Winter continues. Cold and dark, but at least we made it thru January. Too bad the Bills did not win the AFC championship game, but KC and Mahomes were just really so good. We did enjoy watching a few games with wings and nachos and beers. Josh Allen is young and the Bills are up-and-coming, and at least they’ll avoid renewing the Super Bowl curse.
Meanwhile, we had an epic snowstorm the last two days. A good eighteen inches, maybe two feet, the biggest snow in probably five years. I went out yesterday around noon to shovel and there was already a good foot on the ground, but light and fluffy. By the time I was done another inch had fallen. Today the snow stopped and we went out to shovel again, and it was all wet and heavy. Ah well, it’s done.
In preparation for the storm we watched the classic 1982 John Carpenter movie The Thing. Still a great movie after all this time. Great soundtrack too.
We’ve reformulated our Thursday jazz group with a new piano player Josh. He used to be in a group with Ken and the old drummer from Haven Street, Dan. He fits in quite well in terms of playing, vibe and temperament. In addition to standards we’re doing jazz adaptations of rock and pop songs. So far we’ve hit You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want), by Joe Jackson, which is a favorite that we used to do in a couple rock bands. Also Walking on the The Moon, which works great and turns into something dreamy and ethereal, and Peg by Steely Dan, which also works great, bouncy and bluesy. Next week we’re gonna try Some Skunk Funk by the Brecker Brothers. I went back and listened to the record Heavy Metal Bebop, which I haven’t put on in quite some time, and it just blew my mind, just how far ahead of its time it was. I also forgot that the drummer was Terry Bozio, before he joined Zappa.
In home studio land, I finished my guitar-driven rock song, Why Not Zed, back around Xmastime, and started recording another, All of the Above. I also hashed out the first few minutes, from the intro thru the verse and chorus and into the solo section, of the prog epic Plague of Frogs. But I put these all aside for a while to work on another jazz number. Lift Off was a song I wrote for Haven Street, inspired by John Coltrane’s Countdown, and featuring lots of half-step modulation inside ii-V’s superimposed on a harmonic structure borrowing tonal ideas from the standards Have You Met Miss Jones? and A Foggy Day. Gary brought his Wes Montgomery mojo, which fit the song perfectly and helped sharpen the arrangement.
For the studio version I’m recasting it for tenor sax and organ, with a typical rhythm section of piano, bass and drums. For bass I used an 80’s-sounding synth bass, just as scratch part, but then I like the sound of it and may very well end up keeping it. The tempo of the song is 210 bpm and I don’t know if I can walk that fast on the fender bass anyway. I’ve been experimenting with two bass parts (synth and bass guitar) for alot of this record, so I’ll come up with something else to do on the fender: counterpoint, accents and embellishments. Meanwhile I put down the piano track, which I really played. There’s an arrangement behind the head, then many choruses of comping, and a solo. I laid down the solo last night, and it came out well. even playing at the real tempo. Next comes the organ, which is key to the arrangement. I might end up swapping some parts between the piano and organ; we’ll see how it sounds. Then there’ll be a pass tweaking the bass and drums to give them more dynamics. There’s a drum solo in there too, trading fours with the sax and then just horn and drums for a chorus. Might add in a layer of live drums. Lastly, I’m really psyched to lay down the sax part. I feel like my playing has gotten alot better over the last year and I can really slay an uptempo bebop number.
At my new job I’ve been learning the Google Firebase platform. This is a so-called “serverless” suite of infrastructure components to run the backend of web and mobile applications. It seems to be just the thing we need, and includes services for hosting, auth, file storage, database, backend logic, and analytics. Saves us from having to spin up our own servers and databases and build it all ourselves. So far it all seems to be pretty good. There’s lots of admin controls and vast documentation; not surprisingly there’s alot to know to come up to speed. Still, after less than two weeks starting from zero I have a site with auth and file storage working end to end, and I hope to be talking to the DB tomorrow. Hopefully next week I’ll turn the corner into actual application development and figuring out how my piece fits in with our other products. I guess if there’s one thing Google is good at, it’s writing software. Nevertheless, it feels a bit like a deal with the devil you don’t know. They have their tentacles in so many pies, and the days of “don’t be evil” are long gone. Just this week I read about how they wiped out something like 100,000 negative reviews of the Robinhood app after it locked its users out from buying shares of some stocks, in order to protect some greedy hedge fund guys who way overreached. Interesting times, one thing for sure is they keep on a-changin’.