Author: zingblog

Look Sharp!

Well it looked like spring was right around the corner. Last Friday was a beautiful day and I even went for a bike ride, but then Saturday and Sunday it snowed. No heavy accumulation, but enough to make a mess. Up in Buffalo the girls went skiing this weekend. Down here Jeannie and I decided the ski season was over two weeks ago and packed our stuff away until next winter. Ah well.

Meanwhile, I started a new consulting gig a few weeks ago, with the Digital Lab at Consumer Reports. More on that as the situation unfolds, but so far it’s lots of fun and very cool. It’s an R&D lab working in the space of consumer advocacy, digital rights, and online privacy. The people seem smart, organized and forward thinking. I’m doing a combination of hands-on software development, architecture, planning, design and think-tanking. Only problem is, it takes up all my time. Suddenly I’m very busy all day long, and have to plan ahead to slot in all the things I need to do over the course of a week. Hope it doesn’t cut into my saxophoning too much.

Speaking of which, one project I always do in the late winter is to update my photo galleries for the previous year. Considering there was a pandemic going on, we did a fair amount of traveling, and captured enough pictures for a few nice galleries (at least compared to 2020, when we didn’t go anywhere after February). I started thinking I wouldn’t have much, since we didn’t use the snapshot camera at all. However, everyone takes pictures on their phones nowadays.

As usual, these friends-and-family galleries are password-protected, so contact me if you need credentials. Enjoy!

Waiting for the Sun

Been waiting for spring to begin, but still hoping to get one more ski trip in. I really want to start spending time outside, biking and skating and working on the yard. I’ve been feeling good so I’m going to go up in weight on my workout in the next few weeks. I’ve also added pull-ups to my routine.

It looks like the pandemic my finally be ending, so I’ve started looking to get out of the house and go see some jazz and other music concerts. Lots of interesting acts coming around the next few months. I also want to see about getting some gigs for my band. I haven’t played a gig since February 28, 2020 (wow, two years ago to the day). I really don’t know where to start. That group broke up and my new group has a different sound, although you can still call it jazz. I suppose I can start by calling up all the places we used to play.

We’re trying to get together a demo to play for the clubs, so we’ve been taping our rehearsals. We’re sounding really good overall, but you always compare everything you do to the best music you’ve ever heard, and there’s room for improvement to really live up to our potential. We need to focus on a handful songs for a few weeks to get them really tight, to have a really killer demo.

I’ve started the process of transitioning my website to a new host. I ran into issues with my current host not being able to host a Unity app, and their customer service was so terrible I decided I want to get rid of them. However, I’m doing it one step at a time, since I want to do some long overdue upgrades to my site’s architecture, deployment and other things. For one thing I want to deploy via git instead of ftp. So for now, I have a placeholder home page at: https://zingmanstudios.com

More to come soon, so watch this space!

Winter Wonderland

It’s been a fun few weeks. A week ago we went skiing, me Jeannie and Michelle, at Catamount up in the Berkshires. It was a great time and we got in ten runs, most of them on Walther’s Way, a nice curvy blue trail with a long, strait run out at the bottom. Last year we hadn’t been skiing in seven years or so, and it was great to get back into it. We went once and it was amazing. Definitely a blessing to still be skiing in our 50’s.

Last season I bought new boots and demoed new skis. This year Jeannie got new boots too, and we both did a full-season demo/rental, where we can keep our skis if we like them instead of getting back our deposit. Skis have changed since we got our last generation of gear, getting on twenty years ago. The fashion now is for shorter, wider skis with a narrow waist. They’re better for carving, and better with some powder on the mountain, but don’t seem to hold a strait line as well, and don’t have much control on ice or scraped-off slope. I got used to mine and like them pretty well, although I can’t seem to go as fast. This fits okay with my current skiing style, which is more about cruising than hot-dogging. Jeannie isn’t digging her new slats. I’m still not sure if I’m gonna keep mine or try something else. I like the ones I demoed last year better than the ones I have now.

We went for the late session, starting in the afternoon and going into the night. On the was home we stopped by a restaurant called Four Brothers Pizza. They actually have four locations between our home and the ski slope, this was the third one. I must say it was great, better than I expected. The food was great, hot cappuccino and soup most welcome. Deep-dish Chicago style pizza; I guess we’re far enough out of the New York City Area. The decor was murals of ancient Greek and Roman temples, landmarks, seascapes and scenes out of mythology, very well done, over-the-top but nevertheless appropriate to the ambience.

During the week we went to Hades Town, a Broadway show. It was the first Broadway show for me in many years, although Lizzy and Michelle have been to a few the last several years. We met Jeannie at her office, a major book publisher, and they had some of their all-time best books on display in the lobby, including The Call of Cthulhu, and D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. We went to dinner and went to Yum Yum, a Thai food place in Hell’s Kitchen, one of our favorite lunch places back in the day when Jeannie and I both used to work in midtown. Good to know they’re still there and the food is as good as ever.

One thing that struck me about walking around midtown is how empty the place was. I’ve been in that neighborhood when it was wall-to-wall pedestrians and you had to practically elbow your way thru the crowd to move at all. This night you could move around with ease. Maybe five percent or less of the usual level of foot traffic.

The show itself was great. Hades Town is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set to the music of old time Appalachian folk, blues, country and jazz. The songs were great, clever and moving, and the performers were fantastic too, especially the actor who played Hades, but the trombone player stole the show.

Then this last weekend we went up to Buffalo to take Michelle back to school for her next semester, and we brought our skis with us. In the past we’ve been up there around Xmastime and brought our skis, but it’s early in the season and there’s a good chance it’ll be too warm or there won’t be enough show. I haven’t been to Buffalo at the end of January for many years, and I gotta tell you, neither of those things were a problem. There were two feet of snow on the ground all around, and the temperature was below 20 degrees the whole time. I grew up in Buffalo, but I’ve almost forgotten what a real winter feels like. Nevertheless, I was quick to adapt.

We went to Holiday Valley, which is the mountain where I learned to ski. Lizzy joined us as well as Michelle. It’s not particularly high compared to the Catskills, let alone Vermont or the Sierras, but it’s enough to be fun. I haven’t been there in thirty years. They’ve made some improvements with more and faster lifts and more lodges. The day we went the high was 12 degrees, so we were hoping the cold would keep people away, but no such luck. We had to circle the parking lot three times to find a spot, and when we got to the base lodge the lift lines were pretty long. But once we got up on the mountain it was fine. Our friend Larry joined us, and he’s been skiing there alot and knew his way around. We went to the back side, to a lift called Tamarack or Tannenbaum. The trails there were beautiful, winding and woodsy with lots of good powder. Perfect soul skiing. We did run after run and went in for hot cocoa after a couple hours. Then we did one more session, up and down the Mardi Gras lift and trail, which was long and strait, mainly going for all-out speed. I think we did twelve or thrirteen runs in all. By the time we got off the mountain it was twelve degrees below zero.

Afterwards we went out to dinner at Ellicotville Brew Club, one of a growing number of craft beer places in the Buffalo area. While we were gone, there was a major snowstorm back at home. Jeannie set up a a little web cam so we could watch our yard fill up with snow. To our surprise, our neighbor Kevin across the street came over and cleared our driveway. He has a giant snowblower and I guess he doesn’t have a chance to use it that often. He’s done a bunch other kind things for us (remember project dirt last year), and the bar happened to be selling variety packs of their beers, so we picked one up for him as a thank-you.

Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World

It’s post-holidays deep winter. We finally snow got some snow, followed by a pretty good cold spell, solidly below freezing the last few days. Gonna get down in the teens tomorrow. At least the snow makes the sunshine alot brighter. We’re starting to think about when we can go skiing.

There has been no jazz rehearsal in a month. The studio has been closed due to the pandemic surge. This week they’re reopening, with new distancing and mask protocols. But now our drummer has covid and needs to isolate for a week. On the upside, I’ve gone from practicing piano twice a week to four times a week. It’s a amazing what extra boost that gives to the finger dexterity and muscle memory, not to mention being able to explore different material and ideas.

I’m still waiting for my new record Bluezebub to come back from the CD manufacturing and to work it’s way thru the system to appear on iTunes and Spotify. I’ve played the record for a few friends and the all like the songs and the playing, but have commented in particular at how good the mixes sound. At first I was thinking maybe this was a left-handed compliment, even if well intentioned. After all an album is supposed to sound good, that’s just table stakes. But I did put a good deal of care into the dynamic compression as well as the mix itself. The mastering FX chain is different than my previous records. I sought to make it much more dynamic than a modern pop record, but much hotter and more saturated than a classic jazz record without loosing any of the tone. I guess I pulled it off.

Meanwhile I dusted off my in-progress rock record. I have three completed songs from before I switched my focus to Bluezebub. One, The Story Lies sounds great as-is, but I’ve made updates to the other two.

Why Not Zed? has a new bari sax part to replace the tenor sax, since I liked the bari so much on Bluezebub. Now it sounds way hipper, darker and heavier, sort of a Morphine vibe.

Who Speaks on Your Behalf sounded a bit to sweet, even though I had some buzzy synths and fuzztone bass in there. So I added an electric guitar part with lots of thick distortion (preset #18 on my Vox box). Just the right touch. I was inspired after meeting Mike, the guitar player on the original Cheshire Cat track, at a King Crimson concert last fall. I had originally eschewed guitars on my arrangement, bringing in synths and saxes to fill out the sound. But then thought of an approach to guitar that I could play and would work with the song, focusing on contrasting staccato and sustained rhythmic figures.

I’m getting more confident writing and arranging guitar parts, exploring different sounds and feels. So in contrast the the jazz record, which has no guitar at all, I’m gonna try and get guitar on every track of the new rock album. The next couple songs I’m putting down are gonna be based on rhythm guitar rather than piano as the spine. One thing watching Get Back made me realize is I can do pretty much anything on guitar that John can. It’s not so hard if you don’t try and get too complicated.

Anyway, here are the new mixes. Enjoy!

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bzvr/WhyNotZed24.mp3


https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bzvr/WhoSpeaksOnYourBehalf33.mp3


https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bzvr/TheStoryLies24b.mp3


Channeling Ringo

We had a lovely Thanksgiving. Spent the day out on Long Island with Jeannie’s sister and the niblings, playing Jackbox and watching the Bills game. Michelle came home from college, although Lizzy stayed in Buffalo cuz she had work on Friday. We observed Slack Friday, as is our custom, and did no shopping. For someone who doesn’t watch alot of TV, however, there was alot on.

First, we watched the new Cowboy Bebop live action series the weekend before Thanksgiving. I thought it was great, very entertaining, and want to watch it again at Christmastime. John Cho is excellent, as is the whole cast, and they pulled off the trick of staying faithful to the spirit of the original tone, action, humor, and sci-fi world building, while pulling the story arc and characters in into deeper directions. And the music was great.

The internet seems to hate it, but they must all be super picky nerds who do nothing besides wallow in their fandom. After all, it’s a show on a streaming internet service, based on a cartoon from the ’90’s. What do you expect? If you’re at all reasonable, the new Bebop blows them away.

Then we watched the new Peter Jackson remake of the Beatles’ Let It Be. I heard it was long, but was hopeful nonetheless. After all, Jackson’s adaptation of Help! was the original extended trilogy, and remains one of my favorite movies of all time, even at thirteen hours long. In fact, we usually watch it every winter, and since Michelle was home for the long weekend, we viewed the first half.

Granted, Jackson transposed the setting for Help! from 1960’s England to a place called the Shire, and the four young lads are Hobbits rather than Liverpudlians, and as they try and get rid of the ring, they’re being chased by a death cult of Nazgul rather then a death cult of Kali, and they’re trying to get to Mordor rather than the Bahamas. Eleanor Braun is replaced by a CG Gollum and Victor Spinetti by Christopher Lee. They added a few new songs and changed the title, but the basic plot remains the same.

So, was the new Get Back on the level of Lord of the Rings, or more like PJ’s The Hobbit, bloated and stretched thin like butter over too much toast?

Well, I have to tell you I’m a huge Beatles fan, but now I finally feel like they’ve jumped the shark and landed in overrated and self-indulgent territory. It would have been a much better film if it was five or six hours long rather than eight. As a musician who has spent tons of time in rehearsals and recording sessions, I know very well how tedious it can be to write, arrange, rehearse and perfect a set of tunes. I think there was actually a great story in there, and a bit of editing would have moved things along without all the false starts, noodling jams, and endless complaining how they don’t have the material for a movie yet. Eight or sixteen bars would do. As it is, the new film is not really much better than the original, just alot longer. They should have named it The Long and Winding Road.

Ah well, at least Jackson has kept in touch with his horror movie roots. He featured Yoko Ono “singing” (ok, really just screaming) for several minutes, presumably anguished over George quitting the band. Why anyone would let that woman near a microphone is beyond me, even if you’re drug addled, madly in love, and think it’s avant-garde. The look on young Heather McCartney’s face at witnessing the spectacle is priceless though.

In other news, my new jazz album is almost done. I’ve decided on a running order for the tracks, and five of the six songs are fully mixed and mastered. The last one, Sun of the Son, was the first track I did, over a year ago, and I did a three or four rock tracks after that before I decided to make the focus of the album instrumental jazz. So I changed my mastering setup for the newer songs, to give the sound more depth and dynamics. Now I’ve gone back and done the same thing for SotS. Almost there!

New Song: Bluezebub (The Devil You Don’t Know)

Here’s a close-to-finished mix of my new song Bluezebub (The Devil You Don’t Know). This is a last song to complete my new album of computer jazz songs. I’ve already turned to corner to doing final mixes and mastering, and am close to done on three other songs. So more on that soon. But for now let me tell you about Bluezebub.

It’s a rather long and complicated song, but for what it is, it came together pretty quickly and organically. The general vibe is 60’s spy jazz meets prog rock madness.

It started with the drum pattern that introduces the song, which I came up practicing various swing and shuffle beats, and seeing if could make 5/4 time swing. Next came the bass line. I became fascinated by the idea of a 10-bar blues, and that pattern forms the basis of the arrangement. I also came up with 5- and 15-bar blues patterns that are used in different places. Since I don’t have the constraints of playing live, I double tracked the bass part with a synth and fender bass guitar. There’s also a piano part played on fender rhodes to outline the chords and give it some tastiness.

The first part of the song is a slow, easy, kinda groovy mysterioso feel. I brought in the melody on bari sax. The song suggested a building feel, so the next chorus I added a tenor sax, then a lead synth the chorus after that, and before I knew it I had three melodies in a fugue-like interlock over the rhythm section. To bring some resolution from there, I wrote a bridge where the horns and synth all play in harmony, mostly on whole notes, while the bass and piano come forward. Then it’s a restatement of the fugue theme, but elaborated and embellished with drum breaks.

The solo section echoes the structure of the head somewhat. The bari sax has a nice long chance to stretch out, then the tenor and finally the synth, keeping the groove relaxed and building to a simmer.

Then things get crazy. The time shifts from 5/4 to 15/8, with the feel on the triplet. This is superimposed over the old pulse, to there’s a 5-against-6 feel that comes around every few bars. The blues bass line is now sped up, and everyone blows over it, increasingly dissonant and intense, culminating in a climactic burst of silence. This is followed by a skewed, condensed and embellished recapitulation of the head, with the rhythmic tension retained and a bit of Cowboy Bebop style riffing thrown in for good measure.

Believe it or not, there wasn’t alot mixing to do once I dialed in the basic setup, cuz most of the dynamics are in the playing.

I shared a rough with Martin last week, and he called me up to tell me it evoked a story to him, where Bluezebub is this supernatural blue cat demon, identified with the bari sax, and is emceeing some kind of show or parade of friendly monsters, but then it all turns scary and you have to run away. I think that sums it up pretty well.

Anyway here it is. Enjoy!

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/Bluzebub41c.mp3


And as We Wind On Down the Road

Been doing some traveling lately. This was the week we were supposed to go to San Francisco for the Pacific Coast Origami Convention, but that got cancelled due to the pandemic, and so we took some local trips instead.

A week ago Jeannie and I went out to Pennsylvania for a wedding. It was Wiccan/Halloween themed, and alot of fun. Good to catch up with that side of the family. We stayed overnight and had planned on doing some hiking around the Delaware Water Gap the next day, but it was pouring rain, so we had to punt.

One day last week went to visit the Bronx Zoo. We hadn’t been to in a while and of course it’s a world famous zoo. It was a perfect fall day, good for walking around, and the zoo wasn’t crowded at all, so we got to see everything and linger at attractions like the tigers, gorillas, and rhinos. Lots of birds and reptiles too, and of course the elephant (it seems they’re down to just one now) out standing in its field, viewable from the monorail ride.

Then this last weekend we went up to Buffalo to visit the kids as well as my parents. That was a good time. We went out to celebrate Lizzy birthday on Friday, and the next day my mum had everyone over for a big family dinner, with wine and storytelling. Sunday we out to bar in Lizzy’s neighborhood (remember Buffalo is trendy again) to catch the Bills game and try and get some of that energy now that the Bills are hot again too. It was a good time, but unfortunately the Bills weren’t really on their game and lost narrowly in the 4th quarter.

Funny thing, most of the music playing at the places we went was from the 1980’s, even some from the 70’s. My kids seem to know and like alot of that stuff. Lizzy says she listens to 97 Rock alot these days. It’s kinda strange to me that they don’t think of it as oldies. I mean when I was a teenager I wasn’t listening to music from the 1940’s. Well okay I listened to Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon, and maybe some Duke and Ella, but none of my friends did, and I didn’t listen to pop from that era like Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby.

While I was up there, my dad gave me a young peach tree which sprouted from a seed in his garden after a peach fell from the main tree. I planted in the back yard this morning. Hopefully it will take root and prosper.

At home I’ve been busy with the Global Jukebox, adding routes and SEO. Also diving into web and mobile 3-D, with three.js and unity. And my song Bluezebub is almost done, down to mixing, which means soon it’ll be on to finishing off the album, mastering, sequencing the tracks, doing the cover art, and publishing it.

Fun fact: Led Zeppelin’s famous fourth album, a.k.a. Zoso, is 50 years old today.

New Song Preview: Bluezebub Bari Sax Demo

Autumn arrives. A week ago the kids were home visiting for the weekend, which was very nice. Michelle is doing well at college, having fun, making friends and enjoying her classes. Perhaps not surprisingly, she brought home a giant bag of laundry in lieu of luggage. Lizzy hung out with a bunch of her friends down here, and was good to see how they’re all doing too.

The weather has remained mostly mild, although we had a couple cool nights where we had to turn on the heat the next morning for a little bit. I’ve been resisting putting on the heat more than necessary, figuring this is a good time acclimatize myself to the cooler weather. Anyway we decided to take out the air conditioners this weekend, and then today got up close to 80 degrees.

Last Friday I got in a skate on my rollerblades, the third and maybe final time this season. Even though it’s been staying pretty warm, it’s getting dark earlier every day, which limits the time available to do things outside. Sunday I went for an epic bike ride thru the nature study woods, all the way to the far end and back. And I went up in weights in my workout like I’d planned. It’s been a a few weeks and feels good. So the next increase is in the offing.

I’ve been playing alot of bari sax recently. It’s been a while since the last time I took it out of the case, but I needed it for my new song Bluezebub. I spent a couple days practicing, getting my chops in shape on the horn, and then a couple sessions laying down the track. And it must say, it came out great. The horn has tone galore, and the action and intonation are better than I remember. Maybe cuz I’ve been playing more tenor then I used to before the plague times..

The bari is an old horn, a Conn 12M, which I brought from my brother years ago. He always considered it less than a pro-level horn, probably because Conn saxes were not particularly well regarded in the 1980s when we were students, and it is a big beast to manage. But I googled it, and the 12M is actually considered and all-time classic with a lineage dating back the 1930’s, the big sister of the legendary “Naked Lady” 8M tenor. The one I have was built in the 1960s, before production moved to Mexico, and has a giant fancy engraving on the bell that includes the words “Elkhart Indiana U.S.A.”. Everything about the horn, the pads and springs and all, are in great shape. My only real complaint this the thumbrest is not so comfortable. The mouthpiece is a hard rubber Otto Link btw, a great paring. So tone galore. And now it’s back in its case until next time I write a song with a baritone sax part. Unless maybe I can find a horn section band.

Meanwhile I really dig the way the bari part came out, so here’s a preview, without the other saxes and synthesizers, of the first half or so of the song. Enjoy!

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/Bluzebub27_bari_demo.mp3


New Song: Lift Off

Here’s a pretty-close-to-finished mix of my song Lift Off. It’s the fifth of six songs on my forthcoming computer jazz album, and the most straight-ahead bebop number of the bunch.

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/LiftOff50.mp3


This song was originally developed for my pre-pandemic jazz group as a vehicle for some uptempo tenor sax shredding, inspired in part by John Coltrane’s Countdown and Steely Dan’s Bodhisattva. The changes are in the mode of standards like Have You Met Miss Jones? and A Foggy Day, but with a half-step modulation inside the ii-V’s, a streamlined version of the Giant Steps trick (i.e. ii-bii-bVi-V). It’s pretty challenging to solo over, but even with the constant modulation and implied dissonance, it’s pretty smooth to listen to.

Like other songs that I’ve previously played live, it’s hard to completely unwind the arrangement, so the live version was used as a starting point. It’s a tenor sax backed by a rhythm section of piano bass and drums. I introduced an organ in lieu of a guitar, and then the organ is sometimes doubled by a synth for emphasis.

There’s actually two bass parts. One is a bass guitar played fairly softly and EQ’d with much of the middle scooped out to make is sound more jazzier. The other is a synth bass, and the patch is layered with an organ to suggest the organ player is doing it with his left hand (which is actually true, I guess). They double for much of the song, but in the solos when it goes to a walking quarter note pattern the bass guitar just outlines the chords, and the synth takes over. I can’t walk on those changes on a bass guitar at 200 bpm!

I put alot of effort into the dynamics and the drums to make it swing. I’m using mainly sequenced drums here, again because of my limitations playing jazz drums at that tempo and doing it justice. So something resembling human feel and interaction was important. Alot of the song is carried on just the ride cymbal and hi-hat with the snare and kick drum doing accents. I practiced and developed a few patterns out of the bebop drumming book to really get what I wanted to program.

There’s a section where drums and sax are trading fours. I tried a few different ideas for this. I was inspired by Mahavishnu orchestra and their vocalized drum solos, and went with something kinda like that, but doubled on snare and toms and with a heavy flange effect. I think it sound cool and works pretty well.

Got a Drink in my Hand, Got my Toes in the Sand

We finished out our summer vacay this year with a trip to Ocean City, MD. We used to go there pretty much every year when the kids were little, but there’s been lots of other stuff to do the last few years, so it’s been a while. This is first time Jeannie and I went by ourselves. It was fun and relaxing, very mellow. We know the place pretty well and have a few favorites, also explored some new stuff. The weather was great the whole time and we were able to eat outdoors.

We drove up Friday afternoon. The drive was pretty relaxing, even though there was a good deal of traffic. We walked around Friday evening, dipped our toes in the ocean, and went to dinner at Mackie’s on the bay, one of our perennial favorites. Yummy frozen drinks and seafood dishes. Stopped by Anthony’s deli on the way back to the hotel. Saturday was a beautiful day and we lounged on the balcony taking in the ocean view over our morning coffee, then went swimming in the ocean for a good long while. In the late afternoon we walked down the boardwalk toward the amusement pier, stopping at Shenanigans, another favorite hangout, for drinks and snacks. The evening we went on a cruise around the harbor and out into the ocean along the beach and back, giving us wonderful views of the sunset. Afterwards was ate at Anglers place on the bay right downtown, very nice. Sunday we went out to Assateague Island and did a bunch of hikes, including the swamp walk and a dunes walk. We wanted to rent a canoe but it was too windy. We came back in the afternoon and went for a swim in the ocean, but it was too rough to stay out a long time. Ate dinner on the boardwalk at a place called the Taphouse, that had many kinds of beer. I had a huge burger with the works and an egg on top. Drove home Monday after breakfast at the Marlin Moon, in our old favorite hotel, just a couple blocks from our new hotel.

Now it’s back to school time, but there’s no kids to go back to school, so it’s more like getting our heads in gear to get stuff in the fall and to the end of the year. I’m looking forward to working more on music and origami, finishing my current computer jazz record and my third origami book, and possibly some new music and origami software development, in addition to the Global Jukebox and other consulting gigs. Also doing more hiking as the weather gets cool.