Month: September 2024

Making Miles for Martin

This coming weekend would have been Martin’s birthday. On Sunday afternoon his rock group, the East Berne Band, is putting on a benefit concert in his memory up at the Wayward Lane Brewery in the greater Berne area, in the hills between Albany and the Catskills Albany where he used to live. I might also be sitting with another one of the bands on the bill, One Wing Duck, which I as understand it is sort of a jam collective of which Martin was also a member. I haven’t played a rock show since before the pandemic, so I’ve been learning a bunch of new songs and practicing real hard. We’re doing a couple of Martin’s originals, including one I hadn’t heard until a few weeks ago. It should be a fun time with some great music.

The Brothers Zing

Martin and I have been making music together from the time we were little kids. I’d always dreamed of putting together a live band with him someday to perform our original songs. With the upcoming release of the fifth Buzzy Tonic album, now is a good time to look back the first Buzzy Tonic album, called The Brothers Zing, a collaboration between Martin and myself. Actually, the album was originally called Buzzy Tonic and the name of the group was The Brothers Zing. (I retconned it just like certain film directors add a subtitle like A New Hope to their movie after it’s been out in theaters a while, then years later try and play it off like the subtitle has always been the actual title. But I digress …) I should mention that Martin came up with the name Buzzy Tonic, meaning both a description of the sound, consonant yet distorted, and also some kind of intoxicating libation that staggers the mind.

Back in 2004 or so, twenty years ago now (wow!), I was in a sort of musical hiatus and looking to do something new when Martin approached me. The idea was to do a virtual collaboration, which was unusual at the time. We built matching ProTools based recording studio setups, and we’d send files back and forth, building up a song track by track, changing things around and refining them as we went. We wrote, arranged, preformed and produced eight original songs in a period of about a year.

For me it was a big step forward in many ways. It was the first time I’d really written rock songs with a lyric (I’d previously written mainly jazz instrumentals up to that point, and I’d done a whole lot of computer and electronic music) and focused on an actual album of songs, with the aim of producing a professional quality record. He gave me alot of confidence to step up with my writing and singing. He also wrote a computer program called Guitar George to help him figure out how to play guitar voicings for all the crazy jazz chords that appeared in my songs!

Obviously it was fun and successful, and I’ve kept on making records, getting better with each one. Martin had to drop out of the second record due to other commitments, and I sort of took it over as a a solo project. He remained very generous, contributing one song for every album (except the jazz instrumental one), and often adding vocal or guitar parts to my songs, and giving constructive critical feedback along the way. In fact, I kind of think of all the Buzzy Tonic records as being in a way by The Brothers Zing. And don’t worry, we’ve done other project before and after, so there’s more music from the two of us in the offing.

Meanwhile, you can hear the songs here:
https://zingman.com/music/#BeeZee

And learn all about the the songs and making of the record here:
https://zingman.com/music/beezee.php

Enjoy!

Plutonium Dirigible

It’s been another fun and busy week for music.  Last Thursday I saw the current touring versions of the classic prog bands Yes and ELP at the Capitol Theatre.  It was a really good show.  The only surviving member of Emerson Lake and Palmer is Carl Palmer, and he did an ELP tribute show that combined live musicians with canned tracks and video from ELP’s 1992 tour.  It was pretty effective.  They opened with Karn Evil 9 1st Impression Part 2.  Both the bass player and the guitarist had midi pickups on their instruments.  Once the singing part was done the bass player played the organ solo, and then the guitar player did the synth solo.  Very impressive.  They did one new tune with no legacy tracks, a pretty cool instrumental prog jam.  The only thing I didn’t love was using vocals from old fat 90’s Greg Lake rather than from the 70’s when the band was in their prime, but I guess they didn’t have isolated tracks they could use from way back then.

Yes was actually Jon Anderson with The Band Geeks, a Yes tribute band he apparently saw on the internet and asked to tour with him.  They were very good, actually better than some versions of real Yes I’ve seen.  The bass player and and guitarist in particular leaned heavily into the classic sounds of Chris Squire and Steve Howe, with the the same instruments, and every nuance of every riff lovingly memorized.  The set was entirely the big numbers off The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge, with one new song that fit right in.  Jon can still really sing and lead that great vocal harmony sound.  And, sitting on 12-string acoustic guitar for And You And I was special guest John McLaughlin!

Then on Saturday night I saw my friend Erik play a set of rock covers on the patio of a bar next to parking lot in Hastings.  I haven’t seen him since before the pandemic.  Good to get together and talk, even if only briefly.  I’ve been trying to connect with friends again recently.

Also, I biked twenty-six miles in an hour and forty-five minutes on Sunday, a personal best for the season.

But the big news for tonight is the tracks for the new Buzzy Tonic record, Plutonium Dirigible, are complete! 

You can hear the tracks here:

https://zingman.com/music/#beezeevee

And learn more about all the songs and the whole project here:

https://zingman.com/music/beezeevee.php

All that remains is the album artwork and to submit it for publication. So watch this space for the release of the album on CD and streaming services in a few weeks.

Fall Forward

Been trying to get back to normal life the last few weeks, and settling into some kind of fall routine.  There’s been alot of random tasks piling up.  Did a bunch of yardwork the last few weekends.  Almost at the end of the late summer cycle, nothing to do after but wait for the leaves to start falling.  Also been doing work on our various cars. Michelle and I patched the bumper on the camry before she went back to school.

One piece of good news of good news is that I got the Mustang fixed.  Way back in July one day I took it out of the garage to take it for a spin, only to discover the brake pedal felt soft.  I did a little research and determined it was probably nothing I could fix myself.  Being an old car, I didn’t want to take any chances.  However I didn’t have to time to actually take into the shop until September, and then it took them a couple days because my mechanic needed to order a new master cylinder.  So I finally got the car back and took it for a spin last weekend.  Good as new, woo-hoo!

I’ve also been getting back to biking and working out.  For a while my energy felt very depleted, and it was hard to concentrate.  Working out was one thing I could do that was good for my focus, but I had to drop down to like 70% of my regular weight.  Over the last few weeks I’ve been building back up, and now I’m basically I’m at the point where I was before, and building up to surpass my previous plateau this fall.

Meanwhile, back in July I had built up to biking over fifty miles a week.  The first Sunday in August I decided to go for a little further than usual.  On the ride, I passed a woman who then asked if I’d mind if she rode behind me to catch my slipstream.  She looked all cute and sporty in one of those one-piece spandex biking outfits, and in any event why would I object?  After a few miles she had caught her breath and pulled up next to me, and we got to talking, mostly about biking and going further and faster.  She said she was going 30 miles that day, and told me “never plateau”.  When I was done my ride I saw that I’d gone twenty-two and a half miles in a little over ninety minutes.  I was really looking forward to telling Martin, but never got the chance.  In August I scaled back, averaging closer to 30 miles, going out only three or four times a week.  Now I’m ramping back up again.  September is the perfect time for biking.  The weather is not so hot, and you’ve been training all season.  This last weekend I went 22.5 miles again, beating my previous time by about three minutes, closing in on the ninety-minute mark.  Next weekend I’m gonna go for 25 miles, and hopefully do a 30 mile ride before the end of the season.  I’d like to keep on biking into November if possible.

I’ve also returned to working on The Global Jukebox and getting that back on track.  I’ve recruited my friend Nick to work with me as a second engineer.  Nick and Martin and I worked together to create an online version of the game Iron Dragon back in the year 2000.  For now the main tasks is to get him ramped up.  Also, Martin left behind some unfinished work in the form of an experimental branch that he never committed.  I’ve pulled it of his old computer but I have yet to merge it.

In my day job I had been finding it hard to focus too, but that’s steadily improving.  If I can find a task where I can follow a prefab pattern or script rather than have to do deep, open-ending thinking, that suits me better these days.  Fortunately, on one of my project I get to just that: building some new web pages and updating other based on mocks from our designers.  Ginny said that building web sites is my happy place, and that’s not so far from the truth.  In my other project it’s all herding cats, pulling together multiple engineering and management teams from multiple companies for integration testing.  I think I finally found the root cause of a strange, intermittent bug that’s been bedeviling us and blocking our progress, and designed a workaround.  Hopefully I’ll have it implemented this week and progress can resume.

There’s lots going in in music these days too.  For one thing Jeannie and I saw Earth Wind and Fire and Chicago, two of the greatest horn-section bands of all time, at some amphitheater in New Jersey Saturday night.  We attempted to go see this show the first Saturday in August, but it go rained out.  This time the weather was good, but the traffic, limited ways into the venue, and chaotic overcrowded lawn seating arrangements made for a less than promising start. 

I’ve always been a big fan of both bands, but particularly Chicago, with their prog-jazz influenced stuff from the Terry Kath days in the 70’s.  They played plenty of that, including some great deep cuts, and were quite good.  But I guess I’d mentally blocked out their cheesy power ballad phase from the 80’s.  They played a good number of those too, including not one but two about You being the/my inspiration. 

Alot of people seemed to have left after Earth Wind and Fire, so it was easy to move closer for a better view.  At then end, both bands played together, which was pretty epic.  A six-piece horn section, plus two or three of everything else: drums, percussion, bass, guitars, keyboards and singers.  You’d think it might be a giant mess, but they were really tight.  They closed the show with an extended jam of 25 or 6 to 4 (presumably in answer to the question Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?)  It seemed we were among the younger people at the show, which was great because by time we got back to car at the end of the night, the parking lot was mostly empty, and it was a breeze getting out of there.

Lots more going on in the music work including a new guitar, a tribute concert, and a new Buzzy Tonic record about to drop.  More on that in a future post.

Summer’s End

Jeannie and I ended the summer on a bit of a high note, with our traditional trip to Ocean City, Maryland.  This was a quick one, just two nights, but the weather was beautiful and we got in some good lunches and dinners, a sunset cruise, swimming in the ocean and walking down the boardwalk.  The highlight was spending an afternoon biking around Assateague Island.  This time we parked at the visitor center and took our bikes over the bridge onto the island.  This added a few miles to the ride, which is a good thing, plus some nice views on top of the bridge.  The whole area is incredibly flat; we might’ve been on the highest point in the Delmarva peninsula.  An added bonus is we got to skip to long line of cars waiting to get into the parking lot.