Author: Zingblog 2

Jazz and the Mountains

Just got back from a nice vacation to the Montreal Jazz Festival and the Adirondack mountains.  I feel like I’ve been in one long run of deep focus between work and music and other things, so it was a welcome break.

Jeannie and I drove up to Montreal on Monday, which also happened to be Canada day. We arrived mid-afternoon and our hotel was right downtown where the jazz fest was, so we just walked out into the street to enjoy things.  The festival is centered around their big performing arts center call Place des Arts, which is on the level of Lincoln Center here in New York.  The streets around it are closed to cars and become a big public party space with several outdoor concert stages, and lots of vendors for food, libations and merch.  Several other clubs, bars, theaters and other venues host concerts as well.  We found a Canadian Asian fusion place for dinner in view of one of the stages.  I had a Bloody Ceaser with dinner because, when in Rome …

The main act that night was Robert Glasper, who is sort of a jazz-soul-hiphop crossover guy, somewhat comparable to Kamasi, except he sings and plays keyboards, and his band consists of him, a bass, drums and a DJ.  The music was generally groovy and soulful, with some songs featuring modern and minimalist ideas juxtaposed against the main groove.  The band were excellent improvisors, individual and collectively, going beyond just taking solos to build moods and structures and atmospheres. It was cool to see the DJ as an integral part of the sound too.

The next day we lounged around the hotel in the morning and got breakfast, then went for a big walk in the scenic downtown dominated by old stone buildings, and finally out to the waterfront.  The weather was beautiful, sunny and not too hot.  We checked out a science museum on a pier with lots of interactive hands-on exhibit.  We got lunch at a cafe nearby: poutine, shrimp and avocado salad, and some Molsons.  We bought some souvenirs including a stone sculpture of an Inukshuk in the shape of a human figure.  If it can be carved from a single stone, it seems like it might also be a good subject for an origami model too.

That evening the big musical attraction was Joshua Redmond with a new group in one of the theaters in the Place des Arts.  The band were excellent and featured a vocalist in addition to the rhythm section.  She and Joshua on sax did really cool tight harmony sections together a few times.  The theme of the new record they were touring for had to do with the concept place so most of the songs had the name of a place in the title, including some standards like a mashup of John Coltrane’s Alabama with Stars Fell on Alabama, and a surprising way-out jazz version of Hotel California.  I’ve seen Joshua a few times at clubs in New York, but this performance was a whole ‘nuther level.  There was also a really excellent light show in the theater, which enhanced the sound and mood alot.

After that we took more acts on the outdoor stages, including the Low Down Brass Band, whom we heard on our first trip to Montreal six years ago.  Wow, how the time flies!

Next morning we took another walk around the city, looking for baked good to bring back to the States for our friends Mark and Kelly in the Adirondacks.  I also picked up a nice-looking (and, it turned out, lovely-tasting) bottle of whiskey at the duty free shop.  We arrived in the high peaks area mid-afternoon, and when for a hike at a place called High Falls Gorge on the Ausable River near Mount Whiteface. 

The next day was the Fourth of July.  Out main adventure in the morning was a bike ride up a rail trail from Saranac Lake to Lake Placid.  It was twenty-two miles round trip, my best distance so far of the season, although we took a fairly leisurely pace, and stopped for a while at the turnaround point.  This was Jeannie’s fifth or sixth big bike ride of the year.  In the evening we went to a party hosted by Mark’s friend Cory, at a very nice summer cottage on a nearby lake.  Cory happens to be a passionate cocktail mixologist, and has the best home-bar I’ve ever seen made in a former woodshed.  He was very into mixing drinks for everyone using a whole array of bespoke elixirs, infusions, spirits and spices.  Like a master chef for drinks.  Huzzah!

Mark and I talked at length about improvisational music and the challenges of breaking out of genre boxes and other expectations to explore new frontiers.  In addition to his main group Crackin’ Foxy, Mark has been exploring the world of looper jams using pedal and an electric guitar.  He played me lots of interesting loop-based stuff from the classical world, including stuff featuring cello and clarinet.

After the party we headed back into to town to try and catch the fireworks show, but we were too late.  We ended up at a local bar called the Watering Hole, which I hadn’t been to in many years, and used to be kinda run down but is now very nice indeed.  They had a live band doing funk soul party music featuring a trombone player.  Alot of fun.

Friday we went for a canoe ride on some nearby lakes.  Not quite as epic as some canoe rides of seasons past, but we were out on the water for over two hours.  That evening we drove out to a concert venue near Lake Champlain to see Nate Wood doing a project called Four.  Nate is a one-man band and quite astounding.  He plays drum with one hand and both feet, and also guitar or bass with his other hand (using mainly tap technique), all augmented with some keyboards played in interstitial free moments.  The amazing thing is not just that he can do all this at once, but that it actually sounds musical and cool!  The songs are basically structured improv jams with a sort of prog-rock-meets-jazz-fusion sound.  My kind of weird!

Saturday we drove to a weekend of catching up on chores and things including doing yardwork in the ninety-degree heat.  Jeannie and I did another bike ride Sunday morning.  I did sixteen miles with an average pace of 14mph, a personal best for speed this season so far.  Today Jeannie took off for an IT Admin conference in Pennsylvania; she’ll be back Friday.

76 Favorite Saxophone Songs

Here is this year’s summer playlist, with the theme being saxophone songs.  It spans a full ten decades, almost a hundred years of recorded music.  It starts off pretty sparse in the 1930’s and 40’s and thins out again from the 1990s’ into the 21st century.  It begins with Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker, who virtually defined modern jazz on the sax.  In the 50’s and into the 60’s it’s dominated by the great jazz players, mainly tenor but a few alto, soprano, and even bari.  In the mid-sixties pop music start taking over, beginning with soul rapidly followed by rock, and alot of great horn section bands appear around this time.  By the mid-seventies into the 80’s there’s lots of different styles and in rock, horn sections largely give way to a single sax player.  By the 90’s rock and pop had largely moved into grunge and electronic styles, so there’s less of a role for the horn.  Still, around the time we see a resurgence of a new generation of jazz that continues into the present day.

1930’s
Coleman Hawkins – Body and Soul

1940’s
Charlie Parker – Donna Lee

1950’s
Sidney Bechet – Petite Fleur
Ben Webster + Art Tatum – Have You Met Miss Jones?
Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane – Nutty
Sonny Rollins – St. Thomas
Paul Desmond – Take Five
Lester Young – There’ll Never Be Another You
The Champs – Tequila
Ornette Coleman – Lonely Woman
Charles Mingus – Better Git It in Your Soul
Miles Davis – Freddie Freeloader

1960’s
John Coltrane _ Giant Steps
Dexter Gordon – Cheese Cake
Paul Desmond + Gerry Mulligan – All the Things You Are
Stan Getz – The Girl From Ipanema
James Brown – I Got You (I Feel Good)
Eddie Harris – Freedom Jazz Dance
Wayne Shorter – Mah Jong
Sam And Dave – Hold On I’m Coming
Wilson Pickett – In the Midnight Hour
King Curtis – Memphis Soul Stew
The Beatles – Savoy Truffle
The Doors – Touch Me
Sly and the Family Stone – Want to Take You Higher
Joe Henderson – Black Narcissus
King Crimson – 21st Century Schizoid Man

1970’s
Traffic – Glad
Blood Sweat & Tears – Smiling Phases
Chicago – 25 or 6 to 4
Vehicle – The Ides of March
Rolling Stones – Heartbreaker
Headhunters – Sly
Pink Floyd – Us and Them
Supertramp – Crime of the Century
AWB – Pick up the Pieces
The Brecker Brothers Band – Some Skunk Funk
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band – Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
David Bowie – Young Americans
Paul Simon – Still Crazy After All These Years
Return to Forever – Nite Sprite
Billy Joel – Scenes from an Italian Restaurant
Weather Report – Havona
Steely Dan – Deacon Blues
Foreigner – Long, Long Way from Home
Gerry Rafferty – Baker Street
ZZ Top – She Loves My Automobile

1980’s
Grover Washington Jr. – Just the Two of Us
The Blues Brothers / Aretha Franklin – Think
Joco Pastorius – Soul Intro/The Chicken
Lounge Lizards – Harlem Nocturne
The Electric Mayhem – Can You Picture That?
The Police – Hungry For You
Alan Parsons Project – Old and Wise
Genesis – Paperlate
Madness – Our House
Joe Jackson – You Can’t Get What You Want (TYKWYW)
Wham! – Careless Whisper
Sade – Smooth Operator
Huey Lewis and the News – The Heart of Rock’n’Roll
Sting – Shadows in the Rain

INXS – What You Need
Tears for Fears – The Working Hour
Bill Bruford’s Earthworks – Thud
Michael Brecker – The Cost of Living

1990’s
Branford Marsalis – Mo’ Better Blues
They Might be Giants – She’s Actual Size
Morphine – Honey White
John Zorn – Batman
The Seatbelts – Tank

2000’s
Ravi Coltrane – 26-2
Pharoah Sanders – The Creator Has a Master Plan
Joshua Redman’s Elastic Band – The Crunge

2010’s
Joshua Redman / Brad Mehldau – Ornithology
Kamasi Washington – Street Fight Mas
Too Many Zoos – Car Alarm

2020’s
Sungazer – Threshold
David Murry – Cycles and Seasons

Honorable Mention – songs that didn’t make it because they’re not on Spotify, or they’re already on another playlist:

Raymond Scott – Powerhouse
Steve Lacy – Plays Monk
Tower of Power – What is Hip
Parliament Funkadelic – Give Up the Funk
The Who – The Real Me
Maceo Parker – Pass the Peas
Duran Duran – Rio
Huang Chung – Dance Hall Days
Ornette Coleman and Pat Metheny – Song X
Fishbone – Bonin’ in the Boneyard
Material – Black Light

Summertime Grooves

First off, I’m happy to announce the Spacecats record is complete and submitted to all the streaming services.  The release date is July 1.  I’ve also sent off the order to print a small quantity of CDs, just because I feel like it’s important to have a physical artifact to really make the project complete.  More announcement around this as the links go live.

For the first time we’re also looking at doing a vinyl record.  It turns out you can get 100 vinyl records made for a thousand bucks.  Not a bad deal when you think about it, even compared to CDs at two dollars apiece.  However, you can only fit a little over twenty minutes of music on a side, and our record is over fifty long, so we’d need to cut two songs for the vinyl addition.  On top of that, we don’t know anyone who has experience mastering a record for vinyl, and it’s really it’s own thing compared to digital.

We’ve had continued nice weather until just a few days ago, and then it turned hot toward the end of last week.  Lots of barbecuing, and got the mustang out last weekend.  Did a big round of trimming the willow tree growing into our back yard, and now the cycle starts over again with the weeding.

I’ve been doing lots of biking.  In fact, I’ve been biking seven of the last nine days.  I’ve reversed my route thru New Rochelle, so it starts downhill, then the middle is mainly uphill, then a big downhill at the end.

I finally got on the Empire State rail trail with Jeannie and Michelle on Father’s day.  Found a new place to park off Tuckahoe Road.  I got a flat tire, 6 miles out, which was a bit of a drag.  So I took it to the shop, all better, but now I’m thinking of getting a new bike.

On Juneteenth Jeannie and I both had the day off, so we took our bikes down to Robert Moses State Park on Long Island, and took the bike trail out to the little towns on Fire Island.  There’s no cars allowed there so it’s really cute and fun to bike around, kind of like Hobbiton but full of rich people’s beach houses.  Ended up with a nice hang on the beach and a swim in the ocean.  A perfect day for it.

By Friday the weather turned hot — ninety-five degrees, so I actually got out early and did my ride before work.

Saturday Nick and Lisa came over for a visit and Martin came down from Albany too. We did a big ol’ barbecue and built a fire and played games, it was a great hang.  For the party I made a new playlist, as is becoming tradition.  This summer the theme is 76 Favorite Saxophone Songs.  I’ll post a link to it soon, so stay tuned.

Martin stayed over and Sunday morning joined Jeannie and me for another bike ride.  We went fourteen miles, the longest of the season so far.

He also brought his guitar so we jammed a while.  I’ve been re-organizing my big book of rock songs.  I used to have it alphabetical by artist, but then as I moved thru it I’d spend a couple weeks doing only Steely Dan or Billy Joel for example.  Now I have it alphabetical by song title.  I’m in the letter B and recently added a bunch of B songs, including Bad Sneakers, Bloody Well Right, Break On Thru, and others.  Martin brought his book of rock songs too, so we basically took turns calling the tune.  We tend to know alot of the same songs, but if not there was a chart.  I learned Everybody Wants to Rule the World, which I’ll now have to put into my book.

A couple other things:  The OUSA convention would normally be this weekend, but this year it’s in July instead.  Feels more relaxed.  I’ve ramping up my folding the last week or two.  Right now I’m refolding a bunch of models I have out of good paper to exhibit and photograph, including my Platypus and a new and improved version of my Space Cat.  Next it’s on to new models, including some more single-sheet polyhedra ideas combined with tessellated flowers, and some animals and insects.

Lastly, at my day job in the Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, my MVP prototype integration the Data Rights Protocol into the Permission Slip application is on the cusp of completion.  I’m sort of in the Zeno’s paradox phase, where every day brings me half the distance closer.  I’m nominally code complete, and have moved on to integration testing which involves two separate apps, and am encountering pesky deploy roadblocks, cross-domain permission issues, and that sort of things.  Ah well, hopefully I’ll be able to declare victory soon.

The Global Jukebox 3.1.0 is Live

The Global Jukebox 3.1.0 is now live at https://theglobaljukebox.org. The major feature this release is a tool for users to submit corrections to song cantometric coding data and song metadata, along with and admin workflow to accept changes and migrate them into the app database.  There’s also a new journey about The Roots of the Blues by Lamont Pearley. And of course numerous UI, UX and usability enhancements, bug fixes, etc.

Meanwhile at my day job at Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, we just launched a beta version of AskCR, a chatbot-style application to answer user question about product comparisons, backed by our extensive databases.  I’ve been enjoying taking part in testing sessions, and happy to reports so far it’s actually accurate and helpful, even if sometimes it’s just a more verbose way of finding information you could just use our search tool to find.  I’ve been asking it alot about hybrid luxury SUVs and high-performance sports cars recently.   I learned that there’s a hybrid Corvette out there now that has all-wheel drive with electric front wheels and can go from zero to sixty in two and a half seconds!  No information, however, on the storage capacity of the frunk.

The weather had been great, warm and sunny but not yet brutally hot.  I took my first longish bike ride of the season last week, going up into New Rochelle towards Larchmont. Pretty hilly, like most places around here, but still fun.  Just under ten miles, just under an hour.  I’ve also been having a run of good workouts, back up to nominal full weight on all my sets.  Although today was kind of rough; I was tired from being up and down a ladder and swinging a chainsaw around over my head to trim the neighbor’s willow tree that hands into my hard.  I ended up chopping of a pretty good branch landed my shrubbery and rolled off into my other neighbor’s yard.  Talk about a bustle in your hedgerow!  Unfortunately, I have not gotten around to taking the Mustang out for a drive in a few weeks.  By the time I was done the yardwork yesterday the Hutch was all backed up.

My friend Nick had a barbecue party Saturday, a most excellent time.  I ended up talking to his kids and Michelle at length about music, and what people are listening to these days, and how music continues to evolve.  Giovani, who is a musician, has weird and interesting tastes, including jazz, prog, metal and lots of stuff I’ve never heard. He’s gotten as far as appreciating Alan Holdsworth, which is super fun.

And finally, the Spacecats album cover is complete.  Now I can get on to getting CD’s made (which at this point is really just for vanity) and publishing it to the streaming services, which is more important.  I actually got a check last week from people streaming my music.  Less than I make in an hour of work writing software, but you know, it’s something.  I also got a check from royalties from my origami book, which was more than a day’s salary.  So anyway, watch this space.

Another Sunny June

Summer has arrived in earnest.  I’m still busy with work and projects, but have been making time for some low-key relaxation and enjoyment.  This is important because I feel like I’ve been working since February on the same set of things, and while I’ve been making progress and getting things done, I’ve also been getting weary of the grind.

Michelle is home from school for the summer.  Today she started her new summer job, an internship for her study in civil engineering.  She’s very excited.  The work is mainly inspecting, reporting on and supporting repairs on train bridges in The Bronx.  It’s the kind of work where she needs safety boots and a laptop computer with AutoCad. Apparently steel-toed boots in women’s sizes are hard to find at shoe stores around here so she had to order them over the internet. The company provides the computer and software.  Rock on!

Meanwhile, Lizzy has enrolled in grad school to get her Master’s degree in Business.  This is a mainly online program she can do while continuing at her day job. A year ago she told me she had no interest in grad school.  I think she changed her mind because her boyfriend is pursuing a medical degree, but she says it’s to open up her carreer options going forward.  Either way, rock on!

In my own little scene, things are grinding along as I’ve said.  Things are getting done, but everything is harder and taking longer than one would hope.  My day job has entered an unusually chaotic phase, and I was temped to write in my weekly status update today “EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE!!!” but instead wrote “repeated build failures; we are working with the enterprise team to resolve the issue,” which is really just the tip of the iceberg.   We’ve hired a new in-house engineer who will start in July, which should help things going forward.  Meanwhile the MVP for my more R&D-ish project moves ahead one obstacle at a time, when I have to time to work on it.

The Global Jukebox is approaching the release of version 3.1.0.  We’re in the final testing and bug fixing phase.  So stay tuned to this channel for future announcements.

The new album by my jazz group Spacecats has been mixed and mastered and ready to publish for a few weeks now.  All that remains is the album cover.  I put together a cover featuring images of the band members taken from video stills.  We all agreed the quality was not the best, so at rehearsal a week ago we took a bunch of new pics of the group as a whole, both playing music and posed at various spots around the studio.  I’ve gone thru the images and narrowed it down to a handful of semifinalists.  The next step is to drop them into to composition, see how they look, and play around with them until I get somewhere cool.

The OUSA convention is drawing near.  I’ve dusted off my list of ideas for models and begun folding, starting with creating exhibit-quality versions of models I’ve already done, then moving on to explore new territory.  This year the convention isn’t until late July, so I have a whole extra month to get it together.  I also need to decide what I’m going to teach.  Probably one of them will be my Spacecat, a variation on another cat, Sophie.  I’ve recently refined the Spacecat, changing the proportions and folding sequence, and the final model looks better.  Trying to work thru the final sculpting now and looking for the right paper.

I’ve been working out and biking alot, but it’s been a bit uneven as my energy level hasn’t always been the best I’m working thru so weird random pain in my shoulder.  I seem to be mainly over it and back up to full weights on everything the last week or two.  I still haven’t taken a ride with Jeannie on our local rail trail, but hope to this weekend.  I’ve been doing the local loop of my neighborhood (about 4 miles with hills and traffic) about three times a week, and have done the Nature Study woods (longer, no cars, some bumpy trail-ish hills) twice now.  We’ve only done one two hikes this spring too.  Need to get our into nature more.

We did do some fun things the last few weeks, and at least the major spring yardwork cycle got done, although next weekend starts a new round.  Memorial Day weekend I went to a Mets game with Jeannie and Michelle and Mary and Lou and their kids.  I don’t care that much about baseball but it was a fun hang, and our seats were in the shade.  Amazingly, the Mets rallied in the bottom of the ninth for a come-from-behind victory!  We’ve also been doing a bunch of barbecues and hanging out by the firepit in the backyard, listening to playlists from summers past.

Last weekend Jeannie and took a mini-vacation to wild and exotic Connecticut.  We went to Mystic, where they have the Seaport Museum featuring tall ships and lots of stuff related to ships and shipbuilding in the Age of Sail, including things like a blacksmith, cooper, printer and other 19th century shops, crafts and industries.  They’re also actively restoring several historic sailing ships.  There’s also an aquarium there, with penguins, sea lions, beluga whales, and all kinds of fish and even octopus.  After that we went out to sushi for lunch.  There’a cute little downtown a bunch or restaurants and shops, including a great seafood place.  There’s also an 80-foot sailboat parked right there, a three-masted schooner, so we did a two-hour sunset cruise of the sound out beyond the river.  The harbor is actually up the river a little bit, so first we had to navigate the channel out to sea.  We crossed past a swinging train bridge that seems like the perfect focal point for an action set piece in some adventure film.  There’s a train coming and there’s a tall ship coming, and the hero and the villain are fighting up in the control room, trying to gain control of the switch to swing the bridge open or closed.

May Happenings

Spring continues in fits of rain and storms amidst a nice day here and there.  I’ve been trying to shake off a cold for the last week.  It feels strange having a cold when it’s eighty-five degrees outside.  Now it seems I’m finally mostly better.  I had a good workout today and hope to get back on my bike tomorrow, and get caught up on the yardwork over the next few days.

Still been doing stuff.  Last weekend Jeannie and I took a fun day to go into the city.  We started with a stroll thru Central Park, and it was a lovely day for it, sunny if a bit brisk and breezy.  The main attraction of the afternoon was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I haven’t been to since before the pandemic.  Spent most of our time in the Ancient Greek and Roman collections, as well as the Middle East and Asia, the modern wing, and of course the musical instruments and arms and armor galleries.  Afterwards we crossed thru the park again and had dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant, in part to celebrate Jeannie’s recent promotion at her job!

That evening we saw Kamasi Washington at the Beacon Theater.  He put on a great show.  His sound continues to evolve, now incorporating a DJ and some dancers into his large, sci-fi band.  It’s a great sound with two drummers, a standup bass with effects, piano and synth, trombone, vocalist, and Kamasi’s tenor sax over everything.  Lots of big extended-jam pieces with great rises in energy.  Lots of fun.

Then I was back in the city Thursday and Friday for an onsite for my job, with a bunch of people coming in from out of town including my friend Annmarie from Chicago and Sukhi from D.C..  Thursday night we all went out to dinner and afterwards ended up at the rooftop bar of the Harvard Club (my boss Ginny is an alum) until closing time.  Lots of fun, much more open and enjoyable than your typical work social function.  Sincerely good people.  Or maybe it’s just that since we all mainly work remote, it just feels like a special occasion when we get together.  In any event Friday I gave a demo of my current R&D project, which integrating the Data Rights Protocol into Permission Slip, our privacy app.  Been making good progress and this is a key milestone for wider adoption of the protocol among industry partners.

Friday Lizzy came home for a visit with her boyfriend Josh.  They came up from Philly, where they did a little trip see a ball game and some museums and the zoo.  Saturday her grandparents came up for a visit and we had the first barbecue of the season.  Again it was a bit chilly our, so I made a fire in our firepit, which was very nice. 

The mixing of the Spacecats record is nearly complete, and I must say it sounds quite good.  Gavin came by for a mixing session a couple weeks ago, so I got the benefits of his ears and skills.  Now I’m basically up to final mastering.  The next step is to come up with an album cover, and then I can get CD’s made and get it place on the streaming services.  The band wants to try and do a group picture, but unfortunately some of our our out of town the next few weeks, so it may be a while before we can get that together.  Ah well, I can work on an illustration and  rest of the text and graphics in the meantime.

Weekend Warrior

Spring continues to arrive.  Everything is turning green, sprouting and blooming.  Today we had our first actually hot day.  And it’s about time.  Did a ton of yardwork over the weekend.  Mowed the lawn for the first time, plus weeding and edging to get everything looking nice for hanging out outside.  Next step is put down the mulch under the hedges and trim a couple trees.

Been getting on my bike the last couple of weeks, five or six times now.  Nice to get back into that.  I still have yet to do a big long ride on the rail trail near my house, but that will come soon enough.

The big fun this weekend was I went into the city to see my old friend Jim Wynne from Buffalo, playing bass with the band Tripi and the Mother Truckers, who are touring around the northeast these days. Tony Tripi is a singer-songwriter with songs that are fun and earnest, and the group is a power trio with a backup singer for high harmony. Great sound and energy.

I haven’t seen Jim in many years, so it was great to catch up.  It brought back a bunch of memories.  We were in a bunch of bands together back in the day, including Automatic Man and The Purple Connection, and he was the bassist for the last incarnation of my jazz fusion group Event Horizon. Jim is a phenomenal talent on bass, with an imaginative and adventurous technique that he developed after someone lent him a chapman stick for a few months, but then he had to give it back, equally at home in jazz, rock, funk or dance music.  I’d compare him to Les Claypool, Billy Sheehan, or Tony Levin, with a bit of Joco thrown in, but he really has his own thing going.

Automatic Man used to play every Monday night at Broadway Joe’s for a year or two, except when the Bills were on Monday night football.  The group featured Jim on bass, Pete D. on guitar, Pat O. on drums and me on sax.  We did alot of Jeff Beck and Mike Stern, and adaptation of rock songs.  We used to end the set with the Beatle’s Abbey Road medley, with Pete and I playing most of the vocal parts on our instruments and Jim covering pretty much everything else in the arrangement on bass.  It was a great crowd pleaser, and people used to sing along to Carry that Weight and The End.

The Purple Connection also featured Jim and Pat and myself, and Craig H. on guitar.  We had a Sunday afternoon gig at a place called The Inn on the River, a bar where people would pull up to a dock in their boats.  The set leaned more toward smooth jazz, with things like George Benson and Steely in our repertoire.

Around that time I was in a different group making an album and the studio we used had a summer picnic with a raffle, and Jeannie won 10 hours of studio time.  I thought I could make a record in ten hours, so re-formed my group Event Horizon, with Jim on bass, and we went in and recorded an hour of music – four songs – after just one rehearsal.

So like I said, I haven’t seen my friend in many years.  Amazing props that he’s been making his living doing music this whole time and found success at it.  He told me I inspired him to get into digital audio production, and he also teaches now, and even tunes pianos!  His style of playing has evolved too.  A little less flamboyant but better integrated.  Jim now has a seven-string bass guitar, believe it or not, with a really broad neck and lots of room for higher and denser chord voicings and bigger excursions into the treble range.  And he plays it like a mother trucker!

Spacecats – The Recording Session

I’ve been pretty busy the last month or so, but it’s finally time to tell you about the new album my band Spacecats is making.  It’s far enough along now that you can listen to some rough mixes:

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/spacecats/recording_session_240316/edit_mixes_2

We recording the whole thing, ten songs, in a single day back in March.  The project grew out of a desire to have some samples of our music to use to try and get gigs.  We had been taping our rehearsals, but using just a portable audio recorder with a built-in stereo mic to capture the live sound of the room.  It sounded pretty good, but nothing like a professional record.  The inability to separate the instruments or control their tone and dynamics was limiting.

Our friend Gavin, who sets up our rehearsal space, heard us talking about this, and mentioned that he is trained as an audio engineer and we could use our rehearsal space as a recording studio.  A plan was hatched.

Meanwhile, we’d all be writing songs, and at some point last fall our drummer Rick started bring in more and more material.  Soon we realized we probably had enough songs for a full-length album of original material, if we focused on getting the songs tight.  This took a little time, because once we started, there was alot of work on the details of the arrangements.  Also, the guys in the band kept bringing in new tunes that upped the overall level of the project, so we added them in and dropped some others.  In particular Rick brought in a song that was replete with meter changes following a really interesting but complex pattern.  My kind of weird.

We had originally thought we might be ready to record right after then new year.  But between wanting to get the material tight, people in the group having to take a week off at various times, and the availability of the studio, we couldn’t book a date until mid-March.

Although the rehearsal space, the big room downstairs at Lagond, is not a professional studio in the sense that it lacks a control room, we like it because it’s big and has good acoustics, and most of all it has a really nice grand piano.  It also has a mixer and PA for doing live events, which can be hooked up to a computer easily enough.  The studio also has a deep bench of high-quality microphones.  So we really had everything we need.

Gavin came in early that morning to set everything up.  We decided to do it like a traditional jazz record, everything live in the studio.  The instruments were close-mic’d but not completely isolated, which meant limited options for overdubs later because there’s be some bleed-thru.  So what you hear is the real thing!

The setup was: six mics on the drum (kick, snare, rack tom, floor tom, and left and right overheads for the cymbals and hihat); two mics in the piano for left and right, plus a third just outside for ambiance; direct inject plus a mic on the amp for the bass; and two different mics on the sax, one a large diaphragm condenser and the other a ribbon mic, to capture different tones.  That’s thirteen channels total.  

The session went smoothly.  Everyone was relaxed and playing well, and Gavin was able to capture a good sound without difficulty. Once we got set up and soundchecked, we started running down the set list.  The goal was to get two complete takes of each song.  Sometimes we had a false start or broke down in the middle, so we ended up with some partial takes, or even three complete takes sometimes.  After five songs in about three hours we were getting tired so we took a break for lunch.  We front-loaded the more difficult songs, so after lunch we jammed thru the rest in about two hours.  All in all it couldn’t have gone better.

I brought the tracks home and imported them into protools, and set up a project for each song.  I put each instrument on its own bus since we had multiple channels for all of them, then did a basic setup with some light compression, EQ, reverb and dynamic compression on the master out.

The next step was to go thru and listen closely to everything and decide which takes to use, in some cases editing together the song from several different takes.  Also in this phase I tightened up the timing where it was needed, and pasted over the occasional clam.  I must say overall the group has a really good sense of time and the tempos were very consistent between takes and within a song.  For one song, I dropped in a minute-and-a-half sax solo from another take and did not have to adjust the time at all.  I discovered we sometimes to a slight ritard at the end of someone’s solo or anther turning point in the tune for dramatic effect.

Now I’m at the point where I’m listening again for the mix, to try and get that as good as can be.  In particular I’m paying attention to how the bass sits in the mix, and how to make it present but not to overbearing. 

Here’s the list of songs in the order we recorded them, which is probably not the order they’ll appear on the record.

Kamala – written by Rick our drummer, features a 4-against-6 latin groove that breaks into swing in the bridge, and a thru-composed structure with a break after the piano solo that I call the Zappa section.  I play soprano sax on this one (and tenor on most of the others).

There’s Snow Tomorrow – written by Josh our piano player, a light mid-tempo number in a minor key, with a sort of wistful feel.  When we were coming up with the arrangement, I thought it would be cool to have the sax in a supporting role and the piano mainly carry the melody, since Josh has such a great feel for it and we don’t have any other tunes that do that.

Los Gatos del Cosmos – one of mine.  An uptempo samba in the Hungarian minor mode.  Starts with an atmospheric section inspired by the Police, which reprises in the middle as the foundation for a drum feature section.  Lots of fun to play, lots of dynamic ups and downs.

Paris on the Hudson – written by Rick, this is the one that features lots of shifting time signatures, and a tricky melody and chord progression to match.  I guess you’d call it a swing feel, sometimes waltzing, sometimes in four, sometimes in double time.

Lift Off – another by me, this is an uptempo swing number inspired by John Coltrane’s Countdown, and features a tricky 2-5-lift-inside-a-2-5 as the main motivic idea for both the harmony and the melody.  Also has a drum solo.

Lance’s Guitar – a power ballad by Rick with a beautiful melody and a striking chord progression. 

Pour Me a Fifth – another light mid-tempo number by Josh, this one is 3/4 time and has a minor-key chord progression that moves around the cycle of 5ths alot, and a melody that reinforces that idea.  Ken’s bass playing gets really abstract and melodic on this.  I play soprano.

Autumn Eyes – a ballad of mine, very open and atmospheric sounding.  Features a bass solo.  I play soprano. We later did the one and only overdub on this song, some piano comping behind the bass solo. It’s amazing how well my synthesizer piano patch matched the sound of the grand piano from the studio.

Dr. Pluto – a funk jam, my composition.  We had a few funk and R&B kind of numbers we were rehearsing (indeed our tagline was Jazz and Funk, or maybe it was Jank and Fuzz), but this was the only one that made into the set for the session.  I wrote it with the bass having the melody line, and the sax doing a response.  The title comes from a cool-looking sparkly bass Ken brought to rehearsal once. It said Di Pinto on the headstock, but from a distance I misread it.  Josh plays electric piano on this one.

At a Laundromat in Pamplona – Josh’s composition, basically a samba jam.  This is one of our looser songs, with the whole middle section being just two chords.  Toward the end I do this rising thing that Ken calls the Kamasi section.  Josh plays electric piano on this one too.  A perfect way to end the set.

Everything Under the Sun is in Tune

Been busy.  Spring is finally coming.  We had a few nice days in a row.  The grass is starting to grow and the trees are turning green and other colors with fuzz.  Over the weekend I got my Mustang out on the road, finished off some much-needed yard cleanup from a recent bout of storms, and best of all, got on my bike and went for a ride, ending that awkward time of year between the end of ski season and the start of biking season.

The weekend before we went upstate for the big solar eclipse.  I’d never seen one in totality before.  Jeannie and I drove up to Buffalo on Saturday, and noticed the traffic was fairly heavy one we got on the country roads the last hour of the trip.  Excitement was in the air.  Saturday night we hung out Lizzy and Michelle and Lizzy’s boyfriend Josh, and Larry and Jackie joined us later at the bar.  The place had a tap wall with like a dozen different beers.  Lots of fun.  The waitress commented that it was unusually crowded because of people coming into town for the eclipse.  

Larry and Jackie had driven down to Tennessee for the last eclipse, and Larry told me it was a life-changing experience.  He didn’t seem that different to me, so I asked how it had changed him.  He told me he it made him really want to see another eclipse.  And indeed they drove out to Ohio for this one to try and get out from under the clouds.

Sunday Jeannie and Michelle and I decided to go to Chestnut Ridge Park, which is near my parent’s house, to see the famous Eternal Flame, something we had never done despite my parents having lived there for the last thirty years.  It was still stick and mud season up in Buffalo, no sign on anything turning green yet.  I think every other person coming into town for the weekend had the same idea, and the trail was pretty crowded, to the point where we had to queue up to climb over rocks in the last part.  Still it was pretty cool to see, a jet of natural gas burning in a little cave behind a waterfall.  Weird.

Sunday afternoon Martin and Kathleen arrived with the kids and their dog.  My mum made a big family dinner for everyone, and my dad brought out the wine.  Very lovely evening.  Monday I slept in.  I’d been feeling tired the end of the last week and it was good to catch up on my rest.  I spent to whole morning hanging out and talking with Martin.  After lunch we all went for a long walk in the park near my parents’ house.  It felt like a low-key fourth of July.  People had brought lawn chairs and drinks and even some telescopes to watch the big event.  We got back to my parents’ house as the skies were darkening, and watched the totality from their lawn.

It had been mainly sunny in the morning, and grew increasingly cloudy as the totality got closer.  Still there were enough breaks in the cloud for good viewing, if not very sustained.  We had some obsidian discs from Mexico that were meant for viewing the sun, and they somehow made the sun visible behind the clouds.  I think it actually only liked like it was getting cloudier; as the eclipse progressed the sky was getting darker because of that.

When the moment of totality arrived, it suddenly became nighttime.  It was like somebody pulled the house lights down on the whole world.  The temperature dropped, birds and dogs made lots of noise, and there was a ring of pink near the horizon.  We even saw a few stars.  Looking at the sun, there are a few moments when the clouds parted and you could see the corona, all dancing shimmering silver gold tendrils.  Amazing.  Life altering, even.  Then a few minutes later the diamond ring appeared and just as abruptly as is descended, the night vanished.  It was back to tepid daylight, which returned to full strength over the next hour or so.  And wouldn’t you know it, it was bright sunshine the rest of the day, not a cloud in sight.

We dove home Tuesday, and again there was heavy traffic, particularly at the rest stops on the way.  I’m happy to say we found some good places for lunch on the trip.  For many years the only really quick and convenient option McDonalds.  Their food was never that great but seems to have steadily declined in quality over the years.  on the way up we discovered a new place, the Old Bat Factory in Hancock.  They had a deli with sandwiches and wraps, very yummy.  On the way back home there’s a seasonal roadside barbecue stand in Appalachin.  Pulled pork and all that.

And, back in the music studio, I’ve edited together mixes of nine out of ten of the songs for the new Spacecats record.  I know I said I’d tell you all about it, but I think I’ll save the story for next time, when I have some tracks ready to share.

Fotoz 2023, Part 4

Well this project has dragged on a while, but is finally done.  The last batch includes our trip California last fall, including the SF Bay Area, the Lake Tahoe and Yosemite, and the PCOC Origami Conference.  All in it was twenty galleries, by far the most for a single year.  Ah well this year will probably be less traveling.  Can’t wait to get back to doing other things tomorrow.  Enjoy!

https://zingman.com/fotooz/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2023/2023-16/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2023/2023-17/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2023/2023-18/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2023/2023-19/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2023/2023-20/