Author: zingblog

Origami Biplane

I talked to my publisher this week about doing a second origami book, to follow up Origami Animal Sculpture. I gave them a few concepts and the one they like the best is Origami from Sky and Space. This would include models like my Rocketship, U.F.O., Hot Air Balloon, Zeppelin, and Radio Satellite. Now I need to come up with about a half a book’s worth of models to round it out and give them a formal pitch. So I’ve begun brainstorming and folding.

I think I have a very good list. More models than I need actually, so I can choose the ones that come out the best. I’m particularly keen on coming up with a few simple to low intermediate models for the first section of the book, although I must admit, so far my designs have been leaning toward the complex. I’m going have a chapter of airplanes, and I went for the most challenging one first. I folded a Biplane that I think turned out pretty nicely. The form can be adapted into several other aircraft. By coincidence it uses the same base as the Radio Satellite.

The Return of the Debut of The Return of the Debut of the Left Hook

I forgot to mention, our cancelled gig at the Fisherman’s Net has been rescheduled yet again. Now it’s on for this Saturday, April 25. I guess that means they’re open for business again. I wonder if the bar owner is gonna give the boys in the band a 1099.

So once again, Left Hook remains a really smokin’ group, a real knockout. We have a great sound and loads of great material including funk, soul and classic rock, and are even better rehearsed than before. I’m playing sax, piano and singing. We have three strong vocalists and lots of harmonies, plus a slammin’ rhythm section, tasty guitars, everything you need. And now we have another two weeks rehearsal. Here’s the info:

…

LEFT HOOK
Music with a punch!

Westchester’s newest classic rock Funk & soul party band appearing live
Saturday April 25, 9:00 PM
at The Fisherman’s Net, 129 6th St. Pelham, New York

and if you can’t make that come see us:

Saturday May 9. 9:00 PM
Dudley’s Bar & Marina
94 Hudson Park Rd. New Rochelle

Springy Thingy

Another spring break come and gone. After working hard all winter, and the bitter cold weather, we really needed this one. Spring came late this year. Two weeks ago there was still snow on the ground. Things have finally just started budding and turning green.

This weekend was the first really nice weather of the year. Sunny and in the 60’s. We washed and waxed Jeannie’s car, and I put a new battery in the Mustang and started it up, and went for the first ride of the season. Woo-hoo!

On Saturday the Left Hook gig got cancelled again. This time due to the bar owner’s wife called the Dept. of Labor over him paying employees off the books, so he’s shut down for the time being. Ah well we have another gig coming up. Jeannie and I went out to Dudley’s Saturday nite, where our next gig is at. Nice place, right on the water in New Rochelle, Long Island Sound. Have a good stage and PA. Also the jazz group has gig the following weekend. So May is getting busy fast.

Rewinding a bit, at the start of spring break I took the girls to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the city. That was a really good time. We hadn’t been in five years or so. Michelle was really interested in the Greco-Roman wing, from having read Percy Jackson, so we spent some time there. We actually saw quite a bit of the place: the Egyptian wing, some modern and art deco paintings and sculptures, some Dutch masters, some medieval and renaissance stuff, some Asian art, the hall of arms and armor, and the hall of musical instruments. This last one was extra fun because they had a special exhibit on Adolph Sax, inventor of the saxophone, the saxhorn, the sarousaphone, the six-valve trombone, and lots of other weird brass and wind instruments that never caught on. The exhibit featured two extreme saxophones built by Sax himself. One was a contra-bass, in the key or Eb, twice as deep as a bari and about 7 feet high, even with all sorts of extra turnbacks. The other was a sopranino, also in Eb and twice as high as an alto.

We spent Easter weekend visiting with family. Martin’s came down on Saturday, and we went to Queens on Sunday to visit Jeannie’s family. Good to catch up and to know that everyone is well.

Tone Row

A few weeks ago Michelle was watching a video online by that girl who does those online videos about Fibonacci numbers and fractal dragons, but this one was about Schoenberg-style tone rows. I was exposed to serailism in college, but never thought it was particularly tuneful or interesting, although I must say the girl did a really haunting Mary Had a Little Lamb based on the idea. Anyway Michelle and I had a good discussion about music theory and composing, and I gave her a few straight triadic ideas to play around with.

Recently I’ve been going updating my web site so the whole thing uses style sheets. This is a long overdue endeavor and I’ve dusted off some old pages I haven’t looked at in a long time. One was about The Perfect Shuffle, so naturally I wrote a tone row based on the perfect shuffle sequence of a twelve-card deck. I kinda always thought all tone rows were more or less the same, but I played this one on the piano and it sounds pretty compelling. It goes like this:

C Db Eb G D F B Bb Ab E A F#

It has the interesting property that the second half of the pattern is the same as the first half, but flipped upside down. It also has the property that the intervals between the notes are pretty varied from narrow to wide. In fact I think just about every interval from a semitone to a Major7 appears once, and a tritone appears twice.

Now I’m thinking about how to use this riff compositionally. One idea is to generate a bunch more patterns based on perfect shuffles of different sized decks, and arrange them into a kind of phase fugue. I wonder how that would be to listen to.

Leftier Hookier

Left Hook is announcing it’s second show coming up on May:

Saturday May 9. 9:00 PM
Dudley’s Bar & Marina
94 Hudson Park Rd. New Rochelle

This is a cool place down by the water, with really good food too. Should be a great time.

Meanwhile here’s a reminder to come see us this Saturday April 11 at The Fisherman’s Net in Pelham.

Also, I’ve updated out web site at lefthooknyc.com and created a new facebook page at facebook.com/lefthooknyc so you can go and like us an receive info about upcoming shows.

The Return of Origami from Space

Well my busy spell at work has ended a bit sooner than expected, so I have some time now to get caught up on a bunch of long-standing projects. First off, I’ve been thinking about a second origami book, and tossing around ideas for a topic or theme. One of the more promising ones is to expend my repertoire of Origami from Space models with a constellation of related models. The other night I came up with a concept for one. I’m not sure whether to call it Space Probe or Radio Satellite, but over the last few days I folded several versions, experimenting and refining it.

Here’s two of the best so far. One version uses a 12×12 grid and the other 16×16. This model is a but unusual for me in the that it starts with a grid and uses some box-pleating, but it’s appropriate to the subject. The base is similar to my War Elephant, in that it embeds a Hydrangea tessellation in the middle of the paper and proceeds from there. Some day soon I hope to take some pictures on a black background with some salt sprinkled on it to simulate outer space. Meanwhile I also have an idea to fold a Sputnik.

Talent Time

Last weekend was the talent show at Michelle’s school. This was in lieu of the usual musical production that they’ve been putting on the last few years. The main difference is that this format doensn’t have the pre-K thru 4th grade, so logistically it’s much easier. For the older kids it’s not that much different; they have to audition, but then they can do an act of their choosing. Most are music, some are comedy or dance.

Michelle sang Don’t Cry for Me Argentina with her friend accompanying her on piano. The did really well and I was amazed how high the vocal part goes on that song. Some of the other acts were really good, and some sort of just there, but everyone had a great time. This year there was no orchestra, just either piano or karaoke depending on the song. I did the sound mixing for the event, which was a good chance to try out some of my new PA equipment.

Then on Monday Lizzy’s song a theatre group did a show with a rock band theme with a similar format. A bunch of kids, including Lizzy and a group of her friends, did songs with various adults (professional musicians) accompanying them, and were really good. Some of the other kids did full-on rock bands, but they weren’t ready for prime time, and worse they had three songs each!

At least the time was well spent for me. I’ve been thinking about ideas for my next origami book, but I’ve been too busy to fold anything lately. One idea I had was to expand the Origami from Space concept into a full book. So I came up with a model I’m calling Space Probe or maybe Radiosatellite. It’s a spaceship with a radio dish, boom antenna and some solar panels. A bit like V’ger but not quite. I folded one out of the program, and then last night while I was working on code, during compile time. Pics coming soon.

Change in the Weather

It’s been a long, cold stormy winter. Snow day after snow day all thru the second half of January, all of February and even three more snowfalls the first week of March. Enough already! And then suddenly two or three days ago the sun came out and the temperature rose above freezing. Now the snowpiles have dimished from five feet high to three feet, and you can even see a bit of lawn here and there. On the other hand, the remaining snow is black slush from hell and the potholes are in full bloom. Still, it feel like spring is finally here!

I spent most of the winter intensely busy at work. My previous project ended around the new year, and now I’m making the next-generation content management platform. It’s a whole new technology stack, with HTML5, AngularJS, JSON, Git, Gulp, Lint, Less, Vagrant, Karma, Protractor, with Scala and Akka on the middle tier, and lots of other good stuff. Also a major upgrade to our processes and best practices, including full-on test-driven development and continuous deployment and integration. So there’s been a lot to put together and come up to speed on in a short time. We also have a new and expanded team, including four people from my old group and three new guys with more one the way.

Our team is distributed, with guys in Italy, Poland, Nova Scotia, New Jersey, Queens and Westchester, so I’ve been working from home alot more. We have daily video conferences that include GIT pull requests, code reviews and design and planning sessions, which sometime go on for a half a day. Been also putting in alot of late nights and weekends. Still, I guess the best way to learn something new is to jump in the deep end with full immersion. It looks like I’m past the steepest part of the learning curve now. We have a big milestone demo coming up a couple weeks and it looks like we’ll actually get there.

Gamelon

Last week I got the news that an old friend of mine died in a plane crash. (This brings the number of people I’ve known to die in plane crashes up to three, not counting 9/11, but still zero auto accident fatalities.)

Ted Reinhardt was the drummer and leader of the 80’s prog fusion band Gamelon, one the most successful bands to come out of Buffalo, NY. Gamelan had a unique and very evolved sound, with polyrhythms, angular harmonies, funky bass and three guitar players. One sounded a heck of a lot like Alex Lifeson, the next like Eddie Van Halen, and the third one was way out there, doubling on electric violin. Gamelon was the number one band on the scene when my own band, Event Horizon was gigging around. We were big fans and had seen lots of their shows and got to know them, and ended up doing a bunch of double bills with them. They were some of our best gigs, and theirs too. Gamelon went onto national success, playing on the same bill as Miles Davis in one of his last gigs.

I just got their first album again on iTunes and listened to it after many years. It sounds better than I remembered, with lots of stuff going on I missed back in the day. Anyway Ted was a great drummer and a positive influence on my music career. He’ll be missed.

Band Evolution

Winter lingers and we endure. It’s March already and there’s still a foot of snow on the ground, and it’s snowing heavily again right now. Apparently this February was the coldest on record in 80 years. Damn global warming. The Left Hook inaugural gig was cancelled due to a snowstorm last Saturday. It’s getting rescheduled for April, so hopefully the weather will be nicer by then.

Young Wolfgang Skywalker announced a few weeks ago he was going to leave the band after the gig, one week after he showed up for rehearsal dead-dog tired and lamenting about being buried under schoolwork. Ah well we knew it was a matter of time, and now’s a good time to make the break. We’re bringing in Ken “Dr. Pluto” on bass. He rehearsed with us last week. Hit fit right in, and already know a bunch of our songs, and knows Gary from the jazz circle. He should have no problem getting the set together in the next five weeks. So cool, onward and upwards.

We’re now starting to look for more gigs in earnest, so we need to put together a web site. I recently updated my music site with links and pages to my current bands Left Hook, 7 Jazz West, and The Day Trippers. I had started this as part of my ongoing wintertime upgrades to my web site, but once I was done, a realized that the new pages, even thought they the requisite band info and links to video and stuff, are pretty plain design-wise. So another round of updates in the offing. Unfortunately, I’m really buried under work for my day job right now, so it may be a while until I can circle back. Meanwhile we’ll be recording our next few rehearsals, so we can get some audio up so people can hear our sound. Watch this space for future updates.

And as luck would have it, The Day Trippers seems to have run it’s course. Between the question whether to add another singer, the logistical difficulty of getting together to rehearse, and the lack of upcoming gigs, this looks like the end, at least for the time being. Still it was a good experience and a lot fun, and gave me a great change to work on my vocals.

As one door closes another opens. I’ve been trying to get a project going to play my originals for some time now. I’d asked Ken to join, but he’d been busy with other projects. Now he has one less project (he was in DT too) and is very interested. Also this cat Charlie from the jazz circle, whom I approached in the fall, came back to me in January saying he now has some time and wants to get together and jam.

Charlie and I got together yesterday with me on piano and him on guitar. I showed him six of my tunes. He picked them right up and was really into them. He got down Checker Cab, Get on Back 2 U, and Ghost in the Machine. We also looked at Heat Wave, Your Dancing Shoes, and (IGBA) Beautiful Day. This is great news cuz a lot of guys can’t handle my songs; you need to be proficient in jazz harmony and odd meters. So hopefully we can get together soon with Ken on bass, and then all we’ll need is a drummer.