Author: Zingblog 2

Groovin’ High

You’re probably thinking hey John, it’s been a long time since I’ve heard about your recording project. What’s going on with that? Well I’m glad you asked.

First of all, all my bands have been on hiatus for the month of August, because everyone in the band is on vacation sometime during the month, usually two or more of us.

Ken and I are putting together a new group and we’ll start rehearsals in September. As you know the old rock band broke up back July when Gina quit in a tantrum after escalating bad behavior. The direction for the new group is fairly open right now, but we both agree we’re tired of playing the same old bar covers and want to do something a bit more experimental. Rush and Steely Dan are high on our list of influences. The drummer is gonna be Steve, who sat in on our last gig. Vinny the guitar player, who is anti-experimental by nature, and pro-play-the-same-songs-over-and-over, decided to play bass in a heavy metal band.

But we found a new guitar player, this dude Glen. He actually auditioned with us about a year ago and had a great sound and energy and fit in with the group, but left after one or two rehearsals. He randomly ran into Ken not too long ago, and explained the reason he didn’t stay with us is that he couldn’t stand Gina (a trend emerges; there was a drummer before Adrian too …) but if there’s ever a new opportunity give him a call.

Meanwhile the jazz group actually rehearsed once without Gary, and with Steve on drums (I think they rehearsed once without me too) so it was pretty much a jam session. I actually brought my alto sax to get in shape on it. Why you ask?

Ah, well back to the recording project. 2018 was a very productive year for Zing Man Studio, having mixed and released a jazz record Haven Street, and completed the third Buzzy Tonic record Elixr, which was eight years in the making. In early 2019 I completed and released a remix and remaster of the previous Buzzy Tonic record Face the Heat, with greatly superior sonic quality.

Since then I’ve been writing, arranging and practicing new material for the fourth Buzzy Tonic record, and I have more material than I can use, so there’s some decisions two be made. Side two will be drawn for a set of songs that cluster thematically, and are a bit unusual for me in that the lyrics are more worked out than the music. In any event I don’t want to start recording until I can sing and play thru the songs on the piano and know them well.

Closer in is a set of songs that may become side one. Two are covers: The Story Lies by Martin, and Who Speaks on Your Behalf by the Cheshire Cat. More on these as the are further along, but you should know I usually do a couple songs I didn’t write between albums, just to try my hand and something and see what I can learn. It also helps me overcome the limitation that whatever I write always sounds like me. So it’s a chance to bring in different sonic and songwriting ideas. Sometimes these make it on the record, sometimes not. Martin has always been very generous about letting me use his material; there’s a least one song of his on every Buzzy Tonic record.

The Story Lies is a song Martin wrote a long time ago, one that I always liked, with a dark and funky vibe, great chords and a great lyric. Speaks on Your Behalf is my favorite song by The Cheshire Cat, a sort of power-prog-pop anthem. The Cat were the best band to come out of Buffalo in the late 80’s and early 90’s, who somehow despite all their talent never got famous. Ah well. Both these songs feature pretty heavy electric guitar, so I might reinterpret the guitar parts on the keys, or I might try and record some guitar parts of my own.

The third song is a new original Plague of Frogs. I can best describe it as a sci-fi battle mini epic, sort of equal measure Bi Tor and Snow Dog by Rush and I.G.Y. by Donald Fagen. Yes, seriously. It’s gonna be about ten minutes long, and the other two are five each, so that’s an album side.

But then along came the wildcard, a song out of the blue, that I’ve now been working the whole year, and it looks like it’ll take me to the end of the year to finish it. It’s another ten-minute song, so I’m actaully on pace to do about twice my usual recording output.

The song is Sun of the Son, and even though it’s not a cover, it might as well be. I wrote it thirty years ago (wow!), in the late ’80’s for Event Horizon, my prog-jazz-fusion band at the time. When Event Horizon performed it, it grew to be a twenty-minute epic with long improvised sections within a larger end-to-end structure including odd meters, exotic modes, and some tricky unison passages. It just grew and grew into a real magnum opus. I played synth along on it with Scooby, as well as the sax, and Mark played bells as well as drums.

We recorded it around Christmastime 1992, or maybe in the new year of 1993 as part of our second album. By this time the band had broken up and I had moved to New York City to go to grad school for computer art and media, since was pretty clear none us were gonna make as rock stars and it was time get on with life. As luck would have it, just before I left town I was in a recording session with another band and the studio had a barbecue with a raffle, the prize being ten hours of free recording time.

Believe or not Jeannie won the raffle and so became executive producer for the record. We had no money so we had to get the entire project done within the ten hours. I was home on break and we got the band back together for a couple rehearsals and went in and laid down the tracks in a marathon session staring around midnight (that was the catch with free studio time, you had to do it when the studio was available.) No overdubs, no edits, no nothing. I left two hours for mixing and mastering, so that pretty much consisted of setting some levels on the tracks and master compressor and letting it roll down to two tracks. Bam, done!

The band was together for about five years, so we all knew the material well and got some great performances. But obviously it was not as tight or polished as it could have been if we, well, had more time. For Son of the Sun, we actually did two takes cuz there was a train wreck around the fifteen-minute mark of the first take. Man that was hard to pull it together and start over at 5:30 AM.

So anyway, this song as been with me all these years. Last year I tried to bring it in to my new jazz group Haven Street. My idea was to recast into more of a Latin montuno feel. Some of the guys liked it, some though it wasn’t really our sound, and in any event we could work up three or four other songs in the time it would take to do this one. I could see that, so I tired to cut it down but couldn’t see how without losing something vital. I ended up writing a new song, Wolf Whisper, which came out of experimenting with how to make the middle section of more amenable the sound of the new group. The new song sounded nothing like it, but being made for the group, the guys like it much better. Life goes on.

Then one night when I was going thru old files on my computer, sifting thru all the old half-written fragments to see if there was something I could use to go with all the lyrics I have (see above), I came across an old MIDI rendition of Son of the Sun that I must’ve laid down sometime in the ’90s, when electronic music was my day job, that I’d totally forgotten about.

It wasn’t that great musically or sonically by my current standards. All the instruments were MIDI, and the bass and drums sounded pretty stiff. But it did capture the entire complicated structure and was a workable foundation for a new version. I had to go for it.

On thing I did was trim it down to half its original length, from 19:30 to 9:45. I cut out a long, atmospheric intro with a bells solo, and I brought the jam sections in the middle down to a minute or two each. This still left quite a bit of music. Then I re-tracked the piano part, which is the spine of the song, to sound less mechanical, and re-tracked a second keyboard (my part back in the day) which is now basically vibes.

Then I focused on the drums, giving them more human feel and dynamics and changing the groove and hits where necessary. I’ll probably take one more pass at that once the other instruments are in place. I learned the bass part on actual electric bass and recorded that. I’m not at the level of a cat like Jim Wynn, who played on the original recording, as far as free expressiveness goes, but it’s solid and has a good pocket. Still to come is a new synth part, which will pull together several synth pad, bass and lead parts from the MIDI demo.

Next is time for the sax part. I wrote the song on alto. But I must say I never really dug my alto playing and was always drawn to the tenor; it just felt more like my natural voice. Also being in Eb is a pain; it kinda feels like driving on the wrong side of the road or writing in a language without types. For another thing I went to the same high school as Jay Beckenstein and was tired of people comparing us to Spyro Gyra when I was trying to do something much heavier.

In 1992 was was finally able to afford a tenor because I was moving to NYC and had sold my car. Once I got it I never looked back. (That horn turned out to be a great investment BTW, a Mark VII Selmer, and I still have it.)

But the saxophone is a weird instrument, very asymmetrical to play across different keys, and you have to decide whether to play in a higher or lower register when moving to a different horn. (Playing Charlie Parker on the tenor has the same problem.) When I adapted SotS to tenor, there was a part that required me to go into the high altissimo range for a fast, tricky run of 16th notes that modulates midway thru. I came close on the record, but didn’t quite nail it. Then there’s another section I have to play down the octave cuz it’s even higher, and I never liked that way that changed the sound.

So I was never quite satisfied with the recording for that reason as well. Now when I went to practice it on tenor I still couldn’t nail that one riff, so I decided to give it a go on alto.

I’m happy to say that my alto sound and feel is much better than I remember. I guess this is not too surprising. My alto sound is the prototype for my tenor sound, and was as big and loud as I could make it, with a wider bore Dukoff mouthpiece and number four reed, to go head to head with an electric guitar. (Kieth played a Les Paul thru a Marshall amp with a Rockman effect unit and the last band he was in before he joined us was a Metallica cover band.) It turned out to be the right move going back playing alto for this song, and I’ve been having great fun woodshedding. I’m well on my way to laying down the definitive take.

In fact, I have all the composed sections down, and am now in the question of how to approach the solos. Doing this song I’m actually breaking a longstanding rule of mine, that is not to try and do jazz on the computer. The thing that makes jazz work is the live interaction between listening, responsive human musicians in the moment, and that’s just impossible to recreate. At worst it comes off like a bad CG fight scene in a superhero movie. At best of course it’s a creative opportunity.

So I’m searching for alternatives. Ken and Erik have both offered to lay down tracks for me on the bass and drums respectively. But even though they’re both great players, doing it overdubbed onto an existing track may not work out so well.

One thing is I’m letting myself be influenced by Kamasi Washington. All his records have a very textural, layered, groove-oriented sound that might be a useful touchstone. As for other influences …

As luck would have it again, the 50th anniversary of the Woodstock Art and Music Festival was last weekend. Jeannie watched a documentary on it that focused on the behind the scenes planning and logistics, and the narrowly-averted humanitarian crisis due a crowd an order of magnitude larger than planned for showing up.

Someone made a playlist on Spotify reconstructing the entire concert from the bands’ setlists. Where there was no concert recording available from Woodstock they substituted another version. I got thru a good chunk of it, up to Santana, and listened to alot of great music I’d never heard before.

The thing that caught my ear was Ravi Shankar, who I’m familiar with but haven’t listened to in depth in a long time. (Mark from Event Horizon was a big fan and had studied Ragas and the Tabla.) I went on a deep dive, and this led me to Terry Riley, who was one of those guys I’d always heard about (e.g. as the Riley in The Who’s Baba O’Riley) but never really knew well. He’s considered one of the godfathers of electronic music composition. In the 60’s when he did alot of his pioneering work, he said his goal was to combine Indian Ragas with Miles Davis style modal jazz, using electronics. Here was the perfect template for computer jazz, and very compatible with the Kamasi vibe too.

So we’ll see how it goes, but I think at this point it’s just a matter of laying down the tracks and finishing it.

A Journey to the East, Part IV

We were on the train when we realized Vienna waits for us. Coming out of Salzburg there were still alot of mountains, but they eventually gave way to rolling hills and broad valleys. The houses changed from chalets with broad eaves and balconies to another style whose name I don’t know, with walls painted in cheerful colors and always red clay roofs, and the occasional array of solar panels.

Our hotel was a funky building several hundreds of years old, with the entrance under an arch and deep down inside a space that was something between an alleyway and a courtyard, leading back in from the street and dividing the building into two halves. There were a couple of restaurants in the there with both indoor and and outdoor space. One was perfect for dinner that night and the other for breakfast the next morning.

The first stop for the next day was the Schönbrunn Palace, which was the main summer residence of the Hapsburg monarchs for over 300 years. Wow. Not only was it a genuine, bona fide palace with of apartments for the emperor and his family, and huge ballrooms where every bit of surface was a work of art, and as an added bonus, we finally understood what the ceramic stoves we’d been seeing in other places were all about — they were actually heaters for the rooms. Anyway, not only all that, but it was also the seat of government for a major world power. If the other castles were designed to impress and communicate wealth and power, this place was at a whole ‘nuther level. Everything about it was huge. It was a ten-minute walk from the front gate to the front door. And the back yard was a sprawling gardens with groves and paths, sculptures and fountains, a hedge maze, a zoo, and yes even a couple cafés. We spent the better part of the afternoon in the gardens, even solved the hedge maze. By then the weather was getting pretty hot, and remained so the rest of the trip.

The only thing I can compare it to is the Capital and the Mall in Washington, D.C. And now that I’ve seen the prototype, D.C. looks like a weird temple to the abstract concept of democracy, as opposed then some idiosyncratic persona of a particular ruler like in Vienna.

I should mention that the two most important rulers who lived there were the Empress Maria Theresa, back in the time of Mozart and the Holy Roman Empire, and Emperor Franz Joseph, who was also King of Hungary, who reigned from the mid-1800’s until near the end of World War I. Between the time of those two monarchs, a host of other nobles such as Marie Antoinette resided and ruled, with the Hapsburg at the center of an increasingly complicated and fragile web of alliances and powers struggles that extended through Europe and into Africa and the Americas. Napoleon came and went, Germany became a nation, and the industrial revolution happened, along with Adam Smith and Karl Marx. At the of Franz Josef’s day everything finally fell apart for the Austria-Hungarian Empire and all over Europe, and the last vestiges of the feudal systems that provided the world order for Christendom since the fall of the Roman Empire were finally swept away. Yay capitalism!

I must say it was interesting visiting the three cities in Austria in the order we did, because the stories told in the various museums and castles were all interconnected, and flowed into their final climax in Vienna.

For example Salzburg, which was a power center in an earlier time, suffered a major economic downturn in the 16th century because its gold mines we suddenly unprofitable after the bottom dropped out of the market due to the influx of looted gold from Mexico. Later on Franz Josef’s brother was Emperor od Mexico. Small world.

Also I should say Vienna is a much larger city than either Innsbruck of Salzburg, which are basically small towns of 100,000 or so. Vienna is close to two million. Also this was my first ever wholly urban vacation. On other trips I’ve visited say Albuquerque or San Francisco or Montreal, bit then also spent a few days skiing or hiking in the mountains or that kind of thing. This trip it was pretty much all cities. Nevertheless, we did a ton of walking. Most days we were over ten kilometers, and our highest day was eighteen.

I had tried to learn some German for the trip, and indeed heard people speaking it everywhere. The knowledge I had helped with reading signs and menus and that kind of thing. Listening in conversation was a bit harder cuz people speak fast, and speaking — well it was hard to string more than a few words together without taking time to think of the next word. My most commonly used word was “danke”. But it turns out everyone’s English is quite good, so it didn’t matter much.

That night we met up with my cousin Peter. Peter was born and raised in Ontario, Canada, and we were close when we were growing up, the closest of all my cousins. Even more itinerant than I was, Peter toured the States with his rock band in the days of his youth, lived in Florida for a decade or so, then Vancouver, and has been living in the EU for the last couple years. Like me, all of his grandparents were born in Hungary, which means he’s eligible for citizenship there. His girlfriend Kati is also Hungarian. She’s a friend of the family and stayed at my house for a few days when I lived in Brooklyn. Lizzy was a baby and Kati was a teenager on her first trip to Canada and the US, visiting New York City with my Uncle Ron, Peter’s Father. It was nice that she remembered me. And of course it was great to reconnect with Peter, we instantly picked up our rapport. It turns out Peter loves living in Europe, and Austria is much more chill than North America and work-life balance is much better. Even if you’re a kid with your first job at McDonald’s you get five weeks vacation.

We met in the old downtown, right in front of St. Stephen’s Cathedral. We has some time to kill before meeting up so we walked around the downtown and checked out a few of the big churches. St. Stephens was one, and it was gobsmackingly gorgeous outside and in. They must have been tuning the pipe organ because the whole time we were in there you could hear a single note being played for a minute or so, followed by another note a half-step up. There was another church around the corner, just as ornate if not quite as huge, and notable for a great big dome on top, complete with a little dome inside, with a painting of a dove representing the Holy Spirit at the very zenith.

So anyway, we met up with Peter and Kati and went out to dinner at a traditional Austrian restaurant, so more pancake soup and wienerschintzel. Yum yum. They also had a really good csirkepaprikás palacinta appetizer. When we were done with dinner it was raining out, so we went down the street to a nearby café and continued hanging out and talking. A little while later the rain ended and we went for a walk around the city. When he first moved to Austria Peter worked as a tour guide, so he was able to tell us alot about what we were seeing and is an engaging storyteller like his Dad. We ended up in a square in front of the city hall, where the Vienna Film Festival was going on with free outdoor screenings on a great big screen and a huge sound system and seating adjacent to an outdoor cafe. The movie was a performance of the Berlin Philharmonic doing what they do best: Beethoven, Mozart, Strauss, that whole bag. Very good music and alot of fun.

…

Next day we started at the Hofburg, which we’d passed thru the night before. This was the former winter royal palace complex in the city the current seat of the national government. Across the plaza, much like the Smithsonian in the U.S.A., is a pair of museums, right on the Ringstraße, one for art and the other for natural history, founded by Franz Josef in the 1800’s. We picked the Kunsthistorisches, and it was the best art museum yet, considered on of the best art museums in the world. It held paintings by Rapheal, Rembrandt, Dürer (finally), Brughel (most famously the Tower of Babel), Michelangelo, lots of Rubens, and tons of others, with a heavy concentration on the renaissance. The building itself was impressive, with a grand marble stairways and an octagonal dome.

After that we walked around the Volksgarten and down the Ringstraße. Jeannie wanted to see the Danube, but it turned out it’s no big deal, basically just a canal that cuts through the city, at least in the neighborhood where we were. There was a cute little fake beach bar there.

That evening we met up with Peter again and went out to Prater Park, an amusement park embedded in a larger park in the heart of the city. The part itself dates back to the 12th century and the classic rides in the amusement park are from the 1800’s — original steampunk and very well maintained. Of course like everything else in Europe there’s just layer on layer of newer and older stuff. We ended up in a Biergarten, enjoying dinner and the summer evening ambience and quite a few beers.

Next morning we were up bright and early for the final leg of the journey, to Budapest.

The Return of D&D

It’s getting late in the summer, which means soon the kids will be off to college. This year it’s not just Lizzy, but my two nieces Katie and Valerie. What this means for me is that we had to hurry up and finish our D&D campaign.

You’ll recall that last year while on on a cruise, I started a D&D campaign with Michelle and my four nieces and nephews to alleviate the boredom of days on end at sea trapped on a boat and inevitable insanity or worse that’s sure to follow. Well would you believe they all wanted to continue the campaign? And so it came to be, back by popular demand.

The module we played last summer was The Isle of Dread. This summer, in keeping with the theme of adapting 1980’s original AD&D to 5th edition rules, we played White Plume Mountain, in which the party explores a semi-dormant volcano seeking to recover stolen relics, and perhaps learn the whereabouts of the powerful and possibly undead wizard Kerpatis.

Some of the party kept their characters from the previous adventure and some developed new ones. In particular Katie is now playing a Dwarven Paladin, who is a good partner and foil for Carmine the Invincible, Lou’s straight-up Dwarven fighter. Meanwhile Michelle had a really interesting character in a cleric who worshiped Thor, with lots of thundering and hammering special powers, but she traded that in for a Halfling Rogue specializing in burglary in the classic Baggins mode. However Valerie was a new Cleric, and Abbie was an edgy Elfin Bard, chaotic neutral. Phillip kept on with his wizard, and leveled up enough to get spells like Fireball and Lightning Bolt, and so is coming into his own as a force to be reckoned with.

We did the first session back in July, combined with a barbecue. Then this last session was out on Long Island, and we had to get to the end by the end of the night, so it ended up being a pretty long night.

I moved the story along pretty fast; we jump cut straight from the seaside tavern where the party accepted the adventure straight to the smoldering foot of White Plume Mountain, hundreds of miles away. The dungeon is full of tricks and traps, lava and geysers, strange magic and unusual creatures, so there was much more than your typical hack’n’slash and the party needed to keep their wits. They rose to the occasion admirably and wreaked major havoc while keeping their hides alive. Michelle in particular figured out how to effectively burgle in the middle of combat and more than once the party escaped with the treasure and their lives rather than fight it out to the bitter end. Still the monsters were pretty tough and more than once a party member fell and required extreme instant healing. As a DM I must say there’s an inherent disadvantage when you’re the final boss such as a giant decapod (look it up) or vampire: even if you have alot of hit dice you only get a few attacks per round, while there’s six of them all trying to kill you at once.

The quest of this module was to recover three powerful magic weapons. The first one was a strangely cursed sword, which Abbie kept. The second and third were a mace and axe, great for a cleric and a dwarf respectively. There was also a fake ring of wishes, which piqued the party’s avarice. Richly and predictably, the party fell to arguing whether they should return said relics to the patrons who hired them on the quest, or keep them for themselves and return to the city by some circuitous route. Katie pointed out that she and Lou are lawful good, so there’s potentially a test of alignment in the offing. I have a few ideas as to what may happen next. Hopefully we’ll pick this up over Thanksgiving.

A Journey to the East, Part III

The train ride from Innsbruck to Salzburg came down out of the mountains, passed thru southern Germany, then climbed back up and re-entered Austria. So country number four. Traveling by rail you can get a glimpse of the regional economic activity as expressed by inventory of raw materials stacked up by the railroad sidings. There was a good amount of lumber in particular. Everything seemed a bit more human scale than at home, where it seems to be all massive depots dealing in huge quantities of shipping containers and not much else.

We arrived in Salzburg in the evening, in time for dinner. The hotel here was smaller than Innsbruck but had a similar décor, and a nice restaurant with pancake soup – another favorite Austrian dish. Michelle was particularly excited by this, but we all enjoyed it.

We slept in in the morning and had cappuccino and croissants and the hotel bar. Back on the tourist beat, our first stop was Hohensalzburg Fortress. Our cab driver drove right up to the bottom, thru the old town squares, scattering tourists in front of us like pigeons. To get up to the castle meant a ride on a funicular railroad. This on was apparently in in service since the 1800’s, with several upgrades along the way to the carriages, and built on top of an older, water-powered system dating back to the 1600’s.

Hohensalzburg was probably the largest and best preserved castle we saw, with large parts of it intact from the 1500’s. Of course it was built upon older castles, with parts going back to the 1200’s and the original foundations for the keep dating from the Romans. It too had it’s collections of paintings and artifacts, including a hall of puppets and puppetry, as well as a very well preserved chapel. Salzburg was a bit unusual in that it was for a long time ruled by a line of Archbishops as head of both church and state, in a quasi-independent province of the Holy Roman Empire. Images of the double-headed eagle abounded everywhere in Austria. The castle is high on a rocky hill and offers excellent views of the city and surrounding mountains and countryside.

Down at the town square again we had a lunch of beer and pretzels. The was a band playing there, consisting of a clarinet, accordion and standup bass, playing folk music. They were very good. The annual music festival was happening while we were in town, with events in all the churches and concert halls and castles. Alot like the Montreal jazz festival but for classical. Most of the venues were hundreds of dollars a seat, so we didn’t take in any of those, although the programs looked quite impressive. We did catch some free events, like the trio in the square at lunchtime.

Then there was another museum – I think it was called the Salzburg Museum – right in the main square with the statue of Mozart, with more artwork and artifacts. Honestly at this point it’s all running together in my mind, I’d have to look at the pictures we took. In any event we spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the old town, looking at shops and stuff.

Salzburg Cathedral was pretty spectacular. High Baroque style, overwrought with ornament o every available surface, yet somehow very elegant. For one thing, everything about the design was systematic, reflecting a deeply evolved expression of a total worldview. For another, it had five banks or organ pipes. One was up in back in the usual place. The other four were arrayed around the four corners of the large central open space, do doubt capable of producing genuine quadraphonic sound.

We had dinner outdoors at a restaurant in one of the squares. As we moved further east goulash began to appear on the menus as well as schnitzel, and spätzle as well as potatoes.

…

Next day we started at Schloss Mirabell and the Mirabell Gardens, which was a short walk from our hotel. The palace and gardens date from the 1600’s. The gardens are beautiful, full of flowers and paths, and feature a large number of sculptures depicting figures and scenes from Greek mythology. Jeannie was really keen on the gardens since The Sound of Music was one of her favorite movies since the time she was a little girl. It was a perfect sunny day for enjoying them.

In the afternoon we split up and Jeannie and visited the Mozart house while the girls went looking at shops. The Mozart house was fascinating for several reasons, not the least of which is that building is over 700 years old, and so you get a sense of medieval urban architecture for a well-to-do private residence, with it’s courtyards and kitchens and apartments and all. Technology may change but the house design was still comfortable and not totally unfamiliar.

Mozart was of course a boy genius musical prodigy of the 1700’s who went on to become a great composer, and this was the house he grew up an and lived until his mid-twenties. His father was also a famous composer and taught young Wolfgang and took him on tours all over Europe to play for the likes of the Empress Maria Theresa. The house was full of artifacts including manuscripts, musical instruments, travel paraphernalia, and models and drawings of costumes and stage sets for his various operas. There was also a listening room with some of the highest fidelity speakers I have ever heard. I did not know that young Wolfgang’s first instrument was the violin and he switched to piano later when he decided to learn how to compose. I also didn’t know he had a sister who was supposedly the better keyboard player, and they toured together as a brother and sister act until she grew up and married.

He also has a chocolate and liqueur named after him.

Memorizing Jazz

My jazz group Haven Street played a most excellent gig a few days ago at The Barn at Quaker Hill Country Club, up in Pawling NY. It’s a very nice place, reeks of old money, with pictures of F.D.R. and Babe Ruth on the wall, and a grand fireplace with cultural and historical artifacts from around the world, going back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, embedded in the facade. The venue was a large restaurant and lounge adjacent to the bar. The hall had a nice stage and a high ceiling and the acoustics were superb.

We started playing at a moderate volume because right in front of us was a large party of diners including a few little kids, and we didn’t want to blow them away. Musically the band was really good, and the crowd was digging it. The kids got up and danced and people came out from the bar to hear and see us better. Man I swear the group keeps sounding better and better.

One thing I’ve been doing recently is memorizing all our material, our originals and a good bunch of standards we have in heavy rotation (All The Things You Are is still a real M.F.). I feel like people in general used to memorize things alot more, now it’s a dying art cuz everyone always just looks stuff up on their phone. But it’s a skill worth cultivating.

I’ve always memorized songs in the rock group, where I sing and play keys. One reason is the songs tend to be simpler. Another is that I’ve never been able to sight read piano music unless it’s a single melody line or a just a chord progression; if there’s complicated parts written out for both hands, I usually have to read thru at least once and break it down and put it back together before I can play it at speed. And of course when you’re singing it’s a drag to have to look at the words. At this point I know hundreds and hundreds of songs, although not all of them are sharpened up to perform on any given day.

In the jazz group I only play sax. It’s a melody instrument and it’s easy to read a single line. The downside is that you come to rely on the chart and never really REALLY get to know the song. Now that I’ve undertaken the task, I can’t believe it took my this long get around to it; I memorized everything for Event Horizon back in the day. Of course I do know much of the material, and I’m familiar with lots of standards, but we have are some intricate passages (especially in some my own tunes like Lift Off), and I don’t always know what note a song starts on, or maybe some of the chords in the bridge, or whatever. Now it’s all being pulled up into the conscious level. Since jazz tends to modulate alot I’m thinking about the songs much more in terms of their structure and harmonies, and how the melody note relates to the chord. This is natural on piano but easy to skip over on sax. As a bonus suddenly my soloing has gotten more 3-D.

We’re pretty much taking August off because all of us are taking vacation in that time. We have a couple gigs lined up in September and October at two of our favorite venues, The Bean Runner Cafe in Peekskill and the Green Growler in Croton. More details on that coming soon. Meanwhile the push is on to find more gigs, and it’s time to start thinking about heading back into the studio to record a second album. We have an ample amount of material that’s now been road tested in front of a live audience.

Take Me Home Country Roads

I just got back from a nice trip upstate, visiting my parents and celebrated the 4th of July. Lots of good barbecue and even cabbage rolls. Martin and his family were up there too. The weather was very hot.

I’m planning a trip to Europe later this year that includes a visit to Hungary. I’ve been learning Hungarian (as well as German, more on all this in a future post) and my Dad, being fluent in both languages had been helping me out. He translated a poem by the famous poet Sándor Petöfi for me, although right now I only recognize about one word per line and am still working out the basics of the grammar and nuances of the usage of common words. But I was able to pick thru it.

My Dad has a cousin living in the town he grew up in and I made contact. I discovered the house he used to live in is still in the family. It was destroyed in WWII but apparently they built a new house on the old site. So my Dad started making me a handdrawn map, and I pulled up google street view. The whole thing was kind of mind blowing.

On the 5th we went up to Niagara Falls. It was very crowded. We went to ride the Maid of the Mist. The lines were long and the management of the situation was very bad. I’d been there years before and at that time they gave you a ticket with a time to show up and it all ran very smoothly. Now there’s apparently new management and they just have you wait around in a single giant crowded queue for hours with no shade and no place to sit. It was so bad Michelle fainted and bumped her head and had to go cool off in the Visitor Center, and missed the boat ride altogether. And afterwards it was even worse, with another chaotic queue just to get back on the elevator to go back up the cliff, with people cutting line and hopping over fences and very bad crowd control. Oy!

That evening we visited my friend Chris down at Lake Chattaqua. I hadn’t seen Chris in years and it was good to catch up. He was the former keyboard player in my 80’s and early 90’s prog fusion band Event Horizon. He’s looking well and still playing music, going thru changes in life as we all are. He’s in the process of buying a grand piano and putting together a new home studio.

The scene at the lake is very nice, total cottage country. There was a little row of restaurants and bars on the waterfront with live music. Reminds of Lake George. There was a band there, a power trio and everyone sang. Excellent harmonies, I wish my rock band sounded that good. The surprise hit of the night was Never Been Any Reason by Head East. They totally nailed it.

On the ride home we were caught in the jaws of a huge stormfront for most of the drive. Hours and hours of the most torrential, tempestuous downpour you’ve ever seen. Very nasty. Finally we broke free and it was nothing but blue skies. But then after we stopped for lunch the storm caught up to us and the last part was raining again.

OUSA 2019

Ah, I finally have a day to catch up on things. The rock band played a gig last night and we have another tonight. But for now the topic is annual Origami USA Convention, which was last weekend.

What to say? I’ve been going to these conventions for 18 years or so. They still remain alot of fun, and it’s good to hang with my origami friends and see what people are up to. John Montroll was back this year and he has a new book out called Origami Symphony #1. He’s got two more books in the works, Symphony #2 and #3. The concept for each is that it’s subdivided into four movements, which contain a series of models related by subject and/or folding style. It’s a cool concept: it enables him to cover more territory than a single-subject book, to get into some depth in each movement, and to draw connections among the movements. They’re all very cool, as John’s style continues to get more refined and essential. Perhaps my favorite is #3, whose movements include Dinosaurs, Birds, Polyhedra and Dragons.

My exhibit this year included some new models, mainly boats. I have a new model Catamaran and another Powerboat, both on display. I also brought out some classics not seen in a while including my big blue Elephant. I did get a little further folding my Champion Oliphaunt but is was still not quite ready for the exhibit. Still have the final sculpting to go, and it’ll need some kind of internal frame or wire.

I talked to my publisher Jon. Apparently my first book has been selling constantly well and is on the cusp of entering the pantheon of classic origami books. Meanwhile the new Air and Space kit book is selling well too, and it’s time to start thinking of a third book. I had been thinking of a Sea and Shore theme, and maybe another kit book. But now Jon says the success of my first book is making them rethink if they want to get back in to that kind of thing. I hope so cuz that format is more inserting to me. At his point I have quite a few models diagrammed and could pull together any number of books.

The special guests this year were Satoshi Kamiya and Dása Severova. Satoshi of course is known for his supercomplex models such as his Ancient Dragon, and was quite a hit, particularly since he doesn’t come to the States that often. Dash does geometric stuff, mainly with polar symmetry, such as stars and flowers. She’s also quite friendly.

As usual I taught a few courses. First was my Catamaran which I designed back in February at Origami Heaven and diagrammed a few weeks ago. This was a one-hour class but the model didn’t take and hour, so I brought along diagrams for my Flying Fish, having recently completed those as well. Both models went well and I spotted a couple opportunities to improve the diagrams. My other class was my Blimp, which I invented exactly a year ago. I taught it last fall at OrigaMIT and everyone had trouble with the third-to-last step. So I updated the diagrams to show that sequence in more detail and everyone was able to do it just fine.

There’s not alot of dinner options in outer Queens in walking distance from the St. John’s campus where the convention is held, but this year we discovered an excellent Chinese dumplings place.

Sunday night my friend Marc asked me and Jeannie to be judges in the giant paper folding contest. The contest is all in good fun and everyone gets a prize so the judging mostly involves thinking up clever categories appropriate to the various entries. Of course there’s always a few really excellent standouts that should be acknowledged. This year there were several dragons, and the best one was folded by a team of 12-year-old kids. It was an action model and an original design, and they were very earnest. So naturally that team won Best in Show with several honorable mentions.

Monday I spent a good part of the day talking to Robby Kraft and Robert Lang about origami software. Robby is making an origami simulation and diagramming application called Rabbit Ear, which is not to far from the vision of my Foldinator software. So I showed and explained that to him and we discussed how we might collaborate. Only problem is I’m pretty busy now with other things, so I have to find the time!

Can’t Get No Fancy Notes on My Blue Guitar

Tonight’s gig at the street fair was rained out. Ah well. On the upside I have some unexpected free time, so here’s an update to my blog.

I picked up a new guitar not too long ago. This has been on my list for a long time but the stars never aligned. Every few month’s I’d go to the music store to see what they had but I never found one that felt right. I mainly play acoustic guitar, strictly rhythm, to accompany myself singing. I’ve written a few songs on guitar and I want to use it more in my recording.

I have a Strat that Martin lent me a long time ago but I could never really get the sound I was after. I wanted something with dual humbuckers, so I was looking at Les Pauls for a while, and finally figured I’d check out some hollowbody and semi-hollowbody guitars. I found a few new but I’m not such a good guitarist that it’s worth spending huge money, and there’s no point in getting a cheap guitar. So the strategy was to wait until the right used one went by.

This one was for sale at my rehearsal studio, in new condition and at less than half the original price, and right in my zone. It’s a hollowbody with the right pickups, an Epiphone Joe Pass signature model. It’s made in Korea, basically a knockoff of a Gibson (alot like the Chuck Berry one at the museum) that costs ten times the price, but you know, a well built instrument and a good value. It sounds great even unplugged, with excellent sustain and a smooth rich tone. The feel of the neck is great too, much more facile than any of my other guitars.

Gary was with me when I bought it and declared it an excellent jazz guitar (he’s a huge Joe Pass fan). Erik, the studio manager says there are two kinds of players who like a guitar like that: jazz guys, and punk/surf guys who crank it up and prize it for it’s nasty feedback. So perfect for me.

I came home and plugged it into my amp. Playing guitar thru an amp is the big missing piece in my sound, and it’s another thing you have to get used to. My amp is a Roland JC-120 which I use mainly as a keyboard amp since it has that built-in chorus and warm distortion, great for thickening up Fender Rhodes and organ sounds on stage. But it’s really made for guitars and pairs particularly well with a jazz guitar. Woah, totally awesome! So now I’m getting used to it and exploring the range of tones between smooth and chunky.

Next step is to hook it up to some effects. A long time ago Martin also lent me a Zoom multi-effects box, but for the life of me I can’t find it. Ah well, the main application is studio recording, and my method has always been to apply the effects in software. That’s still and option. I can come direct out of the guitar or out of the amp and it ought to sound better than before. But I’m unlikely to fire up my computer just to practice, and it’d be good to get together a bag of tones that I know and can use in various writing and arranging situations. So I might end up getting a new FX box anyway. But not until at least sometime in July.

Haven Street – Jazz at the Lodge

The weather has gotten really nice the last couple weeks. Most days are sunny in the mid 70’s and into the 80’s. Our flowering tree is in bloom. Still very busy, lots of things in motion. More updates soon.

Right now I’m just here to say my jazz group Haven Street has a gig coming up. Saturday June 15 at The Lodge in Ossining. 8 o’clock start time. Should be lots of fun, so come check it out.

Bunny Hop and Duck Walk

Happy Easter everyone! Been busy as usual. Lots going on. Busy at work writing lots and lots of code. April came and is almost gone in a flash. Spring is here.

We didn’t have much of a spring break this year, just a couple days off. Lizzy came home for a long weekend, and we all went out to Queens for Easter Sunday with the family. Mary’s were there and Denis and his whole family were in town too. Very nice time.

Today we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I haven’t been there in four years and they had a special exhibit on rock’n’ roll musical instruments. Very cool. The first thing you see is Chuck Berry’s guitar from Johnny B. Goode. A couple rooms later you’re in a room with Jimmy Page’s Les Paul that he used on all the Led Zeppelin songs, Jimi Hendrix’s Flying V, and Eddie Van Halen’s original Frankenstrat. A couple rooms after that it’s Keith Emerson’s live rig with the Hammond organs complete with knives stuck in the keys, and his original monster Moog. I’d seen that rig close up once before when I saw Keith Emerson Band and you could go up to stage at intermission. It’s nice to see it even more up close and check out all the customization. Lot and lots of other famous historical instruments: Clarence Cleomon’s sax, the Born to Run semi-Telecaster, the synth and echoplex used on Fly Like and Eagle, a mellotron, the Stairway to Heaven Gibson doublenck, the Theremin from Whole Lotta Love, Ringo’s drums and George’s 12-string Rick, and on and on. So many iconic instruments I recognized. Totally amazing.

While we were there we took in a bunch of other halls of the museum, including the historical musical instruments collection, the arms and armor, the Greco Roman, Mid-Eastern and East Asian art, and even a bit of modern and classical paintings. Lots and lots of cool stuff. Good to take a break from the day-to-day and expand your consciousness and creativity a bit.

With my little rock band it’s all drama these days. After one rehearsal our new drummer decided not to join after all, and so we had to arrange another round of auditions in a hurry. We got a new new drummer now, Adrian, who seems like a nice guy and is a very good player. Which is a good thing, because we have one more rehearsal before the start of a string of ten or so gigs that run thru July. The first one is at Rudy’s in Hartsdale on Friday night, May 3. So come out if you can.

We have a few jazz gigs coming up too. The first is Saturday May 10 at the Green Growler in Croton, and it should be really good. We’ll be debuting three new originals.

A couple weeks ago I went to the music store to get new reeds, and while I was there I picked up a copy of the John Coltrane Omnibook. If you’re a sax player you know the original Charlie Parker Omnibook is an all-time classic music text; it’s a transcription of lot and lots of Charlie Parker solos. I studied in high school, it took maybe two years to work my thru from start to finish. Now they’ve expanded the series and made a bunch of books out of the solos of a bunch of great players.

Compared to Bird, Trane’s work is just astoundingly diverse in terms of mood, style and what kind of ideas he was into with harmonic development at any given time. The book is also about twice as thick as Bird’s. Still a common thread runs thru it all from his early bluesy stuff, his work with Miles, the sheets of sound era and the later, really out-there stuff.

There’s something really magical about sight reading. The first song in the book is Acknowledgment, the opening movement to A Love Supreme, which is basically a concept album built out of a 3-note riff. It’s a record I’ve listened to a million times but never tried to figure out by ear. So it was really something to read it down and let it flow thru you, straight from your eyes to your fingers without much mind in between, just being a channel. Then it comes back to you thru your ears and it hits you; you’re just floored hearing the whole thing exactly as is sounds. I never knew I could play that! You can look at it and all his secrets are right there. And then with a bit of practice you can pick them out and work them into your playing. Which is nice because as I said we have a few jazz gigs coming up, and will be heading into the studio sometime soon.