ty Segall.

But he doesn’t seem to want to slow down with Frank’s music, either.

“When you hear the music played and you see the musicians onstage interacting and having their own musical conversation, that’s what makes it, I think, really interesting,” Dweezil said. “As a kid that’s what I loved. I used to watch the band and be like, ‘How are they making what seems like — this is impossible. How does it seem like they’re having fun while they’re doing this?’ It’s almost like a magic trick, like, ‘How do they remember all this stuff? How do they play these things? That’s one of the things that I think is an appealing thing for people to see in this day and age, because that kind of stuff is really not focused on.”

What: Dweezil Zappa: Hot Rats Live

When: 8 p.m. Friday

Where: Tower Theatre, 835 NW Wall St., Bend

Cost: $84.50, $73.50 or $45 plus theater preservation fee

Contact: towertheatre.org or 541-317-0700