Author: Zingblog 2

On the Way Home

We finally got a weekend at home to relax. This week we passed a big deadline at work, the release of Permission Slip 3.0, delivered on time and without any major problems.  I also finished re-architecting and deploying the key generation and storage mechanism for OSIRAA, the API compliance test tool for the Data Rights Protocol, after a long and deep debugging adventure, thus unblocking the road forward to testing.  And, I submitted Plutonium Dirigible to get CDs made and put on streaming services, so that project is officially completed.

Last weekend we were traveling again, this time up to Buffalo.  It was good to see Mum and Dad and talk about things. They are doing basically okay, very stoic, which I guess is not too surprising.

I also saw old friends Mark C. and Chris S.  I hadn’t seen either of them in many years, although we used to be very close, so it was great to reconnect.  Mark and Chris were the drummer and piano/synth player in Event Horizon, our prog jazz fusion band that was together for a number of years and was the vehicle for alot of musical growth.  We were in several other bands together around that time, and both of them stood up at my wedding, which, by the way. was thirty years ago this week.  Chris has a new wife and baby.  Life has a way of moving in circles sometimes, and after many adventures they’re both back living in Kenmore, just a few blocks apart, in the neighborhood we all grew up in.

After that we went to visit Lizzy and Josh at their new apartment in North Buffalo, just a few block on the other side of Kenmore Avenue.  They have a very nice place, and the main decorating them is legos galore.  I always admired that neighborhood when was growing up, with it’s tree-lined avenues and well-kept Victorian houses; it’s good to see the neighborhood is still that way.  They’re right near Hertel Avenue, with a district of restaurants and shops.

Back home Michelle is home from school visiting.  The weather remains nice.  It’s been a super pleasant autumn so far, with mainly warm and sunny weather and beginning to get cool at night.  Haven’t really turned the heat on yet.  Much better than last fall, when it rained pretty much every day.  I’ve been continuing to do alot biking.  This weekend I went twenty miles on the local rail trial.  Hope to get a few more long rides in before it turns cold, and get up to thirty by the end of the season.

This week I’m trying to finish up some origami Flying Fish for OUSA’s holiday tree at American Museum of Natural History.  I also have some ideas for a couple new models that I hope to complete for a convention coming up in November.  So watch this space for that.

And the Wonder Will Set Me Free

This past weekend Jeannie and I went up to the greater Berne area, in the hills between Albany and the Catskills to visit Kathleen and the kids and participate in a benefit concert in Martin’s honor.  We had to get up early Saturday so I could be there for rehearsal.  I hadn’t used my rock keyboard setup in a while, so Friday night I plugged everything in and turned it all to make sure it still worked and sounded good, and if I still remembered my way around the controls of my synth.  Then I tore it all down, figured out what to pack, and pre-loaded the car.

The rehearsal was at the East Berne Band’s drummer John’s house.   He has a nice rehearsal space, set up a bit like mine in that you come in thru the garage and don’t have to go up or down any stairs.  I’d met the guys in the band briefly once before, and had been texting and emailing them, so I felt pretty good about the situation.  John sent me a list of tunes to learn a few weeks ago, then last week sent me a mostly different list.  One thing that was for sure was that we’d be doing two of Martin’s original songs.

The band consists of John on drums and vocals, Dan on bass and vocals, Chris on guitar and backing vocals, Jim on keyboards in the summertime, and sometime vocalist Lorissa, who wasn’t at the practice.  They’re all excellent musicians, who sound really good together, and the vibe was very relaxed and friendly.  They’re very versatile and can handle everything from the E Street Band to Brittany Spears.  We ran thru a good part of the setlist they’d given me, focusing alot of the time on Martin’s songs, which they asked me to sing.  Everyone said I sound just like Martin.  I guess that’s not far from the truth.  I’ve been going over some old recordings we did together and can’t always tell who is singing what part.  I was playing sax as well as keyboards and singing.  I’ve been playing more and more on Martin’s old sax, a Selmer Mark VI tenor from the late 1950’s and really growing to love it.

After that I went back to Kathleen’s house and hung out with her and the kids.  We’re trying to spend some time with them, be more of a presence and get to know them better individually.  This time it was mostly Charlie and Abbie I was talking with, with Match interjecting now and then.  I also seem to be their dog Gus’s new best friend, having played countless rounds of fetch with him.  I spent some time talking with Kathleen’s father Charlie too.  We went for a hike later in the afternoon in some nearby woods overlooking the escarpment and, at the furthest point out, offering a scenic view of Albany.  Apparently it was one of Martin’s favorite hikes.  Kathleen and Jeannie and I went out to dinner with John and his wife Linda, who had been raising alpacas for their wool.  Abbie and Ellie and their cousin Bailey came too.

Next morning we spent more time with the kids.  Jeannie taught Abbie how to fold Sonobe modules, a kind of geometric origami system that’s very popular.  I helped organize some stuff in Martin’s studio.  I found a notebook of some of his older songs.  He never seemed to write down his chord progressions, but sometimes there were hand drawn tabs in the margins.  He liked to explore patterns alot and figure out the names of the chords later.  The concert was out at a brewery about a half hour from the house.  I got there around 1:30 to set up.  The stage was out at the edge of a big lawn behind the brewery, bordered by wildflowers all around.  Out in front was a bunch of picnic tables and a shelter.  A very nice scene.  With four bands on the bill the stage was pretty full: two drum sets, three keyboard rigs, multiple guitar amps.  The bass player Dan was in all four bands, so we pretty much front and center the whole time.  The first two bands did a mixture of covers and originals, all very good.  The overall vibe was a cross between the Grateful Dead and the Barenaked Ladies.  I spent the time meeting and talking to alot of Martin’s friends.  He definitely made an impact on people.  Alot of people seemed to be part of extended family clans, like Martin and Kathleen.  Also a whole networked scene of musicians.  There was a food truck there that served dumplings.  Very yummy.

The East Berne Band went on third, and we started with Lorissa singing, doing a bunch of songs which we hadn’t rehearsed and I didn’t know about.  So they called out the key (sometimes) and I followed along by ear and watching the bass player’s fingers.  I sang Martin’s songs, One of These Days and Making Miles, and both went well.  I almost made it thru without breaking up, but then I looked out into the crowd and there was Jeannie and Kathleen crying.  Still, overall a fun and joyous occasion.  At the end of our set, a bunch of musicians from all the bands came on stage for an epic jam session to close out the day.  Tons of fun.  Lots of good feeling and healing energy.  I hope they do it again sometime.  Meanwhile we’ll be back up there to visit again before too long.

Making Miles for Martin

This coming weekend would have been Martin’s birthday. On Sunday afternoon his rock group, the East Berne Band, is putting on a benefit concert in his memory up at the Wayward Lane Brewery in the greater Berne area, in the hills between Albany and the Catskills Albany where he used to live. I might also be sitting with another one of the bands on the bill, One Wing Duck, which I as understand it is sort of a jam collective of which Martin was also a member. I haven’t played a rock show since before the pandemic, so I’ve been learning a bunch of new songs and practicing real hard. We’re doing a couple of Martin’s originals, including one I hadn’t heard until a few weeks ago. It should be a fun time with some great music.

The Brothers Zing

Martin and I have been making music together from the time we were little kids. I’d always dreamed of putting together a live band with him someday to perform our original songs. With the upcoming release of the fifth Buzzy Tonic album, now is a good time to look back the first Buzzy Tonic album, called The Brothers Zing, a collaboration between Martin and myself. Actually, the album was originally called Buzzy Tonic and the name of the group was The Brothers Zing. (I retconned it just like certain film directors add a subtitle like A New Hope to their movie after it’s been out in theaters a while, then years later try and play it off like the subtitle has always been the actual title. But I digress …) I should mention that Martin came up with the name Buzzy Tonic, meaning both a description of the sound, consonant yet distorted, and also some kind of intoxicating libation that staggers the mind.

Back in 2004 or so, twenty years ago now (wow!), I was in a sort of musical hiatus and looking to do something new when Martin approached me. The idea was to do a virtual collaboration, which was unusual at the time. We built matching ProTools based recording studio setups, and we’d send files back and forth, building up a song track by track, changing things around and refining them as we went. We wrote, arranged, preformed and produced eight original songs in a period of about a year.

For me it was a big step forward in many ways. It was the first time I’d really written rock songs with a lyric (I’d previously written mainly jazz instrumentals up to that point, and I’d done a whole lot of computer and electronic music) and focused on an actual album of songs, with the aim of producing a professional quality record. He gave me alot of confidence to step up with my writing and singing. He also wrote a computer program called Guitar George to help him figure out how to play guitar voicings for all the crazy jazz chords that appeared in my songs!

Obviously it was fun and successful, and I’ve kept on making records, getting better with each one. Martin had to drop out of the second record due to other commitments, and I sort of took it over as a a solo project. He remained very generous, contributing one song for every album (except the jazz instrumental one), and often adding vocal or guitar parts to my songs, and giving constructive critical feedback along the way. In fact, I kind of think of all the Buzzy Tonic records as being in a way by The Brothers Zing. And don’t worry, we’ve done other project before and after, so there’s more music from the two of us in the offing.

Meanwhile, you can hear the songs here:
https://zingman.com/music/#BeeZee

And learn all about the the songs and making of the record here:
https://zingman.com/music/beezee.php

Enjoy!

Plutonium Dirigible

It’s been another fun and busy week for music.  Last Thursday I saw the current touring versions of the classic prog bands Yes and ELP at the Capitol Theatre.  It was a really good show.  The only surviving member of Emerson Lake and Palmer is Carl Palmer, and he did an ELP tribute show that combined live musicians with canned tracks and video from ELP’s 1992 tour.  It was pretty effective.  They opened with Karn Evil 9 1st Impression Part 2.  Both the bass player and the guitarist had midi pickups on their instruments.  Once the singing part was done the bass player played the organ solo, and then the guitar player did the synth solo.  Very impressive.  They did one new tune with no legacy tracks, a pretty cool instrumental prog jam.  The only thing I didn’t love was using vocals from old fat 90’s Greg Lake rather than from the 70’s when the band was in their prime, but I guess they didn’t have isolated tracks they could use from way back then.

Yes was actually Jon Anderson with The Band Geeks, a Yes tribute band he apparently saw on the internet and asked to tour with him.  They were very good, actually better than some versions of real Yes I’ve seen.  The bass player and and guitarist in particular leaned heavily into the classic sounds of Chris Squire and Steve Howe, with the the same instruments, and every nuance of every riff lovingly memorized.  The set was entirely the big numbers off The Yes Album, Fragile, and Close to the Edge, with one new song that fit right in.  Jon can still really sing and lead that great vocal harmony sound.  And, sitting on 12-string acoustic guitar for And You And I was special guest John McLaughlin!

Then on Saturday night I saw my friend Erik play a set of rock covers on the patio of a bar next to parking lot in Hastings.  I haven’t seen him since before the pandemic.  Good to get together and talk, even if only briefly.  I’ve been trying to connect with friends again recently.

Also, I biked twenty-six miles in an hour and forty-five minutes on Sunday, a personal best for the season.

But the big news for tonight is the tracks for the new Buzzy Tonic record, Plutonium Dirigible, are complete! 

You can hear the tracks here:

https://zingman.com/music/#beezeevee

And learn more about all the songs and the whole project here:

https://zingman.com/music/beezeevee.php

All that remains is the album artwork and to submit it for publication. So watch this space for the release of the album on CD and streaming services in a few weeks.

Fall Forward

Been trying to get back to normal life the last few weeks, and settling into some kind of fall routine.  There’s been alot of random tasks piling up.  Did a bunch of yardwork the last few weekends.  Almost at the end of the late summer cycle, nothing to do after but wait for the leaves to start falling.  Also been doing work on our various cars. Michelle and I patched the bumper on the camry before she went back to school.

One piece of good news of good news is that I got the Mustang fixed.  Way back in July one day I took it out of the garage to take it for a spin, only to discover the brake pedal felt soft.  I did a little research and determined it was probably nothing I could fix myself.  Being an old car, I didn’t want to take any chances.  However I didn’t have to time to actually take into the shop until September, and then it took them a couple days because my mechanic needed to order a new master cylinder.  So I finally got the car back and took it for a spin last weekend.  Good as new, woo-hoo!

I’ve also been getting back to biking and working out.  For a while my energy felt very depleted, and it was hard to concentrate.  Working out was one thing I could do that was good for my focus, but I had to drop down to like 70% of my regular weight.  Over the last few weeks I’ve been building back up, and now I’m basically I’m at the point where I was before, and building up to surpass my previous plateau this fall.

Meanwhile, back in July I had built up to biking over fifty miles a week.  The first Sunday in August I decided to go for a little further than usual.  On the ride, I passed a woman who then asked if I’d mind if she rode behind me to catch my slipstream.  She looked all cute and sporty in one of those one-piece spandex biking outfits, and in any event why would I object?  After a few miles she had caught her breath and pulled up next to me, and we got to talking, mostly about biking and going further and faster.  She said she was going 30 miles that day, and told me “never plateau”.  When I was done my ride I saw that I’d gone twenty-two and a half miles in a little over ninety minutes.  I was really looking forward to telling Martin, but never got the chance.  In August I scaled back, averaging closer to 30 miles, going out only three or four times a week.  Now I’m ramping back up again.  September is the perfect time for biking.  The weather is not so hot, and you’ve been training all season.  This last weekend I went 22.5 miles again, beating my previous time by about three minutes, closing in on the ninety-minute mark.  Next weekend I’m gonna go for 25 miles, and hopefully do a 30 mile ride before the end of the season.  I’d like to keep on biking into November if possible.

I’ve also returned to working on The Global Jukebox and getting that back on track.  I’ve recruited my friend Nick to work with me as a second engineer.  Nick and Martin and I worked together to create an online version of the game Iron Dragon back in the year 2000.  For now the main tasks is to get him ramped up.  Also, Martin left behind some unfinished work in the form of an experimental branch that he never committed.  I’ve pulled it of his old computer but I have yet to merge it.

In my day job I had been finding it hard to focus too, but that’s steadily improving.  If I can find a task where I can follow a prefab pattern or script rather than have to do deep, open-ending thinking, that suits me better these days.  Fortunately, on one of my project I get to just that: building some new web pages and updating other based on mocks from our designers.  Ginny said that building web sites is my happy place, and that’s not so far from the truth.  In my other project it’s all herding cats, pulling together multiple engineering and management teams from multiple companies for integration testing.  I think I finally found the root cause of a strange, intermittent bug that’s been bedeviling us and blocking our progress, and designed a workaround.  Hopefully I’ll have it implemented this week and progress can resume.

There’s lots going in in music these days too.  For one thing Jeannie and I saw Earth Wind and Fire and Chicago, two of the greatest horn-section bands of all time, at some amphitheater in New Jersey Saturday night.  We attempted to go see this show the first Saturday in August, but it go rained out.  This time the weather was good, but the traffic, limited ways into the venue, and chaotic overcrowded lawn seating arrangements made for a less than promising start. 

I’ve always been a big fan of both bands, but particularly Chicago, with their prog-jazz influenced stuff from the Terry Kath days in the 70’s.  They played plenty of that, including some great deep cuts, and were quite good.  But I guess I’d mentally blocked out their cheesy power ballad phase from the 80’s.  They played a good number of those too, including not one but two about You being the/my inspiration. 

Alot of people seemed to have left after Earth Wind and Fire, so it was easy to move closer for a better view.  At then end, both bands played together, which was pretty epic.  A six-piece horn section, plus two or three of everything else: drums, percussion, bass, guitars, keyboards and singers.  You’d think it might be a giant mess, but they were really tight.  They closed the show with an extended jam of 25 or 6 to 4 (presumably in answer to the question Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is?)  It seemed we were among the younger people at the show, which was great because by time we got back to car at the end of the night, the parking lot was mostly empty, and it was a breeze getting out of there.

Lots more going on in the music work including a new guitar, a tribute concert, and a new Buzzy Tonic record about to drop.  More on that in a future post.

Summer’s End

Jeannie and I ended the summer on a bit of a high note, with our traditional trip to Ocean City, Maryland.  This was a quick one, just two nights, but the weather was beautiful and we got in some good lunches and dinners, a sunset cruise, swimming in the ocean and walking down the boardwalk.  The highlight was spending an afternoon biking around Assateague Island.  This time we parked at the visitor center and took our bikes over the bridge onto the island.  This added a few miles to the ride, which is a good thing, plus some nice views on top of the bridge.  The whole area is incredibly flat; we might’ve been on the highest point in the Delmarva peninsula.  An added bonus is we got to skip to long line of cars waiting to get into the parking lot.

The Shade Songbook

I’ve been taking some solace in listening to Martin’s music.  Martin left behind six or eight albums worth of songs in various stages of completion.  In fact, we were were starting to work on album together, with me producing some of his newer original songs, and he’d been sending me material.

A couple of weeks ago I found on my hard drive a set of eighteen songs he wrote way back in the 80’s when he was first learning guitar.  He recorded them on a little 4-track cassette recorder in the early 90’s with Kim playing drums and him doing everything else. I’d totally forgotten about alot of those songs. Now I’m learning them on guitar. I even bought a new guitar because I never had a good rock’n’roll electric guitar before.

https://zingman.com/music/victoryhearts/shadesongbook.html

Martin – Words

I lost my brother and lifelong best friend a week ago.  There’s so much to process that I’m still not able to put my feelings into words very much.  So I’ll share something Jeannie wrote.

…

I met Martin for the first time the same night I met John in late August 1987. It was my first night at UB and I met John at a dorm party. John took me around to meet some friends of his and I remember poking our heads into Martin and Dwayne’s room. They greeted us sitting at their computers which were set up side by side.

Dating John meant getting to know Martin. We drove to Toronto together with some friends to see Pink Floyd in the first few weeks I knew them. Martin was a fellow engineering freshman and our circles of friends crossed quite frequently and he became a friend of mine right from the start. I’ll never forget the first time I went to supper at the Szinger home on Curtis Parkway. I don’t remember exactly what type of stew John & Martin’s mum made but Martin nudged me and whispered something like, “You know we’re having squirrel tonight.”

Sometimes I would sit with him and Dwayne at dinner. I dubbed the experience “The Martin and Dwayne Diet” since they would find something gross and unappetizing about anything I put in my mouth. That was Martin with his endearingly odd sense of humor.

Martin greeted me with a big hug when I visited John during the summer after my first year at UB after I was away from Buffalo for over a month. It helped make me feel accepted into the family I would eventually become a part of.

As time went on Martin became a person who you knew could be relied upon. Years later, when my car broke down and I needed to move my brother out of the dorms at UB before Christmas, he helped me move all Denis’s stuff back to my apartment. There are stores about him stepping in

and helping people in his circle with things like re-writing resumes and helping with job searches. He wanted to make the world better for the people around him.

When things were dark for him two decades ago, it was tough. We sat with him and listened, and talked about where he was going. He didn’t sit long at the bottom of despair, and found ways to keep moving, finding something to reach for. He decided to run the Pikes Peak marathon. That gave him a goal to work through, a very important thing for him. I remember he called our house after he completed the Buffalo marathon that summer. John was out somewhere and I took the call and heard all about his experience. At that time he also doubled down his determination to work in the gaming industry and he sought solace in music by recording an album with John. They built matching home recording studios so they could work together remotely. He also found some local musicians and joined a band.

It was through that band that he met Kathleen.

It’s from here that many of you know how the story goes. We were happy he found someone who shared so many interests. We knew that when he decided he wanted a life with Kathleen he would bring the same dedication to her that he brought to everything he did. They started a family. They built a house. They had chickens, bees and cows. He was a wonderful father and uncle. His 4 children all hold his spirit each in their own unique way.

Martin was as brilliant, passionate, creative and as motivated a person as I have ever met. He did nothing halfway. John has been a major collaborator with him the whole time I have known him, especially these past 20 years as their music has filled our home.

For the last few years he collaborated with John on the “Global Jukebox” project. It was suited to both of them as it combined their programming skills with their love of music. John says that one of the greatest pleasures of this professional life was having the opportunity to work with Martin. I was a fly on the wall for many zoom calls that were a combination of fun brotherly comradery and deep technical knowledge.

Last time I saw Martin he came to our house for a barbecue with a few friends. A good time was had by all. John and Martin spent the next day biking and playing music together. As he left, he gave me a hug. The same hug from that summer long ago and same one I got countless times over 37 years.

I will miss you forever Martin.