Author: zingblog

Christmas Cabaret

I’ve been really busy the last couple weeks with the Xmas Cabaret, a big fundraiser at Michelle’s school. Learned like 35 songs on sax and (one on) ukulele. It was a ton of fun. Last time I did one of these shows was three years ago, and I remember working my ass off because I hadn’t played a live show in years and needed to get back into playing shape on the sax, plus learning the tunes while transposing, skipping around the songs, and making my sound fit in with the group.

This time it was alot more relaxed, mainly cuz I already knew the people, and knew what to expect, and also cuz my chops are up and I can sight read and transpose and all that no sweat. Since Michelle L., the director, also runs the school choir, for this show she picked less traditional songs, by artists like Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Harry Connick Jr., Billy Squier, and some more mellow stuff like The Carpenters and Bing Crosby. It was the same crew, and great to see them all and perform together again. Mike L. on piano and musical director, his wife Michelle as show and vocal director, Brian and Kristen running the stage and props and sets and tech and all. Plus a dozen or so singers. The band was rounded out by George on drums and Shredder on guitar, both excellent musicians. They even let me sing the Clarence Clemons part on Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Six words, twice! They drafted Lizzy to do the sound, so she got some good experience running a mixing board.

It was a week solid of rehearsals, with performances Friday and Saturday night and matinee Sunday. And in between I taught an origami event at the Museum of Natural History in the city. I had been thinking of bagging it, but alot people signed up so I went. Even had a chance to check out the OUSA holiday tree before my class started. I’ve been donating models to them for a few years now and they have assembled quite a collection. In addition to my new stuff this year, I my stuff from previous years was well represented. The class itself went well. I was teaching models from my book Origami Animal Sculpture, starting with the Octopus since that was prominently displayed under the tree. Also got to the Common Loon and the Narwhal. Not bad for two hours. It’s funny, though, the more I teach the more I find ways to simplify the models to make them easier to get a across. I think if I had to do this book over it’d be that much more refined. Ah, well, a lesson to apply to the next one.

And, as you can imagine, tonight I’m pretty tired so I’m catching up on my rest.

Adirondack Origami Exhibition

Up in Lake Placid, not far from North Pole, NY, there’s a really cool bookstore called The Bookstore Plus (www.thebookstoreplus.com). A while back they contacted me asking if I could to a book signing there for my new origami book, Origami Animal Sculpture. This I thought was very cool because my book has a strong Adirondack connection. Unfortunately Lake Placid is a pretty long trip for me and I haven’t been able to schedule a time yet. So instead I did the next best thing and sent them a box of origami they could use to make a display to help promote the book. No word yet from them on whether it arrived or what exactly they plan to do with it. But if you’re in the Placid area and you happen to pop in, please take a look. I’d love to see how it turned out.

OrigaMIT IV

I just got back from what’s becoming an annual autumn tradition: the MIT Origami conference, a.k.a OrigaMIT. First off, it’s a great time of year for a drive up to New England, with the leaves turning red and gold contrasted against all kinds of vivid, changing blue and grey skies.

This year was the best one yet. Thanks to Jason Ku and the MIT Origami Club for putting it all together. It’s grown to over 200 attendees, but still feels cozy and intimate. I saw a bunch of origami friends, although I didn’t have the chance to do more than say hi more than I would have liked. I exhibited a few “greatest hits” animals from my book, the one-sheet polyhedra from Uyen’s exhibit this summer, and a couple new models including my Single-Sheet Dual Interlocking Cubes with Color Change, and a new butterfly currently known as Butterfly III.

I don’t normally go to many classes at conventions, preferring mainly to teach and hang out, but this year I went to three. The first was Joseph Wu’s faces. Joseph is a great guy, creative, friendly and articulate, and I haven’t seen him in a few years because he’s on the west coast. Rather than teach a finished model, he taught his “face base” and then had the class freestyle to finish the model each in his own way, making creative discoveries along the way. His base focused on the nose and mouth, but the eye treatment was incomplete, so I began focusing on that. It was fun and interesting. I’ve had the idea to experiment with faces for a long time, but didn’t really have a good way in to get started. Seemed like a pretty big break from the other stuff I’m doing. Now I hope I can make the time to continue these explorations and develop something cool.

The second class I took was Paul Jackson’s one-fold origami. I’d never met Paul before, although I’ve been a big fan of his work and his style. Apparently he was in town for some other reason and it just happened to be the weekend of OrigaMIT. Paul comes from a design background, and the class was about minimalism (as you might expect), and using light and shadow, curved surface, and texture as design elements in origami, and examining closely what’s really going on with the paper, and developing an appreciation of these elements and a vocabulary for how to use them. From single-fold he went to partial-fold and finally to no-fold models. Like Joseph he railed against the tyranny of “the model” as the organizing principle and advocated for process, discovery, creative spontaneity, and exploring variations on a theme. As one data point for how far origami has come, back when I was in design school I did a few things that would now be classified as modular origami and tessellation origami, and at the time no one really got it. I thought it’d be funny to ask Paul if he had diagrams for any of his one-sheet models, but was able to restrain myself.

After lunch it was Erik Demaine’s lecture. He’s deep into reverse-engineering the life work of David Huffman, and inventing and proving all sorts of theorems about curved folding along the way. Neat stuff.

It was a lovely day and it’s always a treat for me to visit Boston, so I took a break in the middle of the day to go for a walk along the Charles river.

I spent the second half of the day teaching. First I class I taught was my Butterfly III. This is actually a set or series of models. It’s easy and natural for me when I’m designing for my thought process to run in streaks. After Joseph and Paul’s classes I decided that was a good theme for the day, and tried to bring that across in my class. The first variation of butterfly is low-intermediate. It’d be dead simple if not for a compound swivel fold to form the wings, but as it is it can be folding in five minutes. The interesting thing about the simple form is that begins folding the paper in half to form a rectangle. From there on it’s two layers thick and might as well be folded from half a sheet. But if you pull apart the layers at step 4 you get a whole nuther flap of paper that can be use to form the legs and antenna.

I also invented a bird using the same approach, but making the first fold on the diagonal rather than straight across. Using the same trick I can make it either with or without talons. I’ve been toying around with developing a two-headed eagle, and this looks promising as a base, although adding a second head changes the layout pretty radically.

My second class was my Mandela Tessellations. Strictly speaking these aren’t even really tessellations because they use polar rather than Cartesian coordinate geometry and they don’t tile a plane, just the area around a single point. Of course they could be extended to fill a plane, but that’s not the point of why I’m doing them. And again, keeping with the them of variation, I’ve developed two types, one with 8-fold symmetry (the Qadrose) and one with tenfold (the Penflower). I diagrammed both of these for the OrigaMIT convention collection. It was good to teach from diagrams, especially since the model has a lot of heavy prefolding. I spotted some places where the diagrams could be improved for clarity, and it’s always good to learn something when you teach a class. For the final, 3-D part I might add some detailed instructions to show more in-between steps, or maybe I’ll drop in some photos there when it’s time to publish it in a book. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the diagrams attached, and any feedback you have is always appreciated.

The evening was hanging out with origami friends. Brian Chan invited Jeannie and myself, along with a few other people, for a tour of MIT’s Hobby Shop, where he works. It’s a rather advanced machine shop full of CNC routers and water cutters and other fun stuff. Brian is building a fully functional Iron Man suit in his spare time there. He has a 3-D printer which he’s using to make parts for a new 3-D printer made as much as possible from 3-D printed parts. I guess there’ll come a day when he can press a button and start the singularity. Get ready!

Night Trippin’

Last night’s Day Tripper gig at the Crossroads went quite well. The Crossroads is a really nice place for bands, with a good stage and sounds system, pretty large and pretty full of people. There were two other bands opening for us, and both sounded really good. By the time we got on stage it was almost 11. We did seventeen songs, just over an hour. If we had more songs we could have gone on longer, but that was all we had.

Musically most songs were right there. Good response from the crowd, and we had new people coming in throughout the show. A couple minor issues, coming out of the bridge of Here Comes the Sun, the ending of Lady Madonna, and on the last couple songs energy level seemed to be flagging a bit. We did some of the real high screamers early in the set – Don’t Let Me Down, Band on the Run and I Want You (She’s So Heavy), but my voice stayed strong the thru the end of the set, and I felt I delivered a good performance. My voice continues getting stronger in terms of range, endurance, control and expressiveness. Woo-hoo!

In fact we’re getting good enough now that I feel we need to work on taking it to the next level. Really tighten and polish the arrangements and vocal harmonies, string together the songs in threes or fours without a pause, work on our between-song banter, and generally keep the flow of the show going. As a singer I know the songs well enough now to focus more on performing them at an emotional rather than technical level. Plus we need to learn a bunch more songs. We seem to be learning about 8 to 10 per show, so for the next one we want to get up to the 25 to 30 range.

So I guess we’ll see when the next gig comes up and take it from there. Meanwhile the Crossroads also has jazz, so we may get a gig there with our jazz group.

Origami Animal Sculpture Reviewed at Gilad Origami

My book Origami Animal Sculpture has been reviewed by Gilad over at Gilad’s Origami Page (http://www.giladorigami.com). For those of you who don’t know, Gilad has a pretty comprehensive origami site with lots of reviews and galleries and an expansive database of lots of different models (by subject) telling you where you can find diagrams to fold such a thing.

He says of my book: “John Szinger has a knack for creating complex-looking designs with ample attention to details, which are actually not incredibly complex to fold. The models … using an innovative array of folding sequences, are well-designed, maximizing the surface of the paper and making them suitable for folding from almost any type of paper.”

I consider this great praise, as that’s pretty much what I’m going for. You can read the full article here:

http://www.giladorigami.com/review-origami-animal-sculpture-szinger.html

Gilad has also folded and photographed several models from the book. I particularly like his rendition of my Brown Bear. It has a really nice snuffling quality.

What Is and What Should Never Be

I went to two rock and roll concerts this week. I can’t remember the last time that happened. One was for Alan Holdsworth, angular post-fusion jazz. Power trio format. Went with my origami friend Marc. The show was at a really cool club in Times Square called the Iridium. Good food even. Great stuff but the kind of music where most of the audience left their wives at home.

The other was Robert Plant, where the audience included a pretty high chick quotient. I brought Jeannie, party in celebration of our upcoming anniversary. We figgered the closest we’d ever get to seeing Led Zeppelin. This was at the Capital Theater in Port Chester, which is has become one of my favorite venues to see a show. It was set up with an open floor area with a bar at the back. We ended up hanging out mostly at the bar. Plant played a lot of new stuff which he described as “country and eastern” and it was good stuff in a sort of Texas-blues-meets-Kashmir kind of way, and Robert still can sing. The first Zeppelin song he did was Thank You, which was the song Jeannie and I danced to at our wedding. So by the end we were slow dancing in the theater and kissing blissfully; it was a very tender moment. Standing next to us were two really tall blond ladies – maybe over six feet tall. Good looking, one of them was a dead ringer for Erik’s wife Jen, and the other looked like she could be her sister. They were quite friendly, chatting, buying me drinks, and one of them kinda hanging off me once she was tipsy a little bit later on, despite the fact I was obviously already with someone. Maybe they were after me cuz I was the only guy around taller than them, I dunno. Jeannie dubbed them “team blonde”. The tipsy one indicated Jeannie and asked “is that your girlfriend?” I told her “that’s my wife.” A minute later I turned around and they were gone.

So Very Autobiographic

I read two books this week, both autobiographies of famous Californians. I read a lot of nonfiction, particularly histories and biographies, but not usually contemporary pop culture figures. Still. One was Total Recall by Arnold Schwarzenegger, actor bodybuilder and politician. This was a natural follow-on to having re-read the whole Conan the Barbarian series last month. One interesting thing was his childhood in Austria. Arnold grew up less than 100 miles (160 km) from my dad in Hungary. He talks about when he was ten years old or so helping his dad, the police chief, take in a flood of refugees who crossed the border after the revolution. Also made me decide to add some exercises for my lats to my workout.

The other was Crazy from the Heat, by David Lee Roth, original frontman for Van Halen. Having gone back and listened to their albums again with a fresh ear (currently enjoying Diver Down in heavy rotation), I’ve concluded Diamond Dave was the real magic ingredient. He’s a very smart and insightful guy, and has a couple things to say about music that really struck me:

“Tone is a direct result of your personal character. And that tone will come out regardless of the equipment you use. You will fiddle about until you have the perfect representation in your mind of who you are, whether you know it or not.”

And a bit later:

“The saxophone was the original fuzz tone instrument. That’s the barometer of soul power, that’s what you set your watch to.”

Interestingly, both Arnold and Diamond Dave mention reading Teddy Roosevelt’s autobiography, which I read a few months back.

Van Halen Adaptations for Piano

As my rock band lurches on I’ve been looking for new songs to add to the setlist. Going for an upbeat party vibe, and this led me to some early Van Halen. I’ve always felt that VH has something that none of their imitators did, and that’s old-timey jazz as one of their influences. The Van Halen bros. father was a big band sax and clarinet player, and of course David Lee Roth’s fondness of Louis Prima is well known. I also recently found out Michael Anthony’s dad was jazz trumpeter and MA also studied trumpet and jazz bass before he switched to rock.

So I got the VH songbook to work out a handful of their songs and make piano adaptations. (Last time I tried to do this, by ear, I ended up writing Heat Wave instead.) I’ve narrowed it down to just a few songs for now: Runnin’ With the Devil, Beautiful Girls, I’m the One, and Feel Your Love Tonight. These tunes have a boggie shuffle beat, lots great chromatic harmonic movement over 7th chords, and superb backing vocal parts, including a whole bop-do-wah shoobie-doo-wah section in one.

The books are funny because they’re designed for guitar players, with obsessively superdetailed tab and guitar-specific annotations to the phrasing, but no bass (or left hand piano) part at all. I guess this is alright cuz Bach sheet music (for example) is biased toward piano players. If you work beyond the idiosyncrasies of the notation to grok the underlying music, it’s really not so complicated to play. Of course I have to change some of the voicings to work better on piano – power chords can be pretty boring – but the basic concept of the interplay between comping and tossing in riffs, and Eddie’s phrasing and timing, reminds me a lot of Fats Waller and those cats. Since there are no bass parts in the music I have to go back and listen to the records and fill in my own thing to get the left hand sounding right. I’m doing a lot of stride and walking bass lines.

Then it’s onto the solos, where everything goes completely bananas. The good news is I can play fast, and the solos are all written out, and since Eddie is classically trained a lot of his solo lines remind me of Keith Emerson. The whole thing is very tight. The only thing is I have to go back and listen to the record to see how exactly its sounds compared to how it’s notated when the tremelo bar gets into the action. Figuring out the bass part here is a bit harder since Eddie loves to modulate when it’s time for the solo, and then play outside the changes on top of that.

The last thing is putting the vocal on top of everything else. David Lee Roth is pretty much in my range, but I’m trying to bring out his phrasing and style. One more gotcha: when you go back and listen to the records, they tune down a semitone. So the choice is to play it in E or Eb. Eb is slightly easier to sing, but I have to read all the parts down a half step. This is not so bad actually. But then I wonder when I bring it to the group if the guitar player will want to tune down or do it in E.

Of course the guitar player I have now says Steely Dan is too hard, so he’ll probably be scared shitless to do a VH song. The good news is, even though he doesn’t know it yet he’s been kicked out of the band. Bad news is now we have to find a replacement.

Meet Mister Mantis

Home again and updating the blog again. I had planned on making my next post about how I finished my ebook or showing some video from the last Day Trippers gig, but both of those have a bit more work before they’re ready.

But then today I worked from home and got a good number of random tasks off my plate in my lunch hour, including an overdue round of yardwork that I didn’t get to last weekend. In the afternoon I noticed we had a very cool visitor. A giant praying mantis, over 6” long, was hanging out on my back door. I’ve never seen one of these in my neighborhood. He stayed all day, let me approach him quite closely, and was still there when I shut the curtain for the night. We’ll see if he’s there in the morning.

Also looks like the Day Trippers may have another gig in October. I’ll keep you posted.