January 2025 – Zing Blog 2

And I Will Draw the Chart

Ok, lots to talk about here with music. Before I dive in, I’ll mention that the weather has gotten a bit warmer. It’s still down in the 20’s at night, but it’s creeping up above freezing for a couple hours in the daytime and last week’s snow is beginning to disappear. Still, I’m not going start biking again until the roads are clear and clean.

First off, my jazz group Spacecats has a show coming up on April 2nd at a place called Jazz on Main in Mount Kisco. We’re hoping to build on the momentum of our last gig, add a bunch of new material and sharpen up the songs already in our repertoire. More on this as the date draws closer.

One of the songs we’re working up these days is Son of the Sun. This is a fairly long and complicated song with lots of changes in meter and open jamming sections linked up with thru-composed parts. I feel really lucky and grateful that the Spacecats want to tackle such a challenging song, and in fact we’re gonna knock it out of the park. But I needed a better chart than my old hand-written one to get the music across to the group. My drummer Rick suggested I try an app called MuseScore, a notation package from the sam people who make Audible. In the past I’ve used Finale, which I found hugely slow and cumbersome although hugely feature-rich, as well as things like the built-in notation for midi in ProTools, which I found quick but not very good. MuseScore hits the sweet spot in the middle, rich and full featured enough for jazz charts, but pretty fast too. It’s not tied to a midi sequence or performance (although you can import a midi file); the focus is a hundred percent on the notation, and you can do things like add repeats, fermatas, a D.S, or coda, hash marks for soloing over, and chord symbols. This is a big step up from writing out charts by hand. Hopefully now I can write out and teach my band a bunch more songs that I’d been afraid might be too much to try and notate. So here I present to you my very first lead sheet made in MuseScore. Enjoy!

In the Dead of Winter

We finally got some snow over the weekend, and then it turned really cold the last few days: in the teens in the daytime and single digits at night. Looks like the snow will stick around a while. Of course this meant we got to go skiing for the first time this season. We went Monday, which was a day for for me and Jeannie, and Michelle’s last day at home before going back to school. We got up early before sunrise, went up for day and got home again sometime after sunset. It was a good time, and we all had a good days skiing after getting used to it the first runs. The snow was mainly good, even great for the northeast, with just a little bit of icy patches here and there, easy enough to avoid. Only trouble it was pretty crowded, and by mid afternoon there were alot of kids taking lessons zigzagging all over the place, so we decided to call it day. All in all we skied ten runs, over four hours. Next time Jeannie and I are gonna play hooky from work and go up when the kids are all in school.

All our wintertime projects are coming along. Maintaining good health and good focus. I finished a major chunk of cleaning out my studio over the weekend, clearing the way for new origami and other projects (more on that later). Only downside is Michelle went back to school before we had a chance to watch Return of the King. The Bills are in the playoffs and have advanced to the ACF Championship (once again against the Chiefs, after beating the Ravens in an intense, high-drama matchup), so that’s cutting into our TV time. Ah well, I guess there’s spring break.

Aside: my friend Robert Lang, one of the most accomplished and creative origami artists of all time, lost both his house and his studio in the recent fires in L.A., including a lifetime of literally priceless artwork (much of it has been exhibited at galleries all over the world), all of his tools and his supply of high-end origami paper (I read that Michael LaFosse is coming out of retirement to make a new batch of origamido paper just for him.) and literally everything else except his pets and one origami cuckoo clock. My heart goes out to him and his wife. Amazingly, Robert seems pretty upbeat for the situation, or at least resilient and determined to get thru the current tragedy and rebuild.

Back here where things are more stable, our D&D campaign continues. True to their chaotic neutral alignments, the party decided to open a half-dozen doors at once at the end of the last session, revealing a captive dragon and whole host of goblins. Next session should be fun. I hope they figure out a way to get the dragon to attack the goblins, or that they can run fast. Also they’re on the verge of having enough XP for second level.

I’m also helping Charlie set up a Minecraft server on Martin’s linux box in the cloud. It turns out this is not exactly straightforward, since he wants a modded version, but we’ve made some good progress, and we’ll probably get there soon.

Most of the rest of the stuff I want to talk about has to do with music, and I think I’ll cover that in a separate post.

In the Year Twenty-Five Twenty-Five

The new year has arrived and we’re settling into the winter routine. I’m feeling pretty good for this time of year, I guess I finally found the right combination of vitamin D, activity and rest. I’m working out at full weight, and actually went out biking five days in a row last week in a spell of mild weather. I used to think fifty degrees was about as cold as I’d feel comfortable riding, but I got some gloves and a warmer base layer and now I’m good down into the forties. Today it was thirty-five when I got up and I thought I’d try that, but by mid-morning it started snowing and the temperature dropped. Ah well, maybe that means we can go skiing soon!

We also got out ice skating this weekend, which was fun except for the rink was rather crowded and people were skating in all directions, making collision avoidance a nonstop concern, with very few chances to get up to a good speed. We’re gonna check out the other rinks around here to see what they’re like. In other fitness news, Jeannie has decided she wants to run a 7k race in April and asked me if I wanted to join her. So we’re gonna figure out how to start training for that.

I’m back to work and off to a good start. Meanwhile at home I’m trying to beat back a long list of random tasks and new project, after slacking off for the holidays. Making steady progress and checking things off one by one. A big one we need to do a big round of organizing the house and throwing things away. This was set into motion when Jeannie asked me to into my closet and pull out some old legos for her to used in the toyland town she set up neat the Christmas tree. Things got jumbled up and there was no way to put everything back and make it fit, so there you go. One thing leads to another since we only have so much closet space.

As is tradition, we’re watching The Lord of the Rings movies again. I’m also re-reading the books, which I haven’t done since the aughts (I used to read it once per decade, but skipped the teens cuz I was busy). This time around I’m appreciating how much the filmmakers actually drew from the book in terms of dialogue and plot details, even if things were generally sharpened up and condensed for the movie. Also remembering how much lore and backstory there is, and how many songs in the book that got cut. So far my favorite was the one Frodo sings at the inn in Bree, an epic retelling of the classic Hey Diddle Diddle.

Also deep into some new music projects. More on that soon, I swear, but it will take more than one post to explain it all.