Month: September 2014

What Is and What Should Never Be

I went to two rock and roll concerts this week. I can’t remember the last time that happened. One was for Alan Holdsworth, angular post-fusion jazz. Power trio format. Went with my origami friend Marc. The show was at a really cool club in Times Square called the Iridium. Good food even. Great stuff but the kind of music where most of the audience left their wives at home.

The other was Robert Plant, where the audience included a pretty high chick quotient. I brought Jeannie, party in celebration of our upcoming anniversary. We figgered the closest we’d ever get to seeing Led Zeppelin. This was at the Capital Theater in Port Chester, which is has become one of my favorite venues to see a show. It was set up with an open floor area with a bar at the back. We ended up hanging out mostly at the bar. Plant played a lot of new stuff which he described as “country and eastern” and it was good stuff in a sort of Texas-blues-meets-Kashmir kind of way, and Robert still can sing. The first Zeppelin song he did was Thank You, which was the song Jeannie and I danced to at our wedding. So by the end we were slow dancing in the theater and kissing blissfully; it was a very tender moment. Standing next to us were two really tall blond ladies – maybe over six feet tall. Good looking, one of them was a dead ringer for Erik’s wife Jen, and the other looked like she could be her sister. They were quite friendly, chatting, buying me drinks, and one of them kinda hanging off me once she was tipsy a little bit later on, despite the fact I was obviously already with someone. Maybe they were after me cuz I was the only guy around taller than them, I dunno. Jeannie dubbed them “team blonde”. The tipsy one indicated Jeannie and asked “is that your girlfriend?” I told her “that’s my wife.” A minute later I turned around and they were gone.

So Very Autobiographic

I read two books this week, both autobiographies of famous Californians. I read a lot of nonfiction, particularly histories and biographies, but not usually contemporary pop culture figures. Still. One was Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger, actor bodybuilder and politician. This was a natural follow-on to having re-read the whole Conan the Barbarian series last month. One interesting thing was his childhood in Austria. Arnold grew up less than 100 miles (160 km) from my dad in Hungary. He talks about when he was ten years old or so helping his dad, the police chief, take in a flood of refugees who crossed the border after the revolution. Also made me decide to add some exercises for my lats to my workout.

The other was Crazy from the Heat, by David Lee Roth, original frontman for Van Halen. Having gone back and listened to their albums again with a fresh ear (currently enjoying Diver Down in heavy rotation), I’ve concluded Diamond Dave was the real magic ingredient. He’s a very smart and insightful guy, and has a couple things to say about music that really struck me:

“Tone is a direct result of your personal character. And that tone will come out regardless of the equipment you use. You will fiddle about until you have the perfect representation in your mind of who you are, whether you know it or not.”

And a bit later:

“The saxophone was the original fuzz tone instrument. That’s the barometer of soul power, that’s what you set your watch to.”

Interestingly, both Arnold and Diamond Dave mention reading Teddy Roosevelt’s autobiography, which I read a few months back.

Churn Churn Churn

So Gus and I have decided to reboot the rock band. After jamming together since June, the summer came and went and we didn’t have any more than a few songs really tight and weren’t ready to start playing out. Our bass player wasn’t really cutting it, and our guitarist was not willing to learn new material and was just kind of a dickhead in so many ways it made you wonder how he was able to function in the world of adults. The kicker for me came when we couldn’t even make Roadhouse Blues sound good last rehearsal. I was thinking “I’ve known high school kids better than these guys!” So we had to let them go. Later I found out the bass player was coming back from a long period of not playing due to a hand condition, and I felt bad about that, but I was glad to be rid of the guitarist.

That left me, and Gus the drummer and Jefferson the singer. So we’ve been looking for new musicians. I got lucky cuz there’s been a guitar player Gary who’s been sitting in with the jazz group the last few weeks. He’s an excellent player, you could tell from the first note, great sound and phrasing. And I was telling him about my learning Van Halen on the piano and he had a few things to say about Eddie (“He’s the real deal”), so I had a hunch he was also a rocker. At the end of the jazz jam I made my pitch for him to join the rock group. “Yeah I do all that stuff. I’m your man”, he said.

Then I got a referral from a friend for a bassist looking to join a group. He was pretty enthusiastic about both the cover band and the possibility of a group based on my originals so I invited him over to jam and see what happened. It turned out he’s a high school kid! Just a couple years older than my kids. My mind was truly blown.

But man, he sure could play. Particularly into Joco, James Brown, and all kinds of funk and jazz. His knowledge of classic rock is kind of limited but he’s a quick study. He was also able to grok my originals, which are too hard for a lot of people. Still, I’m not sure I want to take him on. Yeah there’s a chance he might flake, or his parents wouldn’t let him continue with the group down the line, or it might be hard to work at a bar with him in the group. No matter what he’s not that experienced. But you gotta figure a kid who’s that good has the capacity to focus and would pretty much have is act together. Also, I was playing in bands working in bars when I was just seventeen, and never had any problems if I didn’t try and order a drink. No, the reason is this:

When I lived in California I was in horn-section funk band called The Hip Pocket. It was one of the better bands I’ve even been. Played a lot of great gigs. There were 4 guys in the horn section and 10 in the whole group. It was also a 50-50 split of black guys and white guys. The bass player was this dude Dmitry, who was the second best player I’ve ever played with. (The best was Jim Wynne, master of two-handed tap who had a whole technique he developed after borrowing a Chapman Stick for a few months but had to give it back. We were in several bands together including Automatic Man and The Purple Connection. After he left my group Event Horizon he went on the play in Gamalon.) Anyway Dmitri was from Odessa, in the Ukraine, where he’d been classically trained on symphonic bass. But he loved funk. And in a year of playing with him I never heard a single clam. Such a solid groove. Then one day he told us he was leaving the group cuz he’d been accepted into Berklee School of Music. We all wished him the best, then we tried to find a replacement and when we couldn’t find anyone as solid the band had to break up.

I told this story to the kid I was auditioning and he said “that’s my plan!”. Oy!

The good news, however is Ken, the bassist from my jazz group and The Day Trippers, has changed his status from “maybe” to “very interested”. The reason being one of his other bands seems to have folded. He didn’t want to commit cuz he was already in two other groups. If we get both Gary and Ken I feel we’ll have a really solid group that could do some serious damage!

In other news, The Day Trippers next gig has been confirmed for the last weekend in October for some bar in New Jersey. I’ve requested we do an Abbey Road medley. I’ll let you know as details emerge.

In other news Lizzy is learning De-Lovely for her performance group, so I dusted off my Cole Porter songbook to try and learn it on piano.

Origami Animal Sculpture Now on Sale!!!

Today was the big day. My book Origami Animal Sculpture is now on sale in bookstores in North America (and maybe elsewhere) and also via the internet. Order your copy today!

http://www.amazon.com/Origami-Animal-Sculpture-Nature-Includes-Instructional/dp/4805312629/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386734985&sr=8-1&keywords=John+Szinger

And if you like it, go online and give it a nice review.

Van Halen Adaptations for Piano

As my rock band lurches on I’ve been looking for new songs to add to the setlist. Going for an upbeat party vibe, and this led me to some early Van Halen. I’ve always felt that VH has something that none of their imitators did, and that’s old-timey jazz as one of their influences. The Van Halen bros. father was a big band sax and clarinet player, and of course David Lee Roth’s fondness of Louis Prima is well known. I also recently found out Michael Anthony’s dad was jazz trumpeter and MA also studied trumpet and jazz bass before he switched to rock.

So I got the VH songbook to work out a handful of their songs and make piano adaptations. (Last time I tried to do this, by ear, I ended up writing Heat Wave instead.) I’ve narrowed it down to just a few songs for now: Runnin’ With the Devil, Beautiful Girls, I’m the One, and Feel Your Love Tonight. These tunes have a boggie shuffle beat, lots great chromatic harmonic movement over 7th chords, and superb backing vocal parts, including a whole bop-do-wah shoobie-doo-wah section in one.

The books are funny because they’re designed for guitar players, with obsessively superdetailed tab and guitar-specific annotations to the phrasing, but no bass (or left hand piano) part at all. I guess this is alright cuz Bach sheet music (for example) is biased toward piano players. If you work beyond the idiosyncrasies of the notation to grok the underlying music, it’s really not so complicated to play. Of course I have to change some of the voicings to work better on piano – power chords can be pretty boring – but the basic concept of the interplay between comping and tossing in riffs, and Eddie’s phrasing and timing, reminds me a lot of Fats Waller and those cats. Since there are no bass parts in the music I have to go back and listen to the records and fill in my own thing to get the left hand sounding right. I’m doing a lot of stride and walking bass lines.

Then it’s onto the solos, where everything goes completely bananas. The good news is I can play fast, and the solos are all written out, and since Eddie is classically trained a lot of his solo lines remind me of Keith Emerson. The whole thing is very tight. The only thing is I have to go back and listen to the record to see how exactly its sounds compared to how it’s notated when the tremelo bar gets into the action. Figuring out the bass part here is a bit harder since Eddie loves to modulate when it’s time for the solo, and then play outside the changes on top of that.

The last thing is putting the vocal on top of everything else. David Lee Roth is pretty much in my range, but I’m trying to bring out his phrasing and style. One more gotcha: when you go back and listen to the records, they tune down a semitone. So the choice is to play it in E or Eb. Eb is slightly easier to sing, but I have to read all the parts down a half step. This is not so bad actually. But then I wonder when I bring it to the group if the guitar player will want to tune down or do it in E.

Of course the guitar player I have now says Steely Dan is too hard, so he’ll probably be scared shitless to do a VH song. The good news is, even though he doesn’t know it yet he’s been kicked out of the band. Bad news is now we have to find a replacement.

Meet Mister Mantis

Home again and updating the blog again. I had planned on making my next post about how I finished my ebook or showing some video from the last Day Trippers gig, but both of those have a bit more work before they’re ready.

But then today I worked from home and got a good number of random tasks off my plate in my lunch hour, including an overdue round of yardwork that I didn’t get to last weekend. In the afternoon I noticed we had a very cool visitor. A giant praying mantis, over 6” long, was hanging out on my back door. I’ve never seen one of these in my neighborhood. He stayed all day, let me approach him quite closely, and was still there when I shut the curtain for the night. We’ll see if he’s there in the morning.

Also looks like the Day Trippers may have another gig in October. I’ll keep you posted.

There and Back Again

You may be wondering why you haven’t heard from me in a while. Well I’ve been doing a lot of traveling the last few weeks. One weekend it was camping in the mountains, next a soujourn on the seashore, and then an unexpected journey to Canada. I must say the trip to the beach was very nice and relaxing at least, but it already feels like it came and went too fast. In between I’ve been working on the ebook version of my book Origami Animal Sculpture, which ought to be ready in the next few days, just in time for the release of the print version of the book. Now of course it’s back to work and back to school and getting the fall off to a good start.