Author: Zingblog 2

Haven July Jam

Meanwhile back in jazzland it’s summertime so being able to rehearse on Saturdays is becoming less reliable. Might have to move back to Wednesdays, which would mean clobbering the Wednesday band or somehow merging the two groups.

We recorded last week’s rehearsal, including takes of my compositions Dark Skies and Your Dancing Shoes. The came out quite good, and I think I can edit them up into a decent demo. Meanwhile you can listen to them here:

zingman.com/music/mp3/havenStFive/julyNineJam/

Oh and one more thing. It looks like I have a gig come up, some bandshell in the park kind of thing on Monday July 25, courtesy of Young Skywalker. I’ll let you know more details when I find out.

Origami USA 2016

Another Origami USA convention has come and gone. A great time as usual folding and hanging with my origami friends. John, Brian, Beth, Paul, Sri, Jason, Robert, everyone was there. I also had a meeting with my publisher and finally have a contract in hand for my next book. Just gotta get a few fine points in the rider and we should be all squared away.

The venue for this year was St. John’s University in Queens, and it turned out to be a very nice place. Beautiful campus, and everything was in two buildings close together. Free parking too. There were a few good restaurants in the neighborhood, including a Mexican place that served a drink that was a margarita with an upside-down beer in it, attached to the rim of the glass by a special adapter.

One really nice thing was that the gallery this year was in a hall with great natural lighting, so everything looked much better than it used to at FIT.

I had a whole bunch of new models for my exhibit. The main thing was something I’m calling Flower Balls. The idea is to create a flower-like tessellation and then fold it into a polyhedron to create the effect that people like to do out of modulars, but with a single sheet of paper. I got inspired and started with it last summer in Ohio, and by MIT in the fall I had a Cube and Dodecahedron Flowerball, along with 4- and 5-petal flower tessellation units. In the last month or so I extended the approach to create 6- and 8-petal flowers, and combined them to form a bunch of Archimedean solids, namely a Truncated Tetrahedron, Cuboctahedron, Truncated Octahedron and Truncated Cube. Only downside is people don’t always get that it’s a single sheet.

I taught a couple classes. One was Airplanes and Spaceships II – intermediate level models from the upcoming book. Went over well, go thru five of them in a 105 minute class. The other was the Flowerballs, and this time I had crease patterns to use a guide while I laid out the concept and some examples. On Monday John Montroll did a rare class, on the topic of diagramming on the computer.

All in all a great, fun convention. I’m guessing OUSA will want to go back to St. John’s next year.

New Song: Mobility

Here’s the third in my ongoing series of jazz demos. I’ve been enjoying doing these as a vehicle to present new songs to my jazz group. I haven’t had much time for recording lately, and the last two songs of my Buzzy Tonic album Elixr are sitting there half done. But it can take months to produce a rock song, while I can whip off one of these in just a few hours.

My previous songs Dark Skies and Your Dancing Shoes are now in regular rotation in our jazz group. One is a ballad and the other a funk/soul number. I figured it’s time for an uptempo swing number. We’ve been doing alot of hard bob in the group, Hank Mobley and Dexter Gordon and that kind of thing, and this song is in the zone. Well, maybe more Sonny Rollins or Cannonball Adderly. I’ve never written anything in cut time before, and this one is around 200 bpm. The main riff is something I’ve had in my bag for a long time, it was just a matter of giving it some structure. It’s funny how a good bridge can really make a song. It’s like a commentary on the A section. You have to decide what aspects to contrast or change up, what to keep as-is, and what to take further. In doing so you come to understand the essence of the song. The song begins and ends with a drum solo, since this kind of groove is right in our drummer Mike’s bag. I can hardly wait to get some recordings of the group performing these.


Gig Announcement: LEFT HOOK at Victors in Hawthorne

Hi everyone, okay our next gig is the first weekend of April. Hope to see you there. I don’t think we’ll be adding very many new tunes for this, but mainly tightening up what we got to take it to the next level.

If you google Victors you’ll see the first review says it’s an awful place, like some guy got in an altercation with one of the regulars and blamed it on the establishment. Who knows? I gotta tell you I’ve played gigs there before and it’s just fine. It’s a good size room with a great big bar and good veiws from most everywhere. They have live bands an open mics up there alot.

LEFT HOOK
Music with a punch!
Westchester’s classic rock Funk & soul party band

Saturday April 2, 9 pm
Victors Bar & Grill
500 Commerce St. Hawthorne

Jazz Demos — Dark Skies

Here’s a new song of mine:


Work on the last couple tracks for the third Buzzy Tonic record, Elixr continues apace, with the epic and angular Plague of Frogs, the new and funky Leave the City Behind, and the poignant Ballad of Galadriel in the offing. But meanwhile I’ve taken on another recording project, albeit of a much lighter nature.

My Saturday jazz group, the Haven Street Quintet, is advanced enough that I figure it’s worth trying to do some originals. It’s kind of amazing to me how few musicians actually write, but to me it’s always been part of the deal, even if only aspiratiionally in the days before I figured out how. Alot if my earliest songs were jazz compositions, and in fact I wrote quite a few before I took on the added challenge of writing lyrics and singing.

In a way writing jazz song is much easier than writing a rock or pop song, because all you really need is a sketch: a melody, some chords, a feel, and maybe an overarching concept. Then you leave it to the musicians to fill in the details and bring it to life.

The first couple of songs I brought to the group we already fully composed, first played by my 80’s fusion group Event Horizon – (I Miss My) Baby in Bb and Solstice. And although the sounded pretty good, they weren’t really right for the direction of the group. Baby in Bb in particular is an uptempo funk, and doesn’t translate on an upright bass. Also I wrote it on alto sax, and it lays just terribly on the tenor. So we’d have to change the key as well as the groove to make it work. Solstice doesn’t have any of those problems, but it’s through-composed enough that learning the structure is non-trivial. Might as well move on!

I have about a half-dozen ideas I can use as the basis for songs for the HSQ. The first of these I’ve named Dark Skies. It’s based on a fragment I’ve had in my head for a long time, but always needed something to complete. I was humming it on the way home from jazz last Saturday and came up with a bridge that was perfect. Came home and banged it out on piano.

There’s no point in trying to track a jazz song on the computer, because the performance is where it’s at. So I had the idea to make a quick demo just to get across the sound. It came out quite well, and was a amazingly fast to record. I tracked the piano on MIDI, and then just repeated the head a second time to provide a backing for the first solo. The bass and drums are MIDI also, just an outline of the rhythm and harmony. The drums are little more than a click track with some pauses and accents. But then I put a sax track over it and that really brought the whole thing to life. I nailed it on the first take. The effects are all well-known presets I just dialed in, some reverb on the horn and some compression on the master out. It only took a couple hours from start to finish.

Hopefully we’ll do it at practice next week and it’ll light up with the band. If all goes well I’m gonna try to knock off a jazz demo every week or two while I finish the last couple tracks of my rock album, a sort of side project within a project. Best case scenario we’ll have some fun and unique new material for the group, and it’ll push us toward the next level. Worst case I’ll have a nice little collection of jazz demos.

Higher and Higher

The LEFT HOOK gig at Burke’s Saturday night was a pretty darn good time. It’s larger and nicer venue than we’ve been playing, and we had a good turnout, with a whole a bunch of people coming to help our drummer Gus celebrate his birthday, and a few of my friends, including Nick, who came all the way from Long Island and took a bunch of pictures of the band, which I’ll post sometime soon. Woo-hoo and thanks alot!

Gus is back to playing his regular drums, which helps the sound alot. Also, last week I finally got my Mark VII sax in for a final adjustment. It took Virgil only a few minutes of fiddling with the various bits of cork around the keys of the upper stack. Now it’s playing totally great. It literally has never sounded better! I have all the tone and growl that I really love, plus a great clarity in the low end, even playing very softly. So now I have two world-class tenor saxes in great working order, the beauty and the beast. I’ve been enjoying hanging out with Virgil, he’s got lots of stories and lots of knowledge on musical instruments. It almost makes me sad my horn is all fixed up now.

We added a bunch of new songs for this show, including The Letter by Joe Cocker, Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel, Beginnings by Chicago, and Cheap Sunglasses by ZZ Top. All went over really well. I think Beginnings in particular, which we used to end out first set, was a winner. We worked on that on for a while and made our own arrangement. I’m emulating a whole horn section on sax, and Mike and Gary are covering the vocal harmonies between them. We even have a percussion break toward the end.

The surprise hit was Cheap Sunglasses. This one was a bit of a late addition, after we’d tried out and discarded a bunch of other new songs for various reasons (vocals were to high, the groove too mellow, that kind of thing). We only rehearsed it twice. It’s a bit heavier than most of our material, but basically a boogie blues, and right in Gary’s zone on guitar. Ken and Gus and got a tight groove going on on the bass and drums. I sing lead on it, and it’s right in my zone vocally too, and I do an Abacab-like solo on the organ over the coda. Big crowd pleaser.

Since we’ve been working so much on new material, we only had a chance to run thru the whole set list once before the show. Overall it was still quite good, but there was the occasional tempo problem (mostly starting too fast) or missed or sloppy transition from one part to the next. Still, we know the songs well, and they’re great songs, and the energy and sound was always there. The vocals keep getting better and better too. I guess you can say the better we get the higher our standards get.

As usual, the second set was the tightest, had the best energy and the biggest crowd. There were a few time where Ken and Gus were really right together in the groove and it felt fantastic. One was Dance to the Music, which we really bombed in rehearsal. For the third set I used to joke that we should just do two or three long jam numbers like Dazed and Confused or Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. But now we finally have enough songs to have a full third set, and not just of the leftovers, but songs we know well. We even ended up doing a couple extra encores, including Foxy Lady, which someone shouted out as a request. Gary launched into it and Ken and Gus joined in, and sang. I think I remembered most of the lyrics. Good fun. And we even got paid more then we’ve been so far.

New Recording: Soul On Fire

We’re more than halfway thru January and winter has finally arrived in earnest. We got out first snowfall last night, and the start of a spell of sustained below-freezing temperatures. I’m weathering it alright. It helps that I’m working form home these days; don’t have to wait out on the train platform in the early morning. With the new Star Wars movie out Michelle asked that we watch episodes I – III, so we did over the weekend. I must say, they’re much better than I remember them, except episode I, which is even worse! I’d forgotten the bit where Jar Jar gets his tongue electrocuted and develops a speech impediment. Yeesh! Still, it’s frustrating because they could have been such really great movies if George had put a more effort into the characters and the dialogue and less into over-the-top CG action set pieces. Ah well it’s over now.

I’ve been able to get around to a few random tasks. I don’t have as much time for recording now since I’m mostly focusing on live bands, but I finally finished tracking the long-awaited Soul On Fire. I had laid down a sax part earlier but wasn’t quite satisfied with it. The new track is also the debut of my new Reference 54 tenor. It sounds quite good. I usually do a few takes and edit them together create the best total performance, but in this case I just used one take as-is with no alterations.

While I was at it I circled back and added a few synth parts to To Be a Rock. Martin had listened to my last mix and though it was missing something, and suggested I think in terms of David Gilmore. Well I didn’t add a guitar track, but I think I have something of that kind of feeling.

Mo’ Better Responsive

I’ve pretty much completed a first pass at making all the pages on my web site mobile-first responsive. Along the way I made a hit-list of items that were too much trouble for the first pass, so now I’m circling back to them. They mostly fall into one of a few categories. First is tweaking the existing styles and fleshing out new ones so the page layouts look good under all resizing and formats. Things like font size, padding and spacing. There’s also a few pages with unusual formats that still have to get converted. Some of this gets pretty subtle and I didn’t want to let it slow me down, but it’ll be worth it. Second is adding new content to the existing sections, and I’ve been doing this on an ongoing basis. It’s getting easier now, as the templates are all largely complete. You’ll notice an expanded roster in the music section, for example. Third will be some all-new presentation formats for the audio and visual elements of the site, but that’s still a little ways off. So for now, go click around and see what you can see.

Caroling Caroling Near and Far

It was a busy weekend. Friday nite we continued on our quest to watch all the Lord of the Rings movies, which we began around Thanksgiving. I haven’t seen them in a couple of years, so they’re fresh again. Up to the middle of The Two Towers now. Jazz on Saturday had been moved to an earlier time slot, but is sounding better than ever after a few weeks off and a rusty start. We want to record our next practice to try and get some gigs. I’m gonna have to really learn how to play Giant Steps now. Yikes!

On Saturday nite we got our Xmas tree and all of the decorations up. This was complicated by the fact that our old tree stand was kaput, and after an hour of trying we had to face the fact it would not hold up the tree no matter what we did. So we had to run out and get another tree stand Saturday night, and even then it was hard to get the tree up straight. But we muddled through somehow. Sunday evening Jeannie and Michelle put up a lego train around it. Choo-choo!

Sunday morning I was in the city, teaching an origami session at the Museum of Natural History. It was more airplanes and spaceships, pretty much the same stuff I taught at MIT a few weeks ago. But in the meanwhile I diagrammed two more models: my Astronaut and my Space Probe. Both came in right around 25 steps.

This session was also webcast. It was my first time doing that and it went well. They provided a camera on a stand pointing down at the table, coupled to a computer running a group video chat so I could easily teach both the people in the room and the ones on the internet at the same time.

The level of folders, at least the local ones, was not at the MIT level. They were low intermediate at best, and some didn’t know alot of the basics. So a few of my models were actually pretty challenging for them. Still, we got thru four: the Astronaut, Rocketship III, UFO II and Space Pod, and all the students did well. It was a good learning experience as an author and teacher. I was wondering if these models might be too hard for a book targeted at non-expert folders. My conclusion is that some may be tough for a raw beginner, but with just a little experience most folders should not alot of fun and have much trouble.

Michelle came with me and took a class. She never misses a chance to do an origami event these days. She folded a really cool mouse, and then made about a dozen of them in rainbow colors. People are telling me now what a good folder she’s become.

This evening Lizzy and Michelle sang at a Lessons and Carols service at the church in Bronxville. It was a large group, anchored by the church choir Lizzy recently joined, and augmented by the children’s chorus from YAA, a really good organist on a great pipe organ, and a brass and timpani ensemble. Apparently today before the show was the only time all three sub-groups rehearsed together.

This is the first time I heard the choir, and I must say there are excellent, truly at a professional level. Lizzy is one of four first sopranos, and the youngest person in the choir. There are two other girls from her youth group but most are adults. They were doing very advanced and complex arrangements with all kinds of counterpoint and harmonies, lots of suspended and other non-triadic intervals, call-and-response things, interleaving voices, and they pulled it all off beautifully. Covered alot of emotional territory too, from haunting to joyous. I only know about three of the songs, but it was the best thing I’ve heard in a while. Also today I learn that unlike the Catholics, the Episcopalians still dress nicely to go to church.