What’s Going On

Things have been mellow lately. The kids are out of the house, and my main contract gig ended a little while back, so there’s less to do than usual while I line up a new gig. Last year at this time I was building a patio, but right now there’s no need for any big home improvement projects. We’re kinda in the middle of defragging the house, but that’s slow going. We’ve been thinking, mostly idly, about getting some new furniture. The world is still under a pandemic, so it’s not a great time for any epic travel adventures. We do have a few mini road trips coming up, but I’m hesitant to do anything that involves air travel nowadays.

I’ve bee updating my web site, including my online software projects portfolio (https://zingman.com/portfolio/). So far alot of it has been invisible, behind-the-scenes stuff, but there’s some new content too. More stuff is in the offing, so stay tuned for future updates.

Been working on the Global Jukebox (https://theglobaljukebox.org) too, and in fact we just did a push to live a couple weeks ago. There’s also another site for The Association for Cultural Equity called The Alan Lomax Digital Archive (https://archive.culturalequity.org/). The site is pretty much what the name implies with lots field recordings, films, radio shows, etc. plus a section of curated exhibits. The site is built in Drupal, and most of the work involves styling and skinning, plus a few UI widgets. The workflow is pretty convoluted, since the site is not under source control and there’s no dev instance nor any way to deploy a local version. A large part of the early phase of the project was setting up a pipeline were I could do chunks of work locally, rapidly deploy and test, and roll back if things didn’t look or behave as expected. Now things are pretty much humming along, but there’s gotchas at every turn.

Although the heat of summer is gone and suntanning season is over, the weather has remained quite mild and pleasant into mid-October. We’ve yet to turn on the heat or even take out the air conditioners, but the days are really getting shorter faster these days. I’ve been going for walks in the nearby field alot, and Jeannie and I even got in a good hike last weekend, up Mount Hook in the Palisades. I’ve also been biking about twice a week on average, once on the streets and once in the Nature Study Woods. I still want to get back on my rollerblades a third time before the end of the season. I went up in weights recently in me workout, and added back in tricep curls. I’m still 5 lbs. short of my goal for the year, and hope to go up one more time, but it gets harder when the weather turns cold, so I better do it soon.

In music, I’ve been working on a new song Bluezebub (The Devil You Don’t Know). This is the last song on my upcoming Computer Jazz record I’ve been working on since the start of the pandemic. It’s a sort of 60’s spy-jazz meets King Crimson vibe, in 5/4 time with a sort fugue-like riff structure for the first half, a crazy uptempo jam in the middle, and then an elaboration and recapitulation to end it all off. I have the whole arrangement worked out, and have tracked the drums, fender bass, synth bass, and fender rhodes piano, and have sketched midi tracks for the horns and lead synth. Yesterday I broke out my bari sax to attempt to lay down the part, only to realize that I better write it out first and practice it a few times, so that’s next.

I’ve been a bit of a Beatles phase lately, as I tend to do every few years. This time I created and printed out lead sheets for a whole bunch of their songs , as part of my ongoing songbook project. Most of the stuff from the first half of their career is to play on guitar. Turns out they’re mostly pretty easy and really fun to play, and full of little twists and tricks and tight arrangements. If only I knew someone who like to sing harmony. Their later songs are mainly to work up piano, with a focus on maximum psychedelia such as Strawberry Fields Forever and I Am the Walrus, plus some not-quite-rock Paul songs.

The jazz group is humming along, although I haven’t had any luck getting gigs, and admittedly I haven’t been trying very hard. Also keeping an eye out for the opportunity to form a new rock group, although there’s not much movement there either.