Just got back from a lovely family vacation in Cape Cod and the surrounding area. This was the first full-week vacation we’ve taken in years, since before the pandemic. Lizzy drove up from Buffalo at met us at Martin’s house outside of Albany, and left her car there. She was all excited because she just bought a new car a few weeks ago. We all took my car from there to make things easier. It was great to be together with both kids for a week and hang out and have fun.
First day we took the ferry out to Martha’s Vineyard. We mostly walked around town and ended up a restaurant having lobster rolls and cold drinks. Then we stayed on Cape Cod for a few days in a sort of resort hotel suite on the beach with a loft and a balcony looking out over the ocean. Went swimming in Nantucket Sound, where the sea there was surprisingly warm and gentle, although the beach was a bit stony after you got in a little ways. Enjoyed the sea and sunshine, went out for breakfast, ice cream, and more seafood dinners, played games in the evening.
One day we drove out to the end of cape, to Provincetown. It was a cute fun town, alot like Martha’s Vineyard. We took a whale watching tour and saw several groups of different kinds of whales. Spent most of our time with a pair of humpbacks who lifted their tails out high out of the water before they dove down.
Another afternoon we went to the National Seashore on the Atlantic side. Saw some lighthouses and the landing for the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, as well as the Marconi station where they sent the first trans-Atlantic wireless communication over a hundred years ago. There was also a hiking trail thru the marsh which was pretty cool. I took a swim in the ocean on one of the beaches there. The water was much colder than on the south side.
We spent a couple of days in Boston. We stayed in a hotel right near downtown, and spent a good deal of time walking around the city. The first day we went to the aquarium, which was pretty cool, and ended up at a pub that’s been there since the 1700’s for dinner. Next day we went to the science museum, which included the planetarium and an electricity demonstration with Van de Graaff generators and Tesla coils that could play music. I found these pretty fascinating, but when I asked after the show the presenter didn’t really have a strong idea of how the Tesla coils were made to play in pitch. So I looked it up, and it turns the lighting actually can be made to fire off at a controlled frequency by modulating the voltage. This creates a tone and basically makes the Tesla coil a speaker. The voltage controller can be driven by a midi interface and suddenly, music! Now I’m thinking of getting one for Spacecats. I wonder if it’s safe in a bar or nightclub.
That evening we went to see the Red Sox play at Fenway Park. We’d been trying to get to a Mets game all summer but the timing didn’t work out, so we did this instead. It’s been years since I went to a baseball game, and it was alot of fun.
The last day we headed out northward. Spent the morning at Salem, and went to the witch museum, which was strangely fascinating. Spent the afternoon at a beach in New Hampshire, which had the same vibe as Cape Cod but a bit more low key. The beach itself was nicer, more sandy and less stony, plus has some big rocks. After that it was back to Martin’s where we hung out most of the following day, and finally Lizzy took off and we went back home too.
Slope began life as a jazz song with my pre-pandemic group Haven Street, written by our bass player Jay, and appeared on our record. I wrote a lyric for it, but we didn’t do vocals in that group, and I’ve never been much of a fan of vocalese anyway, unless it’s Ella Fitzgerald. So for this record I changed it from a jazz style into an old-timey blues, with a drop-tuned guitar now carrying the main riff rather than a standup bass.
The arrangement is fairly sparse, with just a single vocal, guitar, bass and drum. To finish it off I added a bit of Fender Rhodes, and of course a smokey bluesy sax. I also added real drums doing brushes on the snare, since I have no way to create that using midi and samples.
Just when you think that life’s looking up
And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around
Just then you think that life’s looking down
Climbin’ up that slope
Slidin’ down that slope
Just when you think that life’s looking up
Just then you think that life’s looking down
Scamblin’ up that slope
Tumblin’ down that slope
And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around
Holdin’ on to hope
Ridin’ on up and down that slope
More summer, more busy these days. The weather has been beautiful. One night last weekend we built a fire in our fire pit and hung out on the patio and considered what song we might use to break Vecna’s curse. Last summer I made a playlist of 80 favorite 80’s songs, and now I’m thinking of making a new playlist of 77 favorite 70’s songs for this summer.
I edited up some highlight form the the Spacecats gig. I’m going to update my web site soon to feature of few of the best ones, but for now, you can see the whole set here:
I got out for a bike ride five days last week. I mostly go around our neighborhood, which is kinda hilly and some streets have alot of cars. Sometimes to a local place called Nature Study Woods, which is mountain biking trails, and not particularly well maintained. The steep parts tend to be washed out and stony, and the low spots muddy. Also I tend to go on fairly short rides – a half hour to an hour, and usually go as fast as possible.
All in all Jeannie doesn’t enjoy this style of riding, but we wanted to start doing some biking together.
So on Sunday Jeannie took our bikes out to Jones Beach and biked along the scenic Ocean Parkway Coastal Greenway. It’s a great bike path, smooth and flat, that runs the length of the island, out from the main beach, through as series of smaller beaches, saltwater wildlife refuges, and the occasional marina, restaurant or bar. We went out a little over seven miles then turned around, for a total of fifteen miles or so. On the way back there was a pretty consistent headwind, but it was a very doable and fun ride. We had a lunch of ice cream and clam strips, then went out to the beach, but it was too cold for swimming. The water was unusually calm and there were lots of seashells. Also tons of giant container ships out at see, queued up to get into New York harbor, like I’ve never seen before. There’s usually maybe two or three, but this time there was over a dozen.
I also got the mustang on the road over the weekend, and continued with the yardwork. This time is was doing the edging on the driveway and front walk. Still to go is the walk around the back of the house, and the patio. It seems everything has grown in quite alot this spring, and needs an extra level of cutting back. Also I’ve never seen so many bunny rabbits and chipmunks in our neighborhood, nor heard so many songbirds.
Lastly, I’m continuing with doing origami and preparing for the convention, which starts this Friday. My two dodecahedron star balls are nearly complete, but it’s taking some work to finish them. They’re single-sheet polyhedra, a very advance form of origami, and closing off and locking the bottom where the edges come together is a nontrivial design challenge. I’ve also been experimenting with a new design called the Space Cat, a variation on my Sophie the Cat, with a midcentury modern look and proportions. Hopefully will get there and have a few new pieces for my exhibit.
Meanwhile, I’m teaching a couple classes, and agreed to pre-record them for people who are attending the convention remotely. This process grew out of last year’s online-only convention, in which all classes were taught live as Zoom calls. This year we’re recording Zoom sessions, with a camera pointing down at the work as it’s being folded. I kind of view this a run-thru, a rehearsal for the real class, and good opportunity to make sure I know the model and can teach it. My first class, Sophie the Cat, went off without a hitch, totally great. For my second class my Five-Banded Armadillo, I somehow skipped a stepped and messed of the proportions of the bands, which are created by pleating. I realized my mistake after I did the collapse and it was too late to undo, so I had to just roll with it and adjust the proportions as I finished the model. All in all it still turned out in the end, and I’m sure to get it right in the actual class.
So let’s see. I guess project dirt was completed a while ago and the new grass is well on its way to being grown in at this point. I’ve been mowing the lawn for several weeks now. We even did the first round of weeding, planting in the garden, and putting down mulch under the hedges. Next job will be trimming.
A couple weeks back I got up on a ladder to unclog the downspout of my gutter in one corner of my job. I used to have to get up there and clean out my gutters every year or so, when there were hundred-foot-tall trees all around my house. But one by one the trees got cut down and I didn’t have to do it for several years. This time instead of leaves and sticks, it was beads of whatever our roof shingles are made of. We got a new roof put on a couple years back, same time we installed our solar panels, and some of the material has worn off with the weather. Of all the jobs I do, this is the one I dislike the most, because of the potential danger of falling off the ladder twenty feet up. So far I’ve been careful and never met with any harm but you never know. Next time I’ll probably hire someone.
Now that the yardwork situation is under control, I’ve been trying to move forward with project furniture. I want to get a good armchair for the living room to replace the awful recliner we have, and a new coffee table and end tables, plus a new sectional sofa for the family room, and maybe and entertainment center too. By the end of the year, if possible. We started thinking about this at the beginning of the pandemic, but it turns out to be a kinda complicated research project, and there’s always something else to do, and every time we find something we think we like, it turns our to backordered for months. Nevertheless, it’s getting to the point where our kids have nicer furniture than us. So it’s time to get moving.
As the weather has been getting nicer, Jeannie and I have been spending more time outdoors. We’ve gone for a couple hikes, mostly at local places like Saxon Woods. I’ve also been getting on my bike alot more, averaging about three times a week this spring, and my strength, speed and endurance are increasing. My typical ride is pretty short, less than an hour, but the neighborhood is kinda hilly. My main ride these days is a loop into downtown Bronxville, then thru Chester Heights and back home. Also went to the Nature Study Woods once, but mostly it’s been too muddy cuz of the rain.
I’ve gotten the Mustang out on the road a few times. Even had to put a tankful of gas in it yesterday. So far it’s been running great. I want to get new tires put on it this spring. The tires I have are the ones from when I bought the car in 1997!
In the software realm, I’ve been working on several thing. One of which is the Origami USA convention scheduling tool. If you recall, I’m on the OUSA convention and web committees, as the person who creates the schedule of classes and events, and the one who writes the software to make that task easier. The last few years we haven’t had any in-person conventions. Last year we had a zoom convention, and I did the schedule for that. Along the way, I discarded the existing scheduling tool, basically a bunch of macros for MS Access, and wrote a web application in Drupal/PHP that integrates with the main web site and other tools. This year I enhanced the functionality in a few ways. First, I created a workflow to reschedule a class without having to first unschedule it then schedule it again. Second I added the capacity to sort the classes by name, to make it easier to find them. On the roadmap is the ability to sort and filter by a number of parameters including the class name, the teacher name, the class type, level of complexity, number of periods, etc. But Drupal and PHP are a serious pain to work with, so I’ll save these enhancements for a future convention.
Meanwhile I have a little over a month to get some new models completed, get and exhibit together and decide what to teach. I have a big pile of half-finished models and an even bigger backlog of ideas. But for the zoom conventions don’t really inspire me and I haven’t been doing that much folding lately. Luckily, this year’s convention is live and in person, at the Sheraton Hotel in NYC, the third weekend in June (I think). Should be alot of fun to reconnect with my origami friends, and hopefully I’ll have a bunch of cool new models.
Been working hard at my new consulting gig at Consumer Reports R&D Lab. Hard to believe I’ve been there three months already. They’ve just extended my contract to the end of the year, which is good news. My group is involved in this thing called the Digital Rights Protocol, which is designed to make it easier for consumers to exercise their rights to opt out of online data collection, tracking, etc., and easier for companies to comply with requests around these rights. We lead a consortium of startups involved in the internet privacy business, and last week we had the first end-to-end test of the Protocol with partners in various roles. Meanwhile Consumer reports is involved in several business-oriented capacities as well, so I am building a reference implementation of the DRP to live in our application ecosystem and provide a touchstone to our partners. Anyway, the end-to-end test was a big success, and now we’re planning out the next phase of development.
Meanwhile at my other big client, The Global Jukebox, we’re getting ready to roll out a new release to Live. This one has a new backend and a cutover to a new server, to get rid of a bunch of old headaches. Everything is all tested and ready to roll. All that remains now is to switch over the DNS server.
Lastly, my music projects proceed apace. Mary came over and laid down the vocal track for My Ol’ Breakdown Truck a week or so ago, and it came out great. Afterwards we went out for Mexican food. Now I have three songs mostly done, with the vocals, bass and guitar tracked and mixed. All that remains is the fine-tune the drum parts, and add a little keyboards and sax to fill things out. Also, Elixr – 2022 Remaster is vary much almost done; all that remains is one final listening back.
Now that my Thursday band has a name and a gig, the music has been rising to the occasion and getting more intense. Today we had a rehearsal where we really drilled down on some of the finer points of some of our songs, to really master the arrangements and make them our own.
Meanwhile, I’ve noticed my Selmer Reference ’54 tenor sax, which I was so in love with, seems to have developed a leak somewhere, so the notes below low D don’t sound clearly and require alot of force to sound at all. Plus one of the mounting posts on the low C keyguard has come loose. So I need to find a new sax repair guy. The guy I’d been using for year – Virgil Scott – was up on Yonkers, only 10 minutes from my house. Sadly, he died of covid during the pandemic. My new guy is great, he’s out in Connecticut up new Massachusetts, almost two hour from here. So I need to find someone local.
For the time being I’ve switched back to playing my Selmer Mark VII, which I had worked on last summer. The low notes are clear and effortless, but best of all, I had the action set up, which it turns out makes a huge difference on tunes like Some Skunk Funk. I’d been struggling with playing that fast and cleanly on my other horn, and now the notes just roll right off. On the downside, I have to get used to this horn’s intonation again. And even worse, I’d been busting my ass to get good on the altissimo range on the tenor, and could get all the way up to the second high D, and play riffs up there. I was developing some real chops. On this horn, the embouchure required is completely different, so I’m back to square one.
I’m now in the middle of three studio recording projects. First on the stack is the next Buzzy Tonic album and the follow-up to Bluezebub. It’s working title is BZVR, and is more of a rock album, with all the songs so far including and electric guitar part. I had three songs mostly complete before I decided to make Bluezebub as an instrumental jazz record, so now I’ve dusted them off.
One is The Story Lies, written by my brother Martin, a cool uptempo funky number. Second is Who Speaks on Your Behalf, a prog-pop anthem by The Cheshire Cat from Buffalo back in the day, reinterpreted with a horn section. I had this one in the can, but when I listened back I decided it needed a heavier sound. So I added a guitar part, mostly big sustained power chords to give it some fill, or syncopated rhythm accents behind the riffs, which are handled by saxes and synths. Third was Why Not Zed? which already had a pretty heavy guitar, and a sort of metal-industrial vibe, but the sax sounded a bit thin. So I doubled the tenor part on bari and octave down and replaced the tenor solo with a bari solo. Just the thing!
That was back in late winter. Then I began work on the three new songs, all short, singer-songwriter style songs written on guitar. The first of these was Slope. It began life as a jazz song with my pre-pandemic group Haven Street, written by our bass player Jay, and appeared on our record. I wrote a lyric for it, but I’ve never been much of a fan of vocalese, unless it’s Ella Fitzgerald. So I changed it from a jazz style into a blues. The arrangement is fairly sparse, with just a single vocal, guitar, bass and drum. I’ll probably add a bit of fender rhodes and organ, and a bit of sax. Possibly also some real drums doing brushes on the snare, since I don’t have a good sample for that.
Second is My Ol’ Brokedown Truck. This is pretty much a traditional country song, although with different lyrics and chord voicings it might be something like a jazz standard from the great American songbook. I wrote it around Christmastime, when I was visiting my parents and my Mum asked me to explain Nashville notation. I did by way of demonstration and came up with the beginnings of this song. I like the chords and lyrics enough to finish it, and it came out quite good. I now have the basic track recorded, with guitar, bass drums and vocal. The vocal has a low and high harmony part, and decided it’d sound better with a female voice doing the high harmony. I asked my sister-in-law Mary, who has been in a number of singing groups over the years, if she’d like to the part. Now we’re trying to set up a time.
Third is All of the Above, which is a rock song with a uptempo fell, and lots of little changes in time signature, basically going from 4/4 to 6/4, but more easily expressed as 2/4 throughout. I have the guitar and bass tracked, and a basic drum part, and have been trying to find the time to lay down the vocals. But things have gotten busy …
I was listening back to my earlier Buzzy Tonic record Elixr for comparison. This was the last one before Bluezebub, and again more of a rock record with lyrics. It took me about eight years to write and record it. My friend Jay helped me mix and master it, and at the time it was a big step forward for me in terms of musical production. But my mixing chops have improved substantially over the last few years and there are a few things I don’t like about the sound of that record. So decided to remix and remaster it. And I must say I’m quite happy with the result. I don’t think I’ll get new CD’s printed up but I’ll probably replace the existing record on Spotify. I’m almost done; just tweaking the time between songs and a final listening back on different stereos.
But then along came an opportunity for a gig with my Thursday Jazz and Funk Group. The group has been getting more and more solid, and none of us has played out since before the pandemic, so we’re all pretty excited. A few weeks ago I bought a portable digital recorder and started recording our rehearsals. To give bar owners an idea of our sound, I put together a few some clips of songs from our last rehearsal. You can hear it at:
Spring continues to tease us with alternating spells of warm and sunny then cold and stormy weather. We got out in the yard again last weekend to turn over the flowerbeds and plant some seeds. Also, I initiated project dirt 2022. If you recall, my neighbor across the street had a big pile of dirt that was dug out from having a swimming pool put int. A year ago he encouraged me to take as much as I wanted. I ended up taking fifty or sixty wheelbarrows to fill in low spots in my yard, and grade the area around my newly expanded patio. This year he moved what’s left of the pile closer to the street and again asked me to help get rid of it. Now I’m just filling in a few remaining low spots, mainly in the front where there were once giant trees and the ground continues to settle years later as the stumps underground continue to decay. Also I did the front yard last last year, and was getting tired of the job toward the end. So far this time I’ve put down six wheelbarrows worth, and am maybe about half done. In the end It’ll probably be twelve to twenty loads total. Anyway, it’s good to spend some time out in the sunshine.
Clubs and concert venues are finally opening again after more than two years. We saw the first of a run of spring concerts last week. The Ed Palermo Big Band played the Iridium in NYC. They’re famous for doing big band arrangements of prog rock songs, particularly the music of Frank Zappa. Usually each show has a different theme, and that night they did a tribute to Gary Brooker featuring the music Procol Harum mingled with a bunch Beatles, Yes and of other prog psychedelia. The highlight was toward the end of the show, when the band did A Whiter Shade of Pale, and the horn section joined in on the organ solo toward the end, and just went round with it and built it up to be absolutely huge and soaring. I’m hoping they’ll do Thick as a Brick Sometime.
So last weekend we went skiing for the third weekend in a row, back up at Catamount in the Berkshires. We were able to catch up with our friends Seth and Cathy, whom we haven’t seen much since before the pandemic started. The conditions were good, and I’m getting more comfortable with my new skis every outing. And once again it was really cold.
Then we had a few warm and mild days, to the point where Saturday it was close to sixty degrees and full of sunshine, and most of the snow had melted. I took the Mustang out for a rare February ride, and after that got on my bike and cruised around the neighborhood. Then Saturday night it turned cold and snowy, and Sunday there was a fresh layer of snow over everything.
I recently read a biography of tenor sax legend Michael Brecker, who used to live one town over in Hastings, and passed away fifteen years ago. He was of course one of my biggest influences in the 80’s and 90’s, with his great big sound, killer chops and boundless imagination, depth and soul in his playing. Among many other things, Mike provided an example of how to apply John Coltrane’s ideas in a contemporary setting and in a rock and funk idiom and then go beyond. His first solo album from 1987 remains one of my all-time favorites. Unlike most biographies of famous musicians, this one gets pretty deep into his actual music, his approach to practicing, improvising and writing, and insights into how he achieved his monstrous technique and applied it in all kinds of different musical situations.
Meanwhile, in my home studio I’m in the middle of tracking three short, singer-songwriter style songs written on guitar. I’ve been be practicing to get my guitar chops up, and experimenting with sounds, phrasing, tone and effects. I think I have two of the three guitar parts in the can. I hope to have full arrangements sometime this spring.
And now that Bluezebub is finished, I’ve been bringing new material into my jazz group. I’ve been listening alot to jazz-adjacent jam bands like Snarky Puppy, Galactic, and Butcher Brown, and hoping to bring some of that kind of thing into our group. We’ve been experimenting with free-from open jams, which is promising and alot of fun, but not very efficient in terms of greeting material. One thing we did was to learn an old song of mine called (I Miss My) Baby in Bb, which has a sort of open funk jam in the beginning and end, framing a funky blues as the main part of the tune. Then Ken listened to Bluezebub, and told me really likes it and would like to play Sun of the Sun off that record. Like Baby in Bb, I wrote Son of the Sun for my 80’s fusion band Event Horizon. It’s a much more advanced song, largely in 5/8 and 7/8, with a long sinuous solo section in the middle.
So now we have this old-school fusion energy in the group. I guess to be fair it was there from the beginning, as one facet of our set is songs by The Brecker Brothers, Weather Report, Grover Washington Jr., and that kind of thing, as well as jazz interpretations of rock song by groups like Steely Dan, Joe Jackson and The Police. And a good chunk of it is pre-fusion modern jazz. About half the songs are originals, mostly of mine, but they come from songs I’ve written for my last few groups and have adapted to this group.
But now I’ve written my first song specifically for this group. It’s called Dr. Pluto, and is a loping funk jam with some Monk-inspired changes and rhythm motifs. The lead on the head is designed for Ken to play on the bass with this auto-wah pedal he’s been fooling around with. It sounds pretty cool and deservers a showcase. Meanwhile I can explore a sort of contrapuntal role on the sax, something I rarely get to do. The arrangement is kept loose on purpose, to give the band a chance to stretch out on it and let it evolve and go somewhere. I’ll bring it to rehearsal this week, and we’ll see how it goes.
I even got a batch of CD’s printed up, although at this point that’s mostly just for fun and promotional purposes.
It’s kinda pathetic the state of album distribution these days. Big tech is making harder for artist than ever. There are no record stores any more for physical media, not even online. CD Baby seems to have gotten out of that business. iTunes charges on 99 cents for a song, regardless of length. Even though there are only six songs, it’s a full length album and should be priced accordingly. But those basterds make the rules, not me. And Spotify pays virtually nil as well, unless millions of you turn on to it. Ah well, at least y’all can stream or it download it into your music library, and listen again and again. Hope these become some of your favorite songs.
