Live, learn, leave
Here’s announcing my updated recording Face the Heat (2018 Remaster) is now complete and available for purchase as a CD or digital download at:
https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/buzzytonic6
Links for iTunes, Amazon and Spotify to follow soon, so watch this space. Meanwhile check out the updated page for the record at:
http://zingman.com/music/facetheheat.php
Enjoy!
Well we’re winding things up for the year. The last few weeks have just flown by. The Xmas tree and decorations are all up and the shopping is mostly done. Lizzy is home for winter break, Michelle is done with school and Jeannie and I are off work until the New Year. All the deadlines were slain and we ended it up with a nice holiday party for my work, at a cool event space near our Manhattan office. Work has been going pretty well recently. We’ve hired a couple new guys into our team and feels like everyone is working together effectively and even having some fun.
You’ll be happy to know our chimney and furnace have been fixed, I got a new car key from the hardware store at a quarter the price the dealer wanted, and we even got a new deadbolt installed on our front door. I got new the tires on my car and the oil changed too, but since then the engine has been a bit, um, funny. More on that in a future post.
Things have been progressing with the Global Jukebox as well. I have been working with Martin on a suite of features to let users and build and share journey-style content, and a tool for building a musical/cultural family tree. Last week had a meeting last week to check in with Ray, our design consultant, in which Anna & co. ratified the wireframes and direction for a new landing page and multiple, configurable entry points into different areas of the app with an optional interstitial page to provide contextual content. The following day we had a meeting with an organization called City Lore, whose goals align with ours and are looking to provide the project with some funding. Happy news.
It’s nice to have a few days of time off to look forward to. Of course our time immediately fills in with things we haven’t gotten around to in a while. Yesterday was Jeannie’s family’s big Xmas party. Denis and Sarah came into town. I played Super Smash Bros. with Michelle and her cousins.
Been working on music. In our rock band we decided to learn twelve new songs over the break and be prepared to get them together as a group in the new year. Alot of 80’s stuff plus some other thins. I’m singing lead on five of them. So today I found copies of the lyrics and chords as well as audio recordings, and started practicing them on piano.
I learned Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on the piano, which is alot of fun even if the sheet music is not totally correct to the record. I’ve even been playing a handful of Christmas Carols including Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas (which as it turns out was kept from being number 1 on the charts back in the day by Bohemian Rhapsody), Steely Dan’s Charlie Freak (not often thought of a Christmas song despite the hipster Dickensian twist on the story of the Gift of the Magi in the lyric and the sleigh bells in the arrangement), plus a couple of numbers by Vince Guaraldi.
In jazz world we’re preparing for our gigs in the new year too, so I’ve been woodshedding a good handful of standards on the sax, as well as our originals. I’m going to make some demos of a couple of my new compositions and arrangements soon, hopefully over the break.
One last piece of news. The remix of my 2010 Buzzy Tonic record Face the Heat is done. I’ve been listening back and making finer and finer tweaks until it’s become as good as I can make it. So now all that’s left is getting the CDs made and setting up the online distribution. So more on that soon.
We have more gig in our holiday season run with G-Force, at Chat 19 in Larchmont this Saturday night. I’ve never played that venue, but Gina seems pretty excited about it and says they always have a good crowd.
I’m thinking of upgrading some of my equipment to make load-in, setup, teardown and load-out quicker and easier. In particular I’m looking for a new lighter keyboard stand, a smaller stage mixer, probably eight channels instead of sixteen, and maybe a couple mic stands if I can find some where the legs don’t flop around after they’ve been collapsed. For the moment I’m thinking of putting a hair scrunchie arond the base of the mic stand to hold the legs shut.
Anyway, as it turns out, the first few gigs in the new year are for the jazz group, so it’s time to hype that.
Haven Street will be playing:
Sat Jan 12, 8pm – The Green Growler, Croton-On-Hudson
Fri Jan 25, 8pm – The Bean Runner Cafe, Peekskill
Fri Feb 1, 6pm – Silvana, Harlem
We’ve played the Growler before. It’s a fun and cozy place with a huge variety of craft beer, and the people who run it really like like music. Sure to be a great time. We might even come back for Sonic Thursday there on Feb 21.
I’ve never played the Bean Runner, but some of the guys in the band have. It has a reputation as a great place for jazz.
Silvana is a happy hour gig uptown Manhattan. That’s supposedly a good jazz venue too.
It’s been a little while since we’ve a rehearsal with the full group, so rather than honing our originals we’ve been exploring the world of standards with an eye toward adopting a few as our own to incorporate our own versions into our repertoire. We’ve also been taking the opportunity to get deeper into extended soloing and group improvisation. That’s been fun and interesting. For the Growler and Bean Runner shows we’re the only band on the bill, so it’s full sets including both originals and covers. So come on out and see us. Should be a really fun time!
Ah, one thing I’m thankful for is a moment’s rest this weekend. It feels like we’ve been on the go since the beginning of September. Now we have a much needed long weekend off from work. Lizzy came home from college earlier in the week. We had an excellent Thanksgiving with family. Jeannie made a turkey and everything, and was an excellent time.
Today we did what was likely the major raking of the year: four cans and four more bags full of leaves. Now the branches are mostly bare. It seems a little late this year.
I’ve been spending alot of time this weekend playing and listening to music. We saw the Queen movie last week, which inspired me to go back and listen to some of the early Queen albums I haven’t heard in years. My college roommate Rich was really into them, particularly Brian May’s guitar playing. So I put on Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack. Such great stuff, a unique combination of heavy metal, vocal harmonies, and wonderful weirdness. I’d say I appreciate it more now than back in the day, especially knowing they did it all with analog circuitry and a 16-track tape deck.
I went thru and listened to the entire setlist for my rock band, about three hours of music, just to get it fresh in my head for next week’s gigs, plus a bunch of new songs we’re considering adding to the set. I’m at the point where I know all the songs well enough, and I know about half of them really well. But every time I listen I pick up nuances in the arrangement that we can use to make our version sound better.
I’ve also been listening to more jazz. The guys in my band have been raving about new stuff from Christian McBride, Brian Blade and Joshua Redman among others. I found Joshua’s new record and it was great. Now Spotify is walking me backward thru his entire discography. Each record is more enjoyable than the last. Lots of great ideas in there.
I’ve been writing new music for the jazz group too. For our last gig we had four new originals – Closing the Distance (Gary), Fever Dream (Jay), A Fat Cat (a.k.a. El Gato Gordo, by Rich), and Lift Off (mine), which is roughly enough for half an album. We have a bunch of other songs we’ve been developing. One of mine, Mobility, is coming along nicely. It’s been around for a while but as of late it’s taken on a sort of Raymond-Scott-meets-gypsy-jazz quality. So I reharmonized it to be in the Hungarian minor mode and to emphasize the diminished quality. Also add a heterophonic ensemble jam toward the end.
Another song of mine, Son of the Sun has been slower going. It’s a pretty intricate number that switches meter alot, mainly between 5/8 and 7/8. We started it way back when, but then we didn’t have a regular drummer for a while and it didn’t seem worth it to try and teach every drummer who sat in. When Erik joined full time we were focused mainly on the last gig. Now it’s back to developing new material. Some of the band seem to think it’s a bit to outside of “our sound”. I find this kind of thinking really limiting and frustrating, but it didn’t help that the demo recording I had was from my heavy-metal fusion band from the 90’s. So I think I’ll put together a new demo with a sound closer to what I have in mind for this group.
Meanwhile I have two new jazz numbers I’m writing. One is based on the idea of a four-bar loop, and has a working title of Heavy Water. The other one, which is further along, I’m thinking of as a “melody” song, a midtempo number with the general feel of something like A Foggy Day or Dolphin Dance. The song explores major seventh chords, and has a bright, spacious sound, and a fair amount of modulation. It kinda started with me exploring the middle section of Sun of the Son, trying to make is sound less heavy. But then it quickly developed in an unexpected direction and became something new. It’s almost there, but not quite; I’m still kind of experimenting and exploring. I want to get the turnarounds really working tight. A great melody has a feeling of inevitability about it, like once you hear it you can’t imagine it going any other way.
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The big news on the music front is I had to buy a new computer last week. Down in my recording studio I have a Mac workstation that’s a few years old. It’s connected to a MBox Pro III and runs a particular version of ProTools. I should also mention that since the release of the third Buzzy Tonic album, Elixr, I went back have been remixing the previous Buzzy Tonic record, Face the Heat, originally released in 2011. I was never fully happy with the sound of that record, and since then I’ve become much better at mixing so I figured it was worth it. And it’s is been coming along here and there late nights and weekends. I was almost done, seven of nine songs in the can.
A couple of months ago the screen on the computer started flickering and then it froze, and I had to reboot. The problem went away and didn’t come back until last week when it started happening repeatedly, until finally wouldn’t come back at all after rebooting. Luckily I have everything backed up on time machine and only lost about an hour’s work from my last session.
So I was all set to buy a brand new IMac Pro, but then I got to thinking about how it would integrate with the current rig. There’s no obvious upgrade path from my current version of ProTools to one that would run on a new OS. And that’s to say nothing of my numerous plugin, some of which have licenses tied tot the machine I’m pretty sure. It just seemed like a potentially bottomless hassle and expense.
So Jeannie stepped in and helped me out. She found a used/refurb computer of the exact same model as mine on Ebay for like five hundred bucks, about ten percent of the cost of a new one. It arrived just two days after we placed the order. And all we had to do was plug in my Time Machine drive and restore the last backup and Viola! Back in business! The computer was able to launch ProTools and talk to the MBox and I was able to continue with my mixing right where I left off. All the plugins I needed were still valid. It looks like I may have some issues with SampleTank, a software synth/sampler which I’ll need when I get back to tracking. But I’ll cross that bridge later.
For now, I’ve finished my penultimate mixes for all nine tracks. This is basically the final mix before mastering. My workflow nowadays doesn’t really include a mastering phase. I’ll sequence the CD and make sure all the levels match, but all the tracks have a dynamic compressor on the main out, so if I need to make any adjustments I’ll just go back to the track. So I have to listen them all together, and A/B them against the old mixes, and against the newer album. I may end up tweaking the level of a compressor, or raising or lowering something by a dB or so, but that’s about it. I was hoping to get this project done by end of Thanksgiving break, but now the goal is by the end of the year. Then in 2019 I’ll start in on BZIV.
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Just a couple random things during my downtime. Michelle and I finished Avatar: The Last Airbender a few weeks ago, and now we’re watching Firefly. She’s hooked. Shiny! And I’ve been reading Robert Lang’s newest magnum opus Origami Twists, Tilings and Tessellations. I’m well over a hundred pages in and only midway thru chapter two.
It’s been another busy week. The change of the seasons is arriving with rapid fury. First off they changed the local timezone settings last weekend. It’s been getting darker and darker but now it’s nighttime before five o’clock. Still getting used to that. I did get the Mustang out one last time, but today we had our first snowstorm. Got maybe 5 inches of wet heavy snow, enough to seriously mess up traffic. Now it’s raining and it’s all supposed to melt. Hopefully the morning won’t be too bad.
We went up MIT last weekend for their annual origami convention. I taught my Dirigible and it went over well. The class was very full and there were a couple people in the class who weren’t quite at the level required, so that slowed things down a bit. Despite my providing diagrams everyone didn’t quite get to the end of the model. I also see I need to explain the collapsing of the nose better in the diagrams.
The other model I folded was my Platypus. I haven’t folded one of these in a while, and it’s not diagrammed, so I did it entirely from memory. It went just fine, and we even finished on time.
This is the most technical of the origami conferences that I regularly attend. Alot of these people were at BOS and 7OSME in Oxford at the end of the summer, and now I kinda wish I could have gone. Ah well.
I did reconnect with Robby from rabbitear.org, who is writing origami software in javascript. I want to find a way to collaborate and contribute to the project, despite my being busy with so many other things. Also Adrianne Sack gave a lecture on the parallels between origami tessellations and certain kinds of fabric and textile pleating and folding techniques. Very cool. Of course Jason taught his crazy complex dragon, and despite it being a four-hour class he had to finish up during the evening free-folding.
I saw alot of my origami friends, and it was a good hang, and a bunch of people gave me good advice about planning our trip to Japan next year. Still, these things are always over too soon.
Back at home the next day we were back in Brooklyn, to see Kamasi Washington and his band play at a place called Brooklyn Steel. You may recall we saw Kamasi at the Montreal Jazz Festival back in June and it totally floored me. Well this time we came in knowing what to expect. The show was excellent. And restored my streak: now 8 of the last 9 shows we’ve seen have had a trombone. I think they’ve been touring pretty much continually since the last time we saw them. They did about half the same songs and half different. And some of the songs have evolved. The opening band, Butcher Brown were good too. Only downside was the venue was a cavernous warehouse space suitable for raves, with no seating and the acoustics could have been better, and the drinks very very expensive. Still it was a great concert and a fun time. I even got a t-shirt.
Driving to work the last few days it’s been peak time for the leaves turning color around here. The local parkways run thru hills of oak and maple forest. Combined with leaden grey clouds and heavy skies the whole landscape was one of striking, eerie beauty. Totally surreal.
Sunday it was a mild a sunny day with bright blue skies, so Jeannie and I went for a hike along the Palisades near the Tappan Zee Bridge (a.k.a. The Mario). Great views of the river, the trees and the surrounding countryside, and we saw lots of hawks and even a family of giant Turkey Vultures hanging out on the cliffs. Way cool.
Last weekend was the first (and last) weekend in a while where we didn’t have a gig with the jazz or rock band, a show to see, or travel plans. But there’s plenty of other stuff going on.
For one thing, over the last several weekends Michelle and I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender. I saw this show out of the corner of my eye with the sound down when it was originally on the air, cuz I worked at Nickelodeon at the time. But watching it for real, well it was just excellent. So much going on, such great characters and conflicts, and such an imaginative story world. I’m still blown away that, like Doctor Markoh from Full Metal Alchemist, the Dragon of the West Iroh has a silent “h” at the end of his name.
For another we finally got the contract signed to get solar power on our roof. This was a big research project and it took a long time to work out all the details. Hopefully we can get the installation finished before the snow comes, but right now we’re waiting on permits from the city.
I’ve been busy with origami. A couple weeks back I made a pair of Cuttlefish for the Origami USA Holiday Tree at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. This project came and went so fast I didn’t even take pictures! But had a similar pair already folded, shown here. The twist is that the cuttlefish is an animal (not really fish, BTW) that changes it’s body color to blend in with its surroundings, to express it’s emotions and to imitidate other life forms with vibrant displays of color and pattern. To simulate the different moods I folded on out a plain beige sheet, as if blending in on a sandy seafloor. The other I made out of the loudest psychedelic fractal paisley pattern I could find, and posed the tentacles spread as if ready for attack. Way cool!
My other recent origami project was to diagram my Dirigible. I’ll be teaching this at the upcoming OrigaMIT convention, and wanted to submit it for the convention collection. It turned out to be a bit longer than I expected. I had estimated about 30 or 40 steps, but it ended up at 51. Still it’s a great model and well worth getting down. I plan on using it in an upcoming book.
Been busy. A week ago we went upstate to visit my parents, and also Lizzy at college. It was a fun trip, and Lizzy is doing well and having a good semester. While we were up there we took a trip to my uncle Ron in Welland and celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving along with that side of the family, including my cousin Tom, whom I haven’t seen in years.
We all caught Lizzy’s cold on the trip and been trying to shake it off ever since. Meanwhile back home Gina caught cold too, so we had to cancel our gig last weekend. We also had to kick out our guitarist, so now we’re looking for a new guitar player again. We don’t have any gigs for about six weeks, then it’s a run of four gigs in a row in late November thru mid December. Hopefully we’ll find someone.
The weather is turning cooler and it’s dark in the morning when we get up and in the evening by suppertime. We finally took out the air conditioners and had to start running the heat in the morning. And there’s been a ton or rain. At least Sunday was nice and clear. I took the Mustang out and Jeannie and went for a hike, first up around Kensico Dam and then a woods nearby called Cranberry Preserve, which has a stone quarry that looks to be where they got the stones to make the dam.
OrigamMIT is fast approaching. I’ve been diagramming my new Blimp, which I’m going to teach there and contribute to their collection, and is going to go in a future book.
At long last, my new origami book Air and Space Origami has been printed and as making its way to bookstore shelves across America and worldwide. The collection includes 14 original models of generally intermediate level, designed for broad appeal. This is a kit book that includes custom printed paper to go with the models, and even stickers for extra fun!
Look for an update to my web site soon with a new page in my origami publication sections. Meanwhile you can learn more from the publisher’s web site, and order it online.
https://www.tuttlepublishing.com/japan/air-and-space-origami-kit
https://www.amazon.com/Air-Space-Origami-Kit-Spaceships/dp/0804849242
Here’s announcing my new rock band G! Force will be playing our debut gig Saturday September 29 and Victor’s in Hawthorne NY, starting at 9:00. Wow that’s only two weeks away!
We do a combination of rock, pop and dance music. Unlike my last band we’re doing alot of newer stuff, from the 90’s and the 21st century as well as from the 80’s and earlier. It’s a really good group, versatile and solid, and things came together pretty quickly. The lineup is Gina Gee on lead vocals, Walter O on guitar, the inimitable Ken on bass, and Andy on drums, with yours truly on vocals, piano and sax. I’ve never been in a group with a female lead singer before, and it opens up a whole new set of material we can do. I’m singing lead on about 14 out of 40 songs, plus there are few more that are essentially duets, which are probably the most fun.
Hope to see you at the show!
Also here’s a link to our facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/G-Force-585865498482960/
It has few videos from a recent rehearsal, and a really sharp-looking logo. I’ll be making a proper web page for the group as soon as I get around to it.
We have more shows coming up, so look to this space for future announcement. So does my jazz group Haven Street. Between the two have six shows confirmed between now and the end of the year!
Well summer is ending and fall is coming. The kids are all back to school, and today for the first time the weather dropped down into the 60s after being pretty much solidly in the 90’s for the last three months. We ended the summer with a trip to Ocean City. We used to do this every year but haven’t been in a few years, so it was nice to go back. It’s not the same now that the kids are older. Lizzy wasn’t there at all, and the amusement park and water park isn’t really a thing anymore. Still we had a good time, swam in the ocean, walked down the boardwalk, had a couple nice dinners and hiked around Assateague National Seashore.
One bit of business left from the summer we finished up this weekend was the D&D adventure. The module is the classic The Isle of Dread, adapted to 5th edition rules. If you recall we started it on the cruise back in July. By the end of the cruise the party had reached the entrance to the dungeon on an island in a lake in a volcanic crater on a mountaintop in a jungle on an island in the far reaches of the tropical ocean. It was the setting for the final climatic chapter. We played on session in August in which the part cleared out the cannibals living in the upper level of the ancient temple and found some treasure and secret door leading to the hidden chambers underneath. It was here that the final session began.
The macguffin for the entire quest was a giant black pearl. The lower level of the dungeon was filled shoulder-deep with water, so the players knew they were getting close. They happened upon a giant flooded chamber in the temple inhabited by sharks, but were forced to turn back. A little while later they opened a secret door which drained the water from most of the corridors. They were able to return to the shark room and now stand at the top of a stairway in water up to their knees or so. The sharks attacked but the players could fight back. Meanwhile on the other side of the room the party spotted a giant oyster, which must surely hold the pearl.
Abby, a halfling rogue, attempted to scale the walls to reach the terrace with the oyster, but unfortunately failed her dexterity check and splashed into the pool. Meanwhile the sharks turned out to be tough opponents, and even standing on stairs the party was fighting at a disadvantage. They threw everything they had at the sharks: hammers, axes, maces and magic, slings and arrows. Interestingly the two front-line combatants for this melee were Lou, playing Carmine the Invincible, a dwarven fighter whose main weapon is an axe, and Michelle, playing a cleric acolyte of Thor, who usually wields a hammer but for this encounter was trying out a newfound +2 mace. No swords. Michelle has studied the rulebooks and figured out how to maximize her spells and special combat abilities, and is already pretty formidable at second level.
It took a few rounds but Michelle had killed one shark and Lou had reduced the other to a single hit point. Meanwhile Abby had swum to the giant oyster and attempted to snatch the pearl but ended up getting trapped inside the oyster and was presently trying to stab her way out with a pair of daggers. That same round, as luck would have it, both Lou and Michelle rolled a 1 on their attack, and so had to make a dexterity check or fall off the stairs into the depths of the pool. Both failed their check fell in, and both were wearing metal armor, so they couldn’t swim except at a great handicap. Lou was then attacked by the shark and reduced to zero hit points. Katie and Valerie dove into the water to attempt to rescue their drowning companions.
This left Philip, the party’s wizard, as the sole front-line warrior. He had used up all is spells and his daggers were lying in the bottom of the pool. His only remaining weapon was a triangle. Now normally a triangle is really a musical instrument, but I figured the situation was desperate and anyway it’s made of metal, so I’d allow him to attack with it for 1-2 points of damage. So Philip dives in and clocks the shark right between the eyes, finally killing the monster! Soon after Abby succeeds in escaping the oyster with the pearl. Wow, what a great combat.
I had thought about all kinds of nastiness or twists of fate the could befall the party on the home voyage, some event to launch then into the next adventure, but I sensed everyone was eager to see the story come to its resolution. So I was nice and they returned without further incident to the very harbor town seaside pub in which the quest began, again sitting face to face with the aged and grizzled pirate Rory Barbarosa. He kept his word and paid them handsomely for the pearl, and let them keep the rest of the treasure and magic items they gained.
Now Michelle wants to DM, and wants to create her own module, so we’ll see how that goes. She’s got to do a bunch of reading and design if she wants to go that way. I’ll probably end up helping her. Hopefully we’ll be ready to play sometime this fall. I’ll need a character to play. I’m thinking of using Barbara Barbarosa, a.k.a. Babs. She was an NPC in the campaign, Rory’s daughter and the captain of the ship the party sailed to Isle of Dread, recently converted by Michelle to the cult of Thor.