Category: Music

Be of Good Cheer

Well this is my last week of work before a well-deserved break for the holidays.  I’m trying to lean in to the spirit of the season this year, even though we haven’t gotten any snow down here.  The most snow I’ve seen was at the Bills game a couple weeks back.  Tons of fun.

We put up our tree a week ago, and started listening to lots of Christmas music.  I’ve discovered all the great jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald have Christmas music that’s much better than your typical pop radio fare.  I guess the big problem with Christmas music is there’s only 50 or maybe 100 songs, so it gets repetitive fast.  We watched the movie Elf, as well as The Hogfather, neither of which I’d seen before, but were recommend by Kathleen and her kids.  Both fun and charming in completely opposite ways.

I should mention the Origami USA holiday tree at the American Museum of Natural History, since I contributed some Flying Fish models to it this year. Go check it out if you haven’t yet! https://origamiusa.org/holidaytree/2024

I also saw not one but two rock shows in Brooklyn over the last week, at a venue call the Kings Theatre, which I’d never been to before.  It’s a big, beautiful, ornate, overwrought art-deco kind of place, similar to the Beacon in Manhattan.  I guess it’s been completely restored recently and now they’re having cool acts play there.  Predictably, drinks are way overpriced.

The first show was Beat, a King Crimson isotope featuring Adrian Belew and Tony Levin from the original lineup, along with Danny Carey from Tool on drums, and Steve Vai on guitar.  They did 80’s Discipline-era Crimso, and in fact played most of the three classic albums that Belew and Levin made with Bill Bruford and Robert Fripp.  The show was most excellent.  The band was tight and energetic and really delivered new interpretations of the material.  Probably the most interesting thing was how Steve Vai, legendary guitar shredder that he is, sort of pointed up the amazing complexity and difficulty of Fripp’s original parts.  Vai covered some parts exactly, and interpreted others; he did alot of stuff tapping that Fripp originally did picking, and skipped some of Fripp’s parts entirely, such as the intro/bridge to Frame by Frame.  On the other hand, Vai was able to impart a bit of a slinky greazy bluesy feel to Fripp’s very mechanical-sounding parts, and that lifted everything.  His solo on Sheltering Sky was one of the high points of the night.

Less than a week later we were back to see Brooklyn’s own They Might Be Giants.  Their music is also pretty complicated, but the vibe is complete opposite, being wacky humor rather than wacky seriousness.  Needless to say the show was alot fun, with a horn section and lots of moments showcasing all the players.  I realized the song Particle Man perfectly describes the graphic novel Watchmen, whether by coincidence or by design.  Dr. Manhattan is Particle Man, Ozymandias is Triangle Man, and Rorschach is Person Man.  Small world, go figure.

Next up: D&D

Autumn Leaves

We had a very nice Thanksgiving weekend.  I was ready for some downtime, since it had been a pretty busy couple of weeks.  The week before I hit a major milestone for my project at work, so now life got a bit easier just in time for the holiday season.

Biking season is over now because it’s too cold and too dark, but I did manage to get a few rides in the first few weeks of November.  Looking forward to starting again next spring.  Meanwhile we have ice skating and skiing to look forward too, and I’ve switched back to the Nordic Track on what used to be biking days.  On the plus side, I can listen to tunes while I do that.  Meanwhile, my shoulder has been hurting off and on the last few months, no doubt from using the computer too much.  So I’ve been going up and down on the amount of weight I’ve been using on weightlifting days.  This is the time of year when I usually start to feel generally tired and achy and low energy anyway, and I often go down in weight for the winter and back up again in the springtime.  In any event, I seem to have stabilized at a level that’s close to my nominal maximum for everything but bench press, which is about 20 lbs. less.  If I continue to feel okay, I’ll probably go up in a week or two.

November is the time of year for raking leaves, and we’ve been out and at it every weekend since we got home from our trip out west.  Most of the leaves are down now, and this last time we filled up only two cans, compared with 6 or seven cans and bags a couple weeks ago when it was peaking.  We also put up fresh new holiday lights outside.  I like to keep them up over the winter, and last year I just never got around to taking them down, but they all burned out over time. 

Lots of people in our neighborhood go in for big Hallowe’en and Christmas displays on their lawns.  Some of them even do Thanksgiving, but compared the other holidays the choice of imagery is kind of thin.  Pretty much you can have an inflatable turkey, and that’s about it.  If I ever do a lawn display, I want something that will last the whole season.  Start with a scary dragon, then give him a pilgrim hat, then a Santa hat.  Something like that.

Michelle came home from school to visit for a whole week.  The weekend before Thanksgiving we went up to Albany to visit Kathleen and the kids.  Now Michelle and I are planning a D&D campaign with them as a fun way to get more regular face time with everyone.  More on that as it develops.  Michelle spent Monday and Tuesday baking up a storm – cookies, sós kifli, more cookies. 

On Thanksgiving day we had a whole lot of family over: Mary’s family, Denis’s too, and Jeannie’s parents.  She made a turkey and all the things – stuffing, potatoes, gravy, and our guests brought lasagna, sweet potatoes, Brussel sprouts, pie, lots of great stuff, and a really good time.  Good to be around family. 

The next day, which in our house we’ve dubbed Slack Friday, we normally stay home and strive to nothing at all.  This year, however we went out to Long Island to visit Mary, since Denis was in town, as well as her cousin Carla.  After that we went over to visit Nick and Lisa, who live just ten minutes away.  The motivating excuse was to sync up with Nick on his progress on the Global Jukebox, but we ended up staying and enjoying Nick’s homemade bread and talking well into the night.

As for Nick’s progress on the Global Jukebox, that’s coming along nicely.  He’s been ramping up and doing his first major chunk of feature work, so we had a code review and I was able to explain to him a bunch of things he wasn’t ready for before, but now that he’s in the problem space he can grok.  He’ll make a good partner going forward.

Saturday was the Spacecats gig up at the Green Growler.  It went amazingly well and was alot of fun.  Thanksgiving weekend is a bit of a wildcard for playing in bars.  Sometimes it’s dead because everyone is out of town or doing family things.  Other times is packed because people are home visiting family and also want to go out and see their friends.  This night the place was really packed, the most crowded I’d ever seen the place because it turned out thee was a group having an informal ten-year high school reunion.  And everyone seemed to really dig the music.  They’d come in, notice the band and start bobbing their heads or doing a little dance.  We also had a good number of family and friends of the band, including a couple of the guys from my Wednesday group.

We did combination of straight-ahead jazz and more rock-funk oriented stuff, including eight songs off our record Los Gatos Del Cosmos, and a new song by Josh called Getaway Car.  We also had our drummer’s wife Robyn sitting in on vocals.  She’s sort of a theatre and show tunes type singer, but can do some standards and pop stuff.  She’s really good.  So we had her sit on on three songs each set, plus accompany the sax on the melody of Kamasi Washington’s Street Fighter Mas.  Having a singer provided a different kind of energy that helped the overall package I’d say.  We’ll probably ask her to sit in again.

The only downside is we were supposed didn’t have quite enough material to cover three hours.  We ended up spending more time rehearsing with Robyn than I’d planned because we wanted her songs to sound good.  We tried a good bunch of songs with her before we settled on the ones we chose, and there was just some getting to know one another musically and work out the arrangements.  A few of her songs had rubato beginnings and endings and we had to get a feel for how to do that together as a group.  This meant there were a few other new things that weren’t adequately rehearsed that we decided to skip.  Ah well. We ended up closing the second set with an extended jam of John Coltrane’s Mr. P.C., which went over great, and did a short third set that included a couple repeats from the beginning of the night.  No one in the audience seemed to mind, and the bar invited us back for another gig.

Sunday we finally had a day to sit at home and relax.  The Bills game was on TV.  The week before they defeated our arch-rivals the Kansas City Chiefs, which was great to see.   This week they played the Forty-Niners, and it was a lake-effect snowstorm the whole game.  Buffalo showed their cold weather prowess and won handily while SF totally fell apart, and the Bills clinched the AFC East championship.  Woo-hoo!

Spacecats Live at the Green Growler November 30

My group Spacecats is going to be making a rare and much-anticipated live appearance at The Green Growler in Croton, NY on Saturday, November 30 from 7 to 10 pm.  The group features John Szinger on saxophone, Josh Deutchman on piano and synthesizer, Ken Matthews on Bass and Rick Arecco on drums, with special guest Robyn Ferracane on vocals.  We play a blend jazz and funk, originals, standards, and pop songs with our own unique twist.  Come out and enjoy!

Spacecats – Jazz and Funk
Saturday, November 30, 7 to 10 pm
at
The Green Growler
4 Croton Point Ave., Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520

Plutonium Dirigible is Live!!!

Here it is at long last, Plutonium Dirigible, the new album by Buzzy Tonic, available on all your favorite streaming services. Buzzy Tonic is my home studio project, and the new record features nine new original tunes.

This record is dedicated to my brother Martin, who started Buzzy Tonic with me years ago, contributed a song to the record, and will always be a part of the creative spirit of the project.

Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/album/5zyYCVFrVi6U4BYPKD8PDW

Apple Music:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/plutonium-dirigible/1777655404

Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLLMJ657

For more info, check out the album’s web page at:
https://zingman.com/music/plutoniumdirigible.php

Enjoy!

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.

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