Live, learn, leave
Here’s the third installment of pictures from our vacation to Europe over the summer. This gets us through Austria and into Hungary, the last country on the trip. Enjoy!
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Things are okay with me these days, but I’ve been pretty tired and burned out this week, with the cold and the dark closing in and all. Still objectively, rah yeah.
The gig last weekend went great. We had over fifty paying guests, so the band made a good chunk of change. More importantly the music was really on. We played all nine songs that are going to be on our next record. It’s just great to do what I think of as a risky song, maybe because it’s challenging to listen to, or has a slow grove, and to look up and see a room full of people totally into it, hanging on every note. Next stop: the recording studio.
This week we also hit a major milestone with the Global Jukebox and CityLore. Whew, man that was a ton of work.
And last night I finally got together with this dude Zeno, the guitarist looking to put together an originals band with prog and pop influences. There was a bass player, Robert, on 5-string fretless. We basically hung out and jammed some riffs and talked about ideas, no actual songs, at least yet. I’d say it was a productive session, worth exploring further. We’re gonna try and get together again when the drummer is available.
Tomorrow we’re headed up to Boston. A much-needed day off. OrigaMIT is on Saturday, so we figured we’d take a day and hang out in the old historic downtown. Michelle has never seen beantown, so it’ll be cool. So this evening I pulled together a bunch of origami, including finally finishing an Oliphaunt and a Turkey with wire and tape on the inside were it doesn’t show. I also folded a couple of Beth’s Stellated Octahedron, one with a color change and one without. The model features a clever twist to accomplish the color change. However, it tends to spring apart so ended up wetfolding them.
Fall is proceeding apace. Hallowe’en is just around the corner, time for fun costumes, jack-o-lanterns, lawn decorations, witchcraft, devilry and all.
Things have actually been pretty boring around here recently. Work work work, getting things done. Sunday was a quiet rainy day at home, Hallowe’en devilry aside. There’s been lots of rain this October, which makes up for a dry September, but the weather has been generally pretty warm and mild. I’ve been able to get out skating and for a bike ride every week.
A couple weeks ago I was out for a bike ride in the Nature Study Woods. It was Sunday morning and there was a half marathon going on that included a trail section, with the runners coming the opposite way that I wanted to do. I ended up taking a bunch of trails that I don’t normally travel, just to find the road less taken. By the time I got to the far end of the woods I decided to take the road back rather then the trails. As I was pulling up a long hill I noticed my chain slipping of it’s sprocket into the next gear. Then without warning the chain snapped.
The bike is over twenty years old, and it was the original chain. I bought the bike in California, when Google was still a tiny little startup with their offices above Palo Alto Bicycles. (I actually talked Jeannie out of applying for a job there – worst mistake of my life.) I’ve ridden that bike over tons and roads and trails. So it was not too surprising.
I took it to a place in Pelham called Danny’s Bikes, that used to be Pelham Bicycles. The replaced the chain, which was fine, but I paid for a tune up and told them specifically that the derailleur was out of alignment and need to be adjusted, but they failed to do that. I ended up adjusting it myself, which I’d done plenty of times before, since it was easier that taking back to the shop and complaining. But still.
Last weekend Jeannie and I went on a hike in the Palisades. We’ve done a couple hikes around there, down near the George and up near the Mario. This time we picked a spot midway between the two bridges, right on the NY-Hj border. We got all the way down the cliffs to the river; it was very cool.
The same weekend we saw the famous guitar player Larry Carlton at the Iridium in NYC. We went with my origami friend Marc, who is also a guitar player and into cats like that. It was a great show, and the band consisted of Larry, his son Trevor on bass, who was most excellent, plus a sax, trombone, piano and drums. He played maybe six Steely Dan songs and the rest was his own stuff, sort of bluesy funk fusion. As luck would have it, Steely Dan was playing the same night uptown at the Beacon.
Speaking of origami, the OrigaMIT convention is coming up in just a couple weeks, so I’ve been folding and diagramming, ramping up and trying to finish and perfect some new models. Meanwhile OUSA has asked me to contribute some models to the annual Holiday Tree. The other night I folded one of my Giant Squid out a a 24″ square of some kind of cool paper I bought a while back. It’s over a foot tall. It looks great, very impressive. Just the finals sculpting to go.
In other news, my new recording Sun of the Son is almost done. (I know you’re been wondering since I haven’t talked about it in a while, but yeah I’ve keeping at it.) I’ve actually been working on it since the springtime, and even dusted of my alto sax to play the lead back at the end of the summer. Since then I recorded the synth solo and the piano solo, plus a few backing keyboard parts to pad things out. For the synth solo I had a concept in mind from the start, and was able to dial in the sound I wanted (a layering of several synth tones) and went down pretty smoothly. The piano solo turned out to be a bit more challenging. Since it’s just a piano you can’t rely on fancy patches or effects, it’s all down to the lines you play.
I had in mind a jazzy, bluesy solo something like Herbie Hancock or Chick Corea might do. But it turns out I can’t really play like those guys. Whatever I did came out sounding like a deranged mashup of Thelonious Monk and Keith Emerson. I guess that makes sense since I have studied those guys pretty deeply and have a fair amount of their pet riffs in my bag. So I decided to roll with it. Even so, I ended up stitching the solo together from multiple takes and it took a fair amount of effort to make if flow.
Now the tracking is done and next up was rendering out all the midi files (mainly the drums and keyboards) to audio for mixing. I finished that this weekend and began applying effects to the drum kit, mainly EQ’s and compressors. I have a default set of effects I use on my drum kit, but it always takes a fair amount of tweaking to make the drums sit right and really groove. Right now I’m honing in on the kick and snare. I want them to be present without being overpowering. The song has a fair amount of dynamics, and it has to sound good soft, loud, and in between. Almost there, then it’s on to the bass.
In the rock world, I’ve been keeping an eye out for new opportunities. One ad on craigslist caught my eye recently. It’s a drummer and guitarist starting up a originals project, looking for a creative keyboardist. The cited among their influences King Crimson, Tame Impala and the Delfonics. Well this seemed weird enough, and Crimso is one of my all-time favorite bands, so I got in touch. Now he’s putting together some audio demos and wants to schedule a rehearsal/audition. Meanwhile I sent him a few of my tracks, and learned how to play In the Court of the Crimson King. We’ll see how it turns out.
Also a reminder my jazz group, Haven Street is playing Saturday November 2 at the Bean Runner Cafe in Peekskill, eight o’clock downbeat. Hope to see you there.
My jazz group Haven Street is playing Saturday November 2 at The Bean Runner Cafe in Peekskill, 8 o’clock start time, $10 cover. This an excellent place to see a show, and last time we played there we had a great crowd and the music was really on. This time ought to be even better. Should be lots of fun, so come check it out!
My how the time flies.
Last weekend we had a major and important celebration: It was Jeannie and my 25th wedding anniversary! Hard to believe it’s been that long. She remains the love of my life, and I can’t say enough appreciative things about her. We had a party Saturday. My Mum and Dad came into town to visit for the weekend, and so did Lizzy. Martin and Kathleen came down for the party, and Jeannie’s parents and sister came up from Long Island. It was a great time and a great party, and good to take a moment to celebrate and acknowledge these things in life. It was also a full house, and very busy, and of course it came and went too fast. Meanwhile Martin celebrated his 50th birthday right around the same time, as did my friend Nick. Sunday we went over to Nick’s for his birthday party and Oktoberfest. Here’s to the next 25!
It’s been a busy few weeks in other areas as well. At the end of September my jazz group, Haven Street, played our first gig of the fall at the Green Growler in Croton, one of our favorite places. The place was pretty packed and the crowd was great, really into it, which is always nice. Now we’re preparing for our next gig, onwards and upwards.
We also had a major milestone for the Global Jukebox last week. I went down to CityLore in the East Village and demoed the education section we’ve been building for use in the NYC public schools. They loved it, which is a good outcome for a long stretch of hard work. There are a few tweaks but now we’re mainly on to server-side integration.
Over in rock’n’roll land I had a lineup for a new rock group, and it looked as if we were going to get it off the ground. Had a bunch of tunes picked out and a rehearsal date set. But at the last minute the guitar and bass player bailed. So it’s back to square one again with that.
The jazz group has another gig coming up soon. This one is Saturday November 2 at the Bean Runner Café in Peekskill. The Bean Runner is pretty much a legit jazz club, and last time we were there we had a good crowd and they liked us alot. So this time we really want to get the word out so people show up, and we we really want to kill it musically. Despite the fact the music is so much better than it was in my last rock band, everyone in this group is really focused on getting to the next level. So come on and check it out, should be really good.
Here’s the first installment of pictures from our vacation to Europe last month. The first part of the trip was in the Alps: Zürich Switzerland and Innsbruck Austria, and the surrounding environs. As usual, these galleries are protected, so ping me if you need login credentials. Enjoy!
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http://zingman.com/fotooz/2019/2019-01/
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You might recall I got a new electric guitar a few months back. It’s an Epiphone semihollowbody, and I play it paired with a Roland JC amp, which is great if you want a clean jazzy tone. But what if you want a different tone? I’ve been practicing and learning new songs and I figure it’s time to expand my sonic palette.
Even though I’ve played guitar for many years, it’s been mainly acoustic, with a focus on rhythm and accompanying myself singing. But lately I’ve become more interested in using it for writing, arranging and recording. Still I’ve never really gotten into the whole electric thing. Mainly it’s because the instrument is not just the guitar, but the combination of the the guitar, the amp and the effects. Every guitar player has their own pedalboard set up in their own unique way for their own personal tone that’s, as David Lee Roth says, the ultimate expression of who you really are. This is just too much for me.
I actually have a couple old Boss stompboxes from the ’80’s. They’re both classic effects, Chorus and Overdrive. I used them as part of my synth signal chain back in the day when synthesizers sounded pretty thin live. These days if you look around there are about 1,000 different distortion pedals, blue tone and brown tone and everything in between, for just the right sound, like a wall of exotic hot sauces at a Mexican restaurant. And then another realm of delay, reverb, and modulation to season your tone further. But some odd building blocks do not a temple make. In any event most of my effort in this direction goes toward honing my tone on saxophone, and a close second is learning my way around all the knobs and sliders on the myriad synthesizers I already own.
So I’ve had my eye on a digital multi-effects processor for a long time. Last time I checked in with this space was years ago when Martin lent me one of his Zoom boxes, and I could never really figure out my way around the thing. More recently, Vinny, the guitar player for G-Force, had a single box that was a programmable multi effects board, and he used it to great effect (heheh) on a wide variety of songs in different styles.
So I looked around. I didn’t want anything too complicated. Boss makes one for about $300 with maybe a dozen or twenty knobs, four footswitches and an expression pedal. Seemed like the one to beat. Then they announced a brand new one with maybe forty or more knobs, for about $1000. Definitely moving in the wrong direction.
The one I zeroed in on is the Stomp Lab by Vox. It has only 3 knobs, 2 footswitches and a pedal and is under $100. It arrived the other day, and turned out to be just the thing. Super cool and super fun. Very small but well built with a metal shell and and heavy duty moving parts, made to be stomped on. It’s one to select the patch, one for pre-amp, and one for output gain, plus the expression pedal. Easy peasy! The presets run the gamut from light to heavy, old to modern, all the styles, with varying degrees of things like flange, echo and reverb. You can even program in your own sounds: it’s a full-on amp simulator and mutli-effects modeler. But I bet I can get pretty far just learning my way around the presets. With the knobs on the box plus the ones on the guitar there’s alot of space to color the tone.
I must say I’m really happy that modern digital gear generally sounds really good. I remember when it all had a “digital” sound, that generally meant thin and harsh on the ears. Nowadays even a cheap little FX box sounds killer. I mean, just the guitar and the amp sound great as-is, but it’s that jazz guitar sound. With the FX it’s anything from psychedelic to heavy metal and it’s frickin’ amazing. It’s also super loud! I gotta turn way down.
One big difference between applying effect in post on the computer and doing it live is that the amp makes it interactive. My guitar is very resonant, so it’s easy to get a ton of feedback. Totally changes the way you play. It’s very satisfying to just chug along on a simple riff and let the amp fill in the sound. So it should be fun to explore. Hopefully some new song ideas will come out of it.
Meanwhile I’m practicing sax every day for a half hour these days to seriously memorize all the material for our next jazz gig, in two weeks. For the new rock band we’ve started picking tunes and I’ve been woodshedding those too. And, I bought a new pair of rollerblades last night. More on all this coming soon.
The next day was Sunday, the last full day of our trip. We rented a car – a black Mercedes sedan, very slick – and drove out into the countryside to the town of Mör, where my father was born and grew up. This was a very special part of the trip for me personally because I still have family there and so we visited them for the day.
My dad left Hungary as a teenager along with my grandparents and my Uncle Steve amid the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II. They lived in Germany for a year and then emigrated to Canada. He did not go back to visit until after the the Soviet Union collapsed and Hungary was under democratic government, in the 1990’s.
My grandparent’s house in Mör was bombed and destroyed during the war. My grandmother’s sister was their next-door neighbor and the two families shared a yard. That house stayed in the family. Apparently my father kept in touch with his cousin Rosszi, who lives there now. So they invited us to visit. In addition to Rosszi was her daughter Zsuzsi and husband Laci, and their son, also Laci. They are the nicest, warmest people you could ever hope to meet, especially as we’d never been there before and they’d never met us. They invited us in and treated us like, well, family.
My dad must have kept in touch with Rosszi because she had lots of pictures from over the years and knew exactly who we were: photos of Jeannie and me from our wedding day, of my Mum and Dad visiting when we’d just bought our house and Lizzy was a baby, and going further back of me and my brothers when we were kids, of my parents looking young and glamorous in the early 1960’s, and then of my dad and uncle as youths in Hungary, and my grandparents when they were young. Some of these I haven’t seen in a long, long time, many I’d never seen.
Zsuzsi speaks some English, and young Laci is fluent, so he acted as translator. His English is excellent, with an accent halfway between proper received British and hollywood American; he reminds me of a cross between a blonde Harry Potter and my brother Martin when he was that age, particularly his sense of humor. Laci is studying computer science at Budapest University. Alot of engineers and computer scientists in my family, especially on my dad’s side. And Hungary is of course known for its mathematicians, physicists and that sort of thing, so it’s good to see someone of the younger generation carrying on in that tradition.
Meanwhile I’d been boning up on my Hungarian language skills, so I understood a fair amount, but as with German, if I have to string more than an few words together it’s hard to do in real time. As it turns out, most of the Hungarian words I know are for food, so that was useful. My most used word was probably köszönöm.
So they took us around and we saw the church where my grandparents were married and my dad was baptized, we saw the school they attended as kids. There’s a local landmark called Lamberg-kastély, the former home of a local noble family, that is now a library and a museum of the area’s history. The town is small and this was all a short walk from their home. After a tour there, which included some surprise origami, we went to lunch at a local German restaurant that had Hungarian food too. We started with húsleves with csiga tészta for everyone, and uborkasaláta, then wienerschinzel with mushrooms, potatoes with a fried egg on top, and things like that. All very good. We saw the local cemetery where my great grandparents, the common ancestors of us and Rosszi’s family, are resting in peace. For my kids this was connecting back five generations, across three centuries, which is pretty amazing when you stop to think about it.
Mör is a famous wine making region, and when the Szingers lived in Hungary they had a farm and vineyards and made wine from the grapes they grew and sold it mainly to hotels and taverns, and that was the family business. Apparently this goes back to the time when they came down the Danube from Germany in the 1700’s. Our family’s land was collectivized long ago, but winemaking lives on, so we saw the vineyards up the hillsides on the south-facing slopes, alot like Napa Valley in California. We saw the presshouses at the bottom of the hill. These have large tunnels going into the mountainside to serve as cellars to keep the wine cool. I’m told the Szinger’s one was uses as a shelter during the war.
When we got back to the house, Laci senior, who is a carpenter, showed us his workshop. It was connected to a building that was also used in winemaking and contains an old, old wine press. The thing was the size of a truck and probably 100 years old. My dad had built a model of the traditional wine press they used, so I had and idea of what it was and how it operated. Still the size of the thing was impressive. The main arm was made of a tree trunk well over a foot thick and probably twenty feet long. Although it hadn’t been used in a long time it was still in working order. Interesting to ponder what might have been if history had not intervened.
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Back in Budapest that night it was our last fancy Hungarian meal, again at the Italian/Hungarian place next door to our hotel. I accidentally ordered three orders of the desert plate with three kinds of strüdel! All in all not a bad mistake to have made.
We were up bright and early to catch a cab to the airport. The first part of the trip was nice and relaxed. We even had time to pick up some palinka and at the duty-free shop in Budapest Airport. We had a connection to make in Amsterdam (county number six). There was almost an hour to catch the next flight after we landed, but for some reason the gate wasn’t available for our plane, so we sat on the tarmac for a half hour or so, until the situation became a bit desperate. It led to a mad dash thru Amsterdam airport, which is huge. Then Michelle got caught in some security station because the machine wouldn’t recognize her as the person in her passport photo! We made it to the gate just in time. Then that plan sat there for another half hour. Ah well I was in business class and they immediately offered me a cold beer. Coming west we lost six hours and so even though it was a seven hour flight we landed in the afternoon, an hour after we took off.
We got back home and all’s week that ends well. That was two weeks ago already and we’re back into the day to day routine here. We’re still figuring out were some of the souvenirs should go, and of course I have thousands of pictures to look thru and organize, but that’s a project for this fall. It was as great trip and a fantastic experience, and wonderful to get a sense of the geography, culture, architecture, history, language, music, all that great food, and to connect with family and learn something about my own heritage, and to be able to share it all with Jeanne and the girls. I hope I get a chance to back to that part of the world again some day.
Next morning bright and early we were on the train to Budapest. We crossed into Hungary only a stone’s throw from Slovakia. When we rolled in, the first thing you noticed was train station was a bit more run-down than anything we saw in Austria, where everything was so well-kept it was like a real-life Epcot Center. In Hungary you could see bits of graffiti and peeling plaster and scaffolding around underway restoration work, but overall it gave things a well worn, liven-in charm and was still nicer than say New York City.
Our hotel was right downtown about a block from the Danube, between the Chain Bridge and the Elizabeth Bridge, on one of those old narrow streets. One either side of the hotel was a restaurant. We had lunch at the one closer to the river while we waited for our room to be ready. At last, genuine, and great Hungarian food! We all got töltött káposzta, which was served in a bowl with szalonna and kolbász. Wow, out of this world.
After lunch we set out to explore. We walked down the waterfront and crossed the famous Chain Bridge, one of the first modern suspension bridges, predating the Brooklyn Bridge by almost fifty years, and the first permanent bridge across the Danube. I must say it’s a beautiful structure. From there were were are the foot of yet another funicular, this one leading up to Buda Castle, historic home of Hungarian kings. This was a cool complex of medieval castles dating to the 13th century and and more modern, palace and government type buildings from mainly the 18th century. We walked around the grounds alot before entering from the back. By this time Jeannie and Michelle were tired from the heat and went back to the hotel.
Lizzy and I kept on exploring. A couple blocks away, on the top of the hill was St. Matthias Church, which was perhaps the most beautiful of all the churches we saw, built in the gothic style in the 1200’s to the 1400’s but the stone is bright white rather than the more typical black-grey. Just past that was a place called the Fisherman’s Bastion, which is sort of a park and café with castle-wall style architecture, providing great views of the city and photo ops, looking down on the Chain Bridge and Parliament across the river. There was a group of street musicians playing violin there.
That night we went out dinner at restaurant on the other side of the hotel, which had both Hungarian and Italian food, also very good. They had great deserts including rates. They had a plate with three different kinds, one turns with spices, one alma with mak, and one cseresznye and dió. Yum yum. We walked around the neighborhood that evening looking at shops and the Danube. Budapest is a very beautiful city. Like Vienna it’s close to two million in population. But it has hills and bridges, plus the general density and rhythm, that remind me alot of San Francisco.
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Next day we headed up to the famous Hosök tere, or Heroes Square. It was a about a two kilometer walk up Andrássy Avenue, a broad and pleasant historical boulevard. The square itself holds a set of statues and monuments; in the center is the original seven Magyar chieftains who came together the form the kingdom of Hungary after their conquest of the Carpathian basin in the ninth century and subsequently made Árpád their king, and around that is a row of monuments to kings of Hungary through the ages
After that we were all hot and tired so we took a cab back to Parliament, a truly massive and impressive neo-gothic building. One thing I really wanted to see was the crown of St. Stephen, which we learned was housed inside. Unfortunately, the wait to take the tour was several hours. If we had known we could have gotten tickets ahead of time. Instead we saw what we could see in the lobby of the visitor center and walked around the outside. After that is was St. Stephen’s Basilica, yet another ornate and beautiful church.
Later that afternoon we went to the Hungarian National Museum, which was absolutely fascinating (at least for me; the girls had had enough museums at this point so we split up again). It’s mainly about the history of Hungary and contains quite a few national treasures (and was the former home of the crown of St. Stephen). The building was similar the art museum in Vienna, which a great grand staircase taking up the whole middle of the building and leading you up to start at the top. There were two wings upstairs corresponding to the medieval period, from the era of King Árpád thru the Turkish invasion, and then the last few hundred years from the rise of Austria-Hungary on to the present day. On the lower level was another section that went all the way back to the stone age, thru the Avars, Celts and Romans.
That night we went on a dinner cruise on the Danube. It was super scenic and very nice, with great food and music. The food was a buffet with lots of stuff including more goulash, ragout, palacinta, kolbász, gombóc, various meats, mushrooms, potatoes, and of course more töltött káposzta, and all sorts of deserts. There was a music group consisting of the two violinists and a bass, playing everything Mozart and Strauss to gypsy dances and Csárdás. On the other side of the boat was a cimbalom player but we didn’t get to hear much of him until the cruise was almost over cuz we didn’t know he was there until we got up and walked around after dinner. Again we ended the night walking around the waterfront.
As much as I’d love to keep on reliving our vacation, we’ve been back home a week and there’s lots going on here. We’re mostly unpacked but we got a pretty good amount of souvenirs, some of them still need a home. Which predictably kicks of a whole defragging the house project.
Things are busy at work all of a sudden, even though alot of people are still out on vacation. We’re converting our whole product to run on Docker containers so everyone has to get up to speed. Lots of training sessions.
I gave Michelle her first driving lesson the other day. Laps around to parking lot of the local high school, and pulling in an out of parking spaces. She did great.
The weather has been really hot this summer, but also there’s been a good amount of rain. So the yard is like a jungle, everything growing like crazy. I mowed the lawn the day we left for our trip and it was overdue by the day we got back. I’ve spent four major sessions in the last few weeks trimming and weeding and pruning and edging, on top of the usual routine. And due to the extreme heat it’s not fun to stay outside for even a half hour, let alone doing hard physical work in the full heat of the day for hours on end. Been trying to do more in the mornings and evenings.
The neighbors behind us have a willow tree that’s gotten pretty big and is hanging down over our hedgerow and into our yard. I bought a tool that’s basically a mini chainsaw on a ten-foot pole in the spring to help prune back the tree. And then from the next neighbor’s yard up sprang a vine that was growing up into the tree. There are several trees in the neighborhood being choked to death by out of control weeds, so I didn’t want to let this go. So another major effort. This was back in July. But the willow grows so fast it’ll need it again soon.
Then in the other corner of my hedgerow were more vines coming from the neighbors on the other side. When I went to take these out I discovered a wasp nest under the eave of my neighbor’s garage, right at the corner of my property, and got stung up. I swear, these hedges use to be so well maintained but my neighbors are letting theirs get all overgrown. Someday I’m going to have to tear mine out and replace it with a fence.
To top it all off there’s a new species of weeds I’ve never seen before, that gives my fingers blisters when I pull it. On the plus side our sunflowers and tomatoes are doing great.