Author: zingblog

Here Comes the Sun Machine

It looks like spring is finally arriving in earnest. Everything feels warmer and coming alive. The big news here is we got solar panels installed on our new roof. The company that did the work was Apex, and I must say they did a great job. Like the roof they came and installed everything in one day. Of course before all that they spec’d the system and did the engineering and got the permits from the town and all that. A few random tasks remain. We’re adding a hookup so we can power the house off a generator more directly. Also the city needs to do an inspection and the electric company to come and install a two-way meter. Then we’ll be all set to let the sun shine in and face it with a grin.

I’ve been practicing sax more lately, trying to level up my playing. Been woodshedding alot of standards as well as our originals. Working on heads and melodies as well as being able to run the changes and put good ideas over them with fluidity. There’s just so many tunes out there, many of which I haven’t played in quite a few years. Some songs I haven’t played since college, when I played alto, so the key and the layout is all different. Been working on Take Five and A Night In Tunisia in particular.

I saw Joshua Redman at the Blue Note in NYC the other night. I never realized it before but he’s Dewey Redman’s son. Joshua is one of my favorite modern tenor players. Such a high level of virtuosity and technical facility. He has an unbelievable altissimo range, and not just for blasting out the occasional high note, but with dexterity and dynamics, like a whole third register on the horn. But you don’t even pay attention to his chops because his musical ideas are at the forefront and very compelling. The band was a quartet and the set was mostly originals and a few standards including the Dexter Gordon classic I Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry. Excellent piano player too.

In the rock world, G! Force played our last gig with our drummer Pete last Saturday night. It was our best gig yet and musically the group keeps getting better and sounding tighter. He’s a good guy and will be missed.

Luckily we auditioned a new drummer tonight. He’s even better, with a super solid sense of time and everything sounds a bit more snappy and energetic. Just lifts everybody’s playing a notch. Plus he already knows alot of the tunes. So hopefully this will work out. We have a few weeks before our next gigs, and then there’s ten shows in May, June and July. Onwards and upwards.

Da Roof

Well spring is getting closer. We’ve begun work on the yard, clearing out the winter debris, putting down dirt to fill in some low spots, and some grass seed and fertilizer. Yesterday was the first genuinely nice warm day, where you could enjoy being outside with just a light jacket. Today it’s rainy but temperate.

We got a new roof put on the house a few days ago. I was super impressed: the crew came around 8:30 in the morning and were done by 3. Pulled off the old roof and everything. It looks great, very attractive color and pattern on the shingles. In the photos it looks kinda greyish, but there’s a good amount of red and brown mixed in. I’ll have to take some more pics on a day when the sun is out.

Next up: solar panels!!!

Pink Elephant

My friend Gina, the singer in my rock band, asked me to make an origami elephant for her, with the trunk up for good luck and fortune. A little while back, at Origami Heaven I came across the perfect piece of paper – a 12″ sheet of pink stardream. Stardream is really fun paper, thick like marble wyndstone, and very workable, but with a pearlescent sparkly finish. I’m very happy with the way the model came out, especially since it required no wetfolding. And like I said, perfect for Gina.

New Keyboard

In music news I bought a new keyboard last week, mainly to use live with the rock band. The old keyboard has great sounds, particularly electric piano, clavinet and organ. But it was not easy to switch between sounds quickly between songs, lots of button flipping. With old classic rock that was fine, but now we’re doing a fair amount of 80’s and modern pop and dance stuff, which requires layering and being able to call up different sounds in the middle of a song. The new keyboard has a thing called Stage Setups that let you combine stacks of sounds and effects and store them as presets, with the individual components of the sound under the control of a bank of sliders. Super powerful and flexible, just what I need. Only thing is now I have to learn how to program the thing! Last week the band learned the classic Funky Town by Lipps Inc., and that’s a good example with different synth and string sounds coming in and out. We have a gig this Friday night, hope I’m ready.

Why Not Zed?

It feels like spring is just around the corner. The sun is coming out now and again, and the snow piles are melting. And so I’m starting to come out of hibernation and sift thru the old to shed or refresh, with an eye to making space for brave new things to come. Since rock the band has been gigging so much I’m looking into a new keyboard, stand and some other stuff to improve my sound and make the schleppage lighter. More on that soon.

And as I continue to organize my back pages of songs and lyrics, here’s one I came across that’s fully compete but I’ll probably never use. My brother-in-law Lou is a singer-songwriter. He wrote and recorded an album of songs for children, He’s My Bear, when his kids were little. One day a while back we were talking and he had a bunch of songs for a follow up. I thought it might be fun to produce. So we made a demo of four or five songs and I began laying down the actual tracks. However life keeps you busy and we were never able to complete the project. Along the way I wrote a song for the record called Why Not Zed? It’s basically a scrambled A-B-C song, using the Canadian pronunciation of the last letter of the alphabet, as in Zed Zed Top, or Why Why Zed. It turns out a lot of Americans aren’t hip. So take off, eh!

…

Why Not Zed?

A – B – C – D
Dinosaurs and cheese
H – I – J – K
Elephants sneeze
1 – 2 – 5 – 3
Blue green red
Double-U, triple-X
Why not zed?

One half, zero
e and pi
Radical two
The golden rule and i
L – M – N – O
Toes knees head
Who what when where
Why not zed?

-jfs 1/14

Slope

2018 was a good year for music. I put out three new albums (well, two new ones and a remix/remaster of an old one) and both my live bands started gigging regularly.

This year is shaping up to be a good year too. I’ve already played six or eight gigs between my two bands. Now I’m getting going on putting together new material for the next round of studio projects.

With the jazz group Haven Street it’s time to start thinking about the next recording. We’ve grown alot musically in the last year, both in terms our writing and our playing. We’ve been working on depth, range and dynamics in our improvisation, and on group improvisation ideas. And the writing provides vehicles for different kinds of playing.

Our first album, which we were mixing a year ago, had nine songs: four by me, four by Gary, and one by Jay. We now have nine new songs, three by me, three by Gary, two by Jay and one by Rich. This probably more than enough but it’s a nice number, and it’s good to have a depth of material going into the studio.

The most recent song is one of mine, tentatively titled A Lazy Lady. It’s a languid, melodic slow swing groove with lots of major seventh chords and shifting modalities. We don’t have another tune that sounds like it, so it’s a worthy contribution to the set. I actually wrote it around Xmastime but we didn’t get into rehearsing until recently cuz we were focused on a series of gigs and wanted to sharpen the material we had. Once we did, the band instantly got into it and started contributing ideas, and pretty soon it was clear that the song would be a winner.

For a while I had been pushing for the group to do Sun of the Son, a song I originally wrote for Event Horizon back in the ’80’s. It has a lot of meter changes and a heavy synth-laden fusion sound. Rich in particular though it was too prog-y for our group and would take too much time to really learn well and make our own. So I started in on making a new demo for it, making it more latin and less electronic, and re-imagining the middle section. Now that I have another new song the group digs the urgency has gone away, but the track has kinda taken on a life of it’s own. It’s gonna be much more than a basic demo, more like a full arrangement. I’m not sure what to do with it; might end up putting it on my next album.

In the rock world we continue gigging with the G-Force band. With the group lineup stabilized we’re adding new songs every show. We’ve probably added a dozen since the New Year. My favorites among last few (because I’m singing lead) include It’s Only Love by Bryan Adams and Tina Turner, I’m No Angel by Gregg Allman, and Rio by Duran Duran (which has a nice sax solo too.) We’re learning a bunch of new dance stuff too. On the other hand, we still have maybe five of the top ten most overplayed bar band songs in our set, and no matter how many new songs we add, there’s a steady thread of songs of that kind.

The last gig we played in Connecticut. The we had to wait to set up because the dinner crowd was really going on long, but they fed us and food was great. (Dragon Roll Burrtio!) It was first bar we’ve played in a while without TVs on in the room. There were plenty of people enjoying the music. It’s amazing how a dancing crowd can really make it fun. On the other hand, the set up and tear-down all the time is getting to be a drag, as I’m still getting over problems with my feet. Ah well, hopefully with the spring coming it’ll get easier.

Last weekend I was feeling particularly bad and spent most of my time hanging around the house listening to music. Explored a lot of long-forgotten 80’s prog-jazz crossover stuff on spotify. We also got a new King Crimson DVD from the same tour we saw last year, with the seven headed monster configuration of the band including Mel Collins on winds, Jakko on vocals, Fripp, Tony Levin, and three drummers. They played at least one song from each of their first seven albums, including lots of mellotron stuff, as well as updated arrangements from the later parts of their career. All in all an amazing job of unifying an incredibly diverse set of material. There were a few songs I didn’t know that well so I went back and found the original tracks. That got me thinking about lyrics.

In addition to planning the next jazz album I’ve been thinking about my next studio solo album for Buzzy Tonic. I have a the first three or four songs ready to go, and now I might be adding a crypto-jazz instrumental as well. We’ll see. Anyway that’s probably enough for one side.

I always have a big backlog of partially written musical ideas that can be developed. I was surprised to discover I also have a pretty big backlog of potential lyrics. I thought it was mostly random fragments, but I went thru and with just a little organizing I found I have enough stuff for maybe ten or fifteen songs. Of course not all are equally good, most are incomplete, and none have a musical idea to go with them. So it’ll take some work, but it’s great to find this cache of material and It’ll alot of fun go thru it and see if I can get some songs happening.

BTW here’s a lyric I came up with at a recent Haven Street gig for Jay’s song Slope. I normally don’t care for vocalese (listen to pretty much anyone who’s not Ella Fitzgerald and you’ll know why) so I have no plans to ever record it, but it just came to me while we were playing and now it’s stuck in my head every time we do the song. Enjoy!

…

Slope

Just when you think that life’s looking up
And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around
And then you think that life’s looking down

Climbin’ up that slope
Slidin’ down that slope

Just when you think that life’s looking up
And then you think that life’s looking down

Slidin’ down that slope
Climbin’ up that slope

And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around

Holdin’ on to hope
Ridin’ on up and down that slope

– jfs 1/19

Just Like Heaven

I’ve been putting in a ton of effort recently for the Global Jukebox, for an upcoming push to live and a designing and spec’ing a subsequent new feature set for education that we’re planning to deliver this summer. I’ve also finally had the time circle back and properly learn the keyboard parts for a bunch of tunes that we’ve recently added to the rock band set list, and practicing vocals too.

But the main event for this post is that I just got back from Origami Heaven in Stonybrook Long Island. This is a regional origami convention that his been more fun and interesting for me every year. Unfortunately, it sounds like this will be the last year because it’s alot of work for the organizers. Thank you Shri and Rachel for putting on a great convention all this time.

I spent most of my time hanging out with Ryan Charpentier and Paul Frasco. Plus there was a group of people from L.A. and Pennsylvania who turned out to be interesting and alot of fun and coming from the ComiCon scene.

I taught two classes. One was my blimp. This time I took a two-hour session and it worked out well. The class was smallish and there were a few non-expert level folders, but I was able to give everyone enough instruction that they all ended up folding a nice model. The other model was my Platypus, which also went over well.

Saturday night a few of us were hanging out at the hotel bar, and the chef who was preparing the dinner came out and asked us to fold a couple models for him. One was a dinner plate, for which I came up with a new, nice design.

A few of us stayed up talking and folding well into the night. I created another new model, a Catamaran, inspired by our recent sailing adventures in the Caribbean.

An aside — by coincidence, the night before Jeannie and I and Jay from my jazz group wen to see T. S. Monk at a place called the Jazz Forum in Tarrytown. They’ve been open about a year and I’ve heard it’s a great place. Jay does a better job than I do of keeping up with what music acts are coming to town, so he often invites me to shows. The T. S. Monk band was great, and featured a lineup of three horns, a tenor and alto sax, and a trumpet, plus a rhythm section, and they brought out a vocalist who could scat like Ella. T. S. himself plays the drums, and they did alot of tunes by his father famed piano genius Thelonious Monk. The piano player in the band had a very unMonklike style, smooth and lyrical rather than angular and percussive. It fit the music very well.

Anyway on the way out of the venue we ran into my friend Bob who was waiting to get in for the late show. It turns out Bob, who is big into sailing, had just got back from a trip to the Caribbean too. He was sailing for two weeks on a 40′ Catamaran that he hired with several other couples. He described it as “an RV with sails”.

So I had sailing on my mind, and was vaguely toying with the idea of making an Origami Sun and Sea book to follow up my Origami Air and Space book. I’m very happy with the way this came out. I can be folded in less than ten minutes and works with all kinds of paper.

Michelle joined us Sunday morning and at lunchtime we walked around the Stonybrook campus, to the weird torus mandala sculpture. She had a robot competition Saturday, and her team qualified for the nation finals. They would need some kind of (probably corporate) sponsorship to get there, to pay for transportation and lodging. I think I’ll ask my boss if the company is interested.

Meanwhile the ComiCon people asked me if I was interested in design an origami model for the Funco Pop figures. I guess one of them works there. That might be interesting…

Island Time

Happy that we’re now into the second half of winter. Lots going on.

First off, Jeannie and I enjoyed a long-weekend getaway to the Bahamas last week. We stayed at a little resort right on Cable Beach in Nassau, right next to where they filmed the movie Help!. This the the third time we’ve been down there, and all three times it’s been when Jeannie’s birthday falls on a Monday. Interesting to see how the place changes over the years. The big new thing this time was a giant resort popped up right down the beach. Last time it was under construction; now it’s fully operational. Luckily our cozy, sleepy stretch of beachfront remains undisturbed.

The trip was lovely, a perfect and total break from everything to shake off the winter blues and relax in the sunshine, gain back some health and enjoy the food, drink, music, pool and hot tub, and the beach and the sea. The weather couldn’t have been better. The food was yummy and interesting, with everything having a local flavor. A good example was the jerked chicken sushi roll. Also lots of fish. And unlimited open bar the whole time, with lots of frozen rum concoctions and local beer.

We went out sailing, which was super fun. The resort lets you take out a small Hobie Cat and breeze around the bay. I haven’t operated a sailboat in years, probably since the last time we were at the resort. But I got the hang of it again soon enough, and it was fun and relaxing.

We also went on a boating expedition with diving and snorkeling. Got a drive-by of a handful of local islands and saw some dolphins. Then we swam around a reef and saw some coral and colorful tropical fishes. The colors were predominantly yellow, blue and purple, very different than an above-water palette. Very cool. The last stop was another reef on the edge of the bay, beyond which was deep water. For some reason sea turtles like to come up out of the deep and hang out at this spot, so we had close encounters with several of them. Super awesome!

…

The night before we left my jazz group Haven Street played a gig at a place called Silvana in Harlem. This was my first gig in Manhattan since the 90’s. Things haven’t changed, there’s still five bands on the bill and you only get to play for an hour. That said, it was a cool venue and the people dug the music. We played one condensed set of our best stuff, which we know inside and out. We have no jazz gigs lined up in the next few weeks, so I think we’ll be focusing on new material. I have a couple new songs to bring in.

We’ve also played another rock gig one we got back home, this one back at Victor’s. Pete is now getting more comfortable on drums, and we introduced three new songs. I like the fact that we add several new songs every gig. Continuing to get tighter and tighter, too, refining the arrangements.

Still more news to come, must save for another post.

Shiny New Year

Ok so, the new year is off to a roaring start.

Two weeks ago we had just returned to work for new year. Coldness and darkness and all that. That weekend Jeannie was putting away the Christmas decorations in the closet under the stairs, a.k.a. the wizard room. Forgetting where she was, she stood up too fast and bumped her head pretty hard on the low ceiling. The next day Jeannie was driving to work and has a headache and started feeling dizzy. It turned out she had a concussion, which took the better part of a week to get over.

Right around that time the pain in my ankle went from kinda bad to really bad, and it was clear that I’d have to seriously and assiduously stay off my feet for a little while.

That same day we got the news Jeannie’s Aunt Mary died. She was 87 years old. A dear sweet lady. I still remember visiting her house in New Jersey way back when I first moved to NYC. I just saw her at Christmas and she seemed to being doing pretty well. The end was pretty fast.

So bang 1-2-3. At least Lizzy was home and was able to give us rides to the doctors and the funeral home. I was able to work from home until I started feeling better, and we got thru all that. I finally went into the office today. It was good to see everyone again.

We managed to get the Honda fixed somewhere in there. The dealer in White Plains where I bought the car was completely useless, lying to us about the scheduling and the work they intended to perform, recommending thousands of dollars in unnecessary repairs, and not addressing the issue we brought it in for in the first place. After multiple visits we had the give up on them. We took it another Honda dealer in Yonkers, and they were no better. We finally took it to the local garage near Jeannie’s work and they fixed it up for a reasonable price. Never got the firmware in the car’s computer updated, but it seems that was probably unnecessary anyway. Yeesh done with the dealers.

…

On a more upbeat note, the first gig of the new year was with my jazz group Haven Street at the Green Growler in Croton, and it went really well. We played two sets, 10 songs and then 6, with a total of 12 originals and 4 standards. Of the originals, 6 were on our record and 6 are new, destined for record #2. I think the newer songs are all really interesting and some of them really challenging to play, and all offer something new and different compositionally and tonally to solo on, so we’re not just repeating ourselves. The group is at a level where we pretty consistently get into a zone of really good listening/interactivity/spontaneity. A friend of the drummer sat in on trumpet on the standards, and he was quite good, tone phrasing riffs and chops.

Green Growler is a fun and cozy venue. It’s not exactly strictly a bar. They have hundreds of kinds of beer in cans and bottles that you can buy and carry out. It’s right by the Croton train station so there’s alot of walk-in traffic and the bar itself is like a counter. They also have a bunch of beers on tap and you can come in with a jug and have it filled. Then there’s a lounge area across from the bar, where the band plays, and in addition to some chairs and tables they have couches and board games, so it’s a pretty cool hang. They mostly have jazz and alternative music. It’s not very large but the room was full for the first set and still half full at the end, and the people really dug it. There was even dancing, and a guy drawing us the whole show. He showed me the drawings, pretty cool. Captured alot of the improvisational energy.

Our next gig is this Friday at the Bean Runner Cafe in Peekskill. Should be even better.

…

On the rock’n’roll front, we had to kick out our old drummer. We all felt really bad about it, but we had gone as far as we could with him. Andy was a really great guy, very dedicated and eager to help in every way. Unfortunately he was just not an experienced player. The rest of the group has several decades each of experience in working bands, and Andy had been playing about a year and was still getting the basics together.

So Gina had a friend Pete, who is a former wedding band drummer and has a great sense of time and groove. As soon as he entered it lifted the whole sound of the band. Pete sings too, so now we can do three-part harmonies.

We had a gig last weekend, which we had to cancel due to the threat of a snowstorm. Our guitarist Vinny works as a supervisor of a snowplow crew in the Bronx, so he got called in. As it turned out the storm was mostly just rain. Still it’s just as well. No one would’ve come out on a nasty stormy night. And having another week to get the set together with Pete is good thing. To top it off I wouldn’t’ve been able to hump the PA gear coming off and ankle injury.

So we have our debut gig with the new lineup this Saturday at P. J. Fogherty’s in Bronxville. Conveniently just five minutes from my house.