Category: Music

Sea of Tranquility

We’re now into week seven. Not too much going on. Or should I say everything that’s happening is happening slowly. Spring has been pretty cold and rainy so far. I mowed the lawn last week for the first time.

I’ve finished the style redesign on the Global Jukebox, and now I’m doing data work, updating the model for the cultures tree, and adding in 700 pop songs. We should be going live before too long.

In music land, I’ve been working my way thru Patterns for Jazz on the sax, I’m up to pattern 78 now, getting into flat thirds and fifths. I’ve also been working thru the Real Book, sight-reading every head and running down the changes, doing a few every day. If there’s a song that’s interesting I’ll take a few days and study it and try and memorize it. So far all the Charlie Parker songs have been interesting in that way. Right now I’m up to Blues for Alice, and the next few songs after that are Bluesette, Boplicty and Bright Size Life, so that’s a fun place to hang out for a while.

I ordered the Charlie Parker Omnibook in Bb. I studied the thru whole book back in high school, but in Eb on alto. I always thought playing Bird songs on tenor was kinda weird, cuz they don’t lay on the horn as well. They tend to wrap around the octave in funny ways and are often either too high or too low, since Bird made use of the full range of the horn. And his tunes are hard enough to begin with. But now I’m thinking it’s worth it to try and get some of his riffs in my bag.

On piano I’m also working my way thru the Real Book, but at a much slower pace, picking and choosing songs to work up as solo piano pieces. Mainly ballads, with alot of emphasis on voicings. I’ve finally gotten pretty good at Body and Soul, and I’ve been playing ‘Round Midnight for ages. Next tune I’m gonna woodshed is either My Romance by Rogers and Hart, or Naima by John Coltrane, or maybe both.

It also occurs to me I know literally hundreds and hundreds of rock and pop songs on piano and voice, and there’s many more I kinda know, but I rarely play more than a handful of them. So I’ve started putting together a notebook of all the charts so I can rotate them in and out of my practice and keep them fresh.

In the recording realm, I’ve finished my sax and synthesizer parts on The Story Lies and Who Speaks on Your Behalf (actually only WSoYB had synths), so now we’re up to the vocals, and then it’s just the mixdown. At the start of the year I was hoping these songs would be done by end of June. Together they’re about 10 minutes, which would put me on track for 20 minutes of produced music for the year. Now it’s looking like they’ll be done in early May, and with luck it’ll be more like 30 minutes of music this year. Woo-hoo!

In origami land, I’ve been continuing to work on my book. I settled on eight or maybe nine models, somewhere between 50 and 60 pages. I have six of the models done with new diagrams and layouts complete. The others are mostly done: the diagrams are finished and I have a draft of the layouts. That is, except for one model. The Martian appeared my previous kit book, and although it’s a great idea I was never really satisfied with the final design. So now I’m redoing that model without the constraint of having to keep it to an intermediate level with a low step count. Changing the body proportions, adding more detail to the head, everything. It’ll be substantially a new model in the end.

Don’t Get Around Much Anymore

Sometimes work can be fun. I recently completed an assignment for The Global Jukebox to put together a list of the greatest jazz singers of all time, along with representative songs to showcase their greatness. It’s been very enjoyable listening and curating the list, and I learned alot along the way. For example, Nina Simone used to live in my neighborhood.

Originally I had wanted to do the top ten or maybe twenty artists, but it was hard to stop. I extended it out to thirty, albeit with fewer songs as you get on down the line. The list features both old and newer singers, spanning the entire history of jazz. Some central to the genre, others maybe coming in from neighboring forms such as blues or pop, but nevertheless great contributors to the legacy of jazz as an art form, and particularly to the vocals. It also really gets across the variety oh jazz styles out there and how it’s evolved over time.

Even though list is definitive because I say it is, naturally that’s absurd. It’s necessarily pretty subjective. Of course Ella, Satchmo and Lady Day are 1-2-3. After that you can debate the relative ranking of the performers or maybe point out someone that I neglected to include. That’d be a fun debate. Regardless, all the performers and songs listed here are pretty great.

Here’s a link to the playlist on Spotify. Enjoy!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VZSjgb7157yUQ9KmrSvvd?si=S0mnQa89RGK3_Og5q0KVRg

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Greatest Jazz Singers of All Time for The Global Jukebox

1. Ella Fitzgerald – How High the Moon, I’m Beginning to See the Light (w/ Duke Ellington), My Romance, I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm, The Lady is a Tramp

2. Louis Armstrong – Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Jeepers Creepers, Cuban Pete, Hello Dolly, What Wonderful World

Bonus: Ella & Loius – Cheek to Cheek, Dream a Little Dream

3. Billie Holiday – Gimme a Pig Foot and a Bottle of Beer, Strange Fruit, Lover Man, Stars Fell on Alabama, God Bless the Child

4. Tony Bennett – (I Left My Heart) In San Francisco, Anything Goes (w/ Lady Gaga), There Will Never Be Another You (w/ DaBrubeck)

5. Sarah Vaughn – Black Coffee, Lullaby of Birdland, Body and Soul

6. Johnny Hartman – Lush Life (w/ John Coltrane), My One and Only Love (w/ John Coltrane), Our Love is Here to Stay

7. Frank Sinatra – Fly Me to the Moon (w/ Count Basie Orchestra), Summer Wind, Luck Be a Lady

8. Dee Dee Bridgewater – Afro Blue, St. James Infirmary (w/ New Orleans Jazz Orchestra), Love from the Sun (w/ Theo Croker)

9. Kurt Elling – Nature Boy, Matte Kudasai, Steppin’ Out

10. Esperanza Spalding – I Know You Know, Cuerpo Y Alma, Funk the Fear

11. Gregory Porter – Liquid Spirit, Holding On

12. Chet Baker – Do It the Hard Way, Everything Happens to Me

13. Nat King Cole – Unforgettable, Smile

14. Shirley Horn – A Foggy Day, Makin’ Whoopee

15. Mel Tormé – They Can’t Take That Away from Me, The Christmas Song

16. Etta Jones – Bye Bye Blackbird, Etta’s Blues

17. Joe Williams – Five O’Clock in the Morning, Don’t Get Around Much Anymore

18. Nina Simone – I Put a Spell on You, Mississippi Goddam

19. Bessie Smith – Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, Devil’s Gonna Git You

20. Ray Charles – Mess Around, America the Beautiful

21. Joni Mitchell – Goodbye Porkpie Hat

22. Billy Eckstine – Oo Bop Sh’bam

23. Dinah Washington – Destination Moon

24. Jazzmeia Horn – Out the Window

25. Patti Cathcart – I’ve Got Just About Everything (w/ Tuck Andress)

26. Dianna Krall – Peel Me a Grape

27. Bobby McFerrin – Thinkin’ About Your Body

28. Norah Jones – Don’t Know Why

29. Harry Connick Jr. – It Had to Be You

30. Etta James – At Last

Victory Hearts

In the home studio realm, I’ve been leveling up on electric guitar and learning alot.

My guitar is a semihollowbody, a Joe Pass edition Epiphone Emperor II which I picked up used, and is actually very nice guitar. Very playable, excellent feel and sound. It’s great great for a clean sound, and perhaps surprisingly, heavy rock too. It’s first electric guitar I’ve ever had that I really like playing, that feels natural to me. I’ve been practicing every day, getting it all together with control over my tone, effects, amp feedback, and which strings I strum, mute or let ring.

Now, every electric guitar player I know has a pedalboard. No two pedalboards are alike. Guitarists spend they’re whole lives tweaking it, taking it apart and putting back together, adding, removing and rearranging the pedals. It’s a personal quest for their true tone, the outer sonic expression of their inner self, much like saxophonists with their reeds and mouthpieces already.

Naturally once they’ve perfected this singular, super-advanced electronic system capable of such a vast range of tones, moods and sounds, they settle in to two or three presets for ninety-five percent of what they play.

I cut to the chase and use just one box, with three knobs and two buttons, but capable of producing all those sounds in a single pedal. I spent some time playing my Vox StompLab pedal thru my amp and trying out all the different sounds, looking for the one true preset, and narrowed it down to a handful of contenders.

I’ve mainly just been woodshedding one song so I can record it. It’s The Story Lies, originally written by Martin on the guitar. And although his setup is pretty different (he plays a 12-string), he’s been giving me guidance on how to craft my tone and improve my technique, at least as it applies to his songs.

My first attempt at recording I came out of the back of my giant Roland JC amp. The sound was awesome but the amp is super loud and super noisy. I couldn’t hear anything else when I was tracking, even if I used headphones. And the feedback which I wanted to capture turned out to be impossible to control. If you accidentally let the E string ring it just dominated everything.

So I took the amp out the equation and re-patched. I now have the guitar going DI into input 1 and thru the stompbox on input 2. Without the additional drive and chorus from the amp I dialed up the preamp in the stompbox to make it suitably nasty. This soon began to look like a reasonable approach.

It’s amazing just how much sustain the FX adds; t’s like playing an organ vs. a piano and really changes the way you approach the arrangement. I laid down a really good take of my part, only to discover that it clashed with the keyboard part in the verse, with both instruments competing too much for the same space. Which is ironic, since I changed around the guitar part to try and make it fit better, giving it more space and chakka-chakka. I came up with a new part that’s closer to Martin’s original part and it fits much better. I laid down a solid take tonight. One small victory, Woohoo!

…

Martin of course has lots of great songs, and I tend cover about one every album I make. It’s good to do other people’s songs from time to time cuz it makes you try out new ideas in recording, sound, instrumentation, arranging, themes, moods, everything really.

Meanwhile, he’s been busy with a recording project of his own, and he’s been exploring and branching out too. He recently mixed a number of songs he’s been working on the last couple years. Martin’s songs tend to be guitar-oriented rock featuring his overdriven tenor sax. Some songs are almost power pop, others lean towards prog and are challenging in surprising ways, and his lyrics are thoughtful and clever, sometimes fun and sometimes serious.

Since he’s been putting time and effort into his mixes, he’s leveled up at that, mainly by backing down the compression and reverb and riding the faders more. You can hear his latest collection of songs at:

https://soundcloud.com/user-746959159

When The World is Running Down You Make the Best of What’s Still Around

A couple weeks ago I got word that friend Mike K., who was the singer and guitar player way back in my first band in high school, had died. He was right around my age. I haven’t seen him in many years.

Then Friday my friend Gus died. Gus was the drummer in several of the bands I’ve been in, going back to when I got back into playing music eight or nine years ago. First was The Relix, and then Left Hook, which we formed when The Relix folded. Gus was in his early sixties. I last saw him about a year ago.

So I’ve been thinking about how bands come and go, and more generally, relationships and situations in life. Everyone is in it for their own reasons, and you never know when things will end, even if everything seems fine. Then you stop seeing people you were close to because everyone is always busy with their lives and goes their separate ways, and one day it’s too late.

Then Saturday Eric, the drummer for my jazz group, abruptly quit. Apparently he got a job playing with a big band in Manhattan, and it’s a better gig for him. The next day Rich, the piano player, decided he’s leaving the group too. Jay, the bass player, looked at the situation and declared it to be the end of an era.

This all caught me by surprise. I guess there were signs the group had plateaued, even as I’ve been focused on continuing to improve my own playing. I think Gary and I, as the two main songwriters, were still keen on honing our songs. I thought we had another album in the offing, indeed we had a bunch of great songs; it was just a matter of lining up the studio session. But those guys were beginning to loose interest. Ever since I got back from Spain it felt like one or the other was missing rehearsal, and several times we had to cancel.

It was a good run for sure. We had a quite a few great gigs and recorded an excellent album. When we started playing together, I brought in a few of my songs, and this inspired everyone else in the group to start writing too. We were together about three years, and we came out of a jazz circle that went back a few years before that, also to the time I started playing again. It was probably the best of group of musicians I ever played with, and I improved alot in that time. So it’s really too bad.

Now it’s back to square one, starting over. Sometime a new group emerges from an old one, sometime not. I’m asking around. And this while I’m trying to get a new rock band off the ground too. Ah well, we’ll see how it goes.

Living in the Limelight

The gig Friday night at the Bean Runner Cafe went great. Nice to have a venue where they know and like you. The group sounded relaxed and comfortable. We played ten of seventeen songs we had prepared, mainly because we stretched out the solo sections on a few tunes. We had a few more standards than usual, including Stolen Moments, Bye-Ya, Jordu, Ornithology and Four on Six. After who knows how many years, I played a solo on All the Things You Are that I was really satisfied with, relaxed and flowing, spontaneous and in the moment. We also did a good number or our originals, and I was happy with my perfromance on Lift Off, my tribute to John Coltrane, which is very difficult to play. I guess all my practicing has been paying off.

In the home studio realm, my two current songs, The Story Lies and Who Speaks on Your Behalf are coming along. I got the bass part for the first song done a week or two ago, and the second one is there except for one riff. The Stories Lies is a groove number and I gave it a fun, funky bass line. Once I started practicing, I really wanted to nail the whole track in one take, to capture all the dynamics over the course of the song and really focus on the phrasing. I got pretty close. I ended up with a very usable take, and did only minor editing. In one section I was rushing a little so I pulled everything back a fraction of beat. You can’t push a click track like you can a human drummer.

Meanwhile I have most of Who Speaks on Your Behalf tracked, but there’s a riff at the beginning and again in the middle of the tune, a twisty run of 16th notes that just kicks my ass at that tempo. At first I couldn’t play it all; now the challenge is to do it cleanly. I don’t know how other bass players do this kind of thing, but I laid out the fingering to take advantage of open strings, and used a few hammer-ons and pull offs rather than striking every note with the right hand.

I’m still trying to get the new rock band off the ground. I put out an ad for a guitarist who sings and writes, and this dude Joe answered. He sent me some demoes of his songs. Good stuff, I like his lyrics and the way he creates drama in his songs, and he can certainly sing and play, although he doesn’t really know jazz harmony. We got together for a rehearsal a couple weeks ago with Ken on bass and Steve on drums. We did a couple of my songs and a couple of Joe’s, and some plain ol’ jamming. The vibe was pretty good. Ken and Steve definitely grok my songs, although Joe was hearing them for the first time and didn’t really get the chords, and we were all learning Joe’s songs new.

Tonight Joe came over to my house and we got alot deeper into learning each other’s songs and talking about our influences and what we want out of a band. It seems like a good fit. He learned my song Ghost in the Machine pretty readily once I broke it down and explained the chords. We were supposed to get together with the full band later this week and I was feeling pretty psyched about it.

But then our bass player Ken had to bow out out temporarily. He’s the director of crisis communications for a major international bank and so his day job has been crazy the last few weeks because of the caronavirus epidemic, and it looks like things may well get worse before it gets better. Ah well.

Back at the Bean Runner – Haven Street Live Jazz

!!! Correction – the date is Friday February 28 !!!

What with all the recent travel and excitement, I almost forgot to mention there’s a gig coming up, just over a week away!

My jazz group Haven Street returns to The Bean Runner Cafe in Peekskill, Friday February 28 at 8 o’clock start time, $10 cover. This is one of our favorite places to play, and we always have a good time and get good crowd. Should be lots of fun, so come check it out!

Still in Motion

Lots going on these days. But somehow at the same time things seem to be moving slowly. That suits me fine these days. I’ve transitioned into a new day-to-day mode in the new year, working mainly from home as a consultant.

Right after the holidays Anna from the Global Jukebox asked me to help draw up a development roadmap for the next round of features. She has alot of things she wants to do and my plan was approved without hesitation. I had previously been doing the Jukebox as a side project, but now it’s my main thing. With luck it’ll keep on rolling and I can take on other consulting gigs here and there to round things out. I’d love to get back into doing more stuff with the arts, like a museum or cultural organization, or music software, or computational origami, or R&D, any of that kind of thing really. Just whatever looks fun. Meanwhile I have more time for music, origami and other worthwhile pursuits. Sure beats some banal VC backed blockchain bro startup

I’ve been establishing new patterns of time. I tend to alot of actual software development work at night, since it’s quiet and conducive to deep focus. That means I have a fair amount of unstructured time in the daytime. So I’m inventing a routine that works for me to keep things in balance and reduce the burden of figuring out what to do next all the time.

The first thing I did was to reboot my workout routine. I had been working out very early in the morning, usually rushing thru it to get out the door and on time to the office. In the wintertime that means before it gets light out. That’s a major drag. Now I’m working out in the mid to late morning and it feel so much better. I’ve been going up in weight, reps, and distance, and adding in more leg and core work, and taking more time. I feel much better overall. Winter is always the harshest season on my body and my health, but this year I’m doing pretty good so far, and the worst of it is probably over. The days are already getting longer. Spring is coming pretty soon.

Another thing I’ve been trying to do listen to more music, and by that I mean whole albums. For a little while I was shooting for an album a day, but that’s actually quite alot to absorb, so now I’m going for three new albums a week. Sometimes I like to listen to music when I work out, and sometimes I like it quiet. Then I’ll listen to a record first thing in the morning.

I tend to jump from genre to genre, spend a few weeks and move on. For a while it was 70’s smooth jazz (George Benson, Grover Washington Jr., that kind of thing). Before that it was 20th century modern like Holst and Aaron Copeland. Then I was listening to alot of old 70’s and 80’s heavy metal, because Michelle and I have been watching the anime Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, in which alot of the characters are names after classic hard rock and metal bands. I got really into Dio, Black Sabbath, Ozzy, Deep Purple and Rainbow (all interconnected), and most of all Iron Maiden, the best of that ilk. I was fan of all of that stuff back in the day, and it was fun to rediscover.

Most recently I’ve been trying to get thru the entire discography of Rush. But man, they have alot of albums. I started at Power Windows, since all the records before that I know really well. Power Windows, Hold Your Fire and Presto actually have 2 or 3 awesome songs each, and then a bunch sorta in the middle. That was their peak synth era, then Roll the Bones feels like they’re coming out of the woods, it’s maybe half great songs. All their records from that era are one or two songs too long.

I skipped ahead to Feedback, which is just great fun. Covers of The Yardbirds, Buffalo Springfield, The Who and Cream. Mr. Soul alone makes it worth it. Then I got to Counterparts. That album is pretty much wall-to-wall amazing. It’s the return to no synthesizers, so it’s petty metal sometimes, but also with prog and 90’s alternative. There’s alot in there. I can’t believe I never got into that album when it was new. The next album after that is Test for Echo, which has a similar tone and maybe half great songs. I’m in the middle of that one now.

I’ve been practicing sax and piano more. Generally I do this in the late afternoon, in lieu of an evening commute. I’m up to three times a week now for each, and at least one of those is a good long session with time to explore new or deep ideas. I’m trying to focus in and improve my actual playing at a technical level, phrasing, dynamics, all that.

I’m particularly trying to level up on sax these days. I’m continuing with Patterns for Jazz, going about ten times the rate it took me in high school (which ended up as two years). I’m doing about ten to twelve patterns a day, shifting ahead by 3 or 4 patterns every practice. These patterns are in all twelve keys (but only written out in C) and move around by different intervals: semitone, whole step, minor third and fourth, so you really get adept a moving thru different keys quickly. I’m also woodshedding more standards.

I think when I’m done on sax I’m gonna go thru the book on piano. For now on the piano I’m working on voicing and moving thru chords without playing melodies. Also learning some standards, and dusting off some of my originals, as it looks like the prog-funk originals project might be happening after all. I put an ad on Cragislist and got a hit, a guitarist who sings and writes. We’re trying to work out a time to get together. Hopefully more on that soon.

I’ve trying to devote more time to origami as well. However, this post is getting pretty long, so more on that next time.

Every Day I Write the Book

The jazz gig last weekend went quite nicely. We weren’t sure what to expect, never having played a library before. In fact I can’t remember the last time I played a gig in the daytime. But it was very cool. The space was great, with a high ceiling and good acoustics, set up with tables and chairs, and coffee and cake rather than the usual craft beer and whiskey.

The show was well attended, sixty people or more. I guess a big suburban library is a happening place on a Sunday afternoon in the wintertime. And I saw some familiar faces from some of our other gigs, so thank you all. Musically things went well, and the crowd dug us. After the show some members of the audience came up to and suggested libraries in other towns nearby where they’d like to see us play. Whuda thunk?

The day of the gig was an unusually warm for January, up in the 60’s; it reminded me of California. However the warm spell was not destined to last, and a couple days later it got solidly below freezing and stayed there. Today we get the first real snowfall of the winter.

This week’s jazz rehearsal had to be cancelled, so I’m putting some time into new recordings in the home studio. I’ve completed the piano part — the spine of the track — for both new tunes TSL and WSoYB, and I’m on to programming the drum parts.

On sax I’m working my thru the book Patterns for Jazz by Lenny Neihaus et al., which I last studied in high school. Getting command of all those figures at my fingertips is helping my improvisation immensely.

In other news, I got pretty close to getting a new rock group off the ground before the holidays. I answered an ad in Craigslist from a guitar player with originals looking for a keyboard player to collaborate with. He listed King Crimson and the Del Phonics among his influences, so I said yeah, my kind of weird. I went over to his house to jam and he also had a bass player, and he said he a drummer but the drummer couldn’t make it that night. He had a bunch of riffs and we jammed them out, seemed promising.

A few weeks went by trying to line up another session. Since he couldn’t get his rhythm section together I invited my friends Ken and Steve on bass drums. The idea was we’d do one of my originals and one of his, and spend the rest of the time jamming on new ideas. I dusted off one of my old songs “Ghost in the Machine”. It went over well and we had a fun time with it. Guitar dude declined to bring in one of his old songs, so we spent the rest of the time jamming on some riffs, got maybe halfway there.

I kinda get that. I have about an albums worth of half-written rock/pop songs, and I’d love to develop them in a group context like I do with my jazz songs in the jazz group. In fact at this point I’m kinda saving them for that situation. But bringing a song that’s already written and that you know works lets you focus on playing together and seeing how everyone responds to the sound and finds their place in a musical context. It’s a good way to get things off the ground and into flight.

So despite a fun rehearsal guitar dude bowed out, citing writer’s block. The good news is now Ken is really jazzed about doing an originals band, and he and Steve really groove as a rhythm section. Ken wants to get together and jam as a power trio while we look for a guitarist.

This to me is an interesting idea, but probably too much to sustain on my side as the lead singer and main writer. I can only think of two keyboard-oriented power trios in the history of rock. The first of course is Emerson Lake and Palmer. However I’m no Keith Emerson, and there will never be another. In any event Greg Lake was the singer, and wrote most of the lyrics and melodies, and played guitar as well as bass. A lesser known power trio from the 80’s was Gowen, featuring Larry Gowen on keyboards and vocals, and his brother on Chapman Stick. Great stuff, very underrated. Unfortunately Ken doesn’t play the stick, only the regular bass. I guess a third example is Rush in their peak synthesizer era, and indeed they’re one of my big influences, but Geddy was a bass player first and doubled on keyboards, kinda like John Paul Jones, and the whole band did lots of triggering of samples to make the sound happen live.

For me the model is more Donald Fagen or Billy Joel, Gregg Allman, Stevie Wonder or Paul McCartney. A keyboard player who sings. Having a guitar to round out the group, fill in the rhythm, take solos, and play parts in other sections is critical. And someone who can sing harmonies! In fact my ideal band would be more of a co-lead situation like Pink Floyd, Supertramp, They Might Be Giants, Claypool Lennon Delirium or the Cheshire Cat.

So if you play guitar and sing and are into originals, drop me a line!

Meanwhile back in jazzland here’s a couple clips from the library gig. Don’t let the old people in audience fool you with their lack of perceptible motion, they were digging it. Enjoy!

Ms. Jones . Mobility

Jazz at the Library

Well the new year is off to a mild and mellow start after a very busy holiday season. I’m a little late in making this announcement, since it’s less than a week away, but here you go, our first gig of the new year.

Haven Street Jazz plays Hendrick Hudson Free Library
Sunday January 12, 2pm
185 Kings Ferry Rd, Montrose, New York 10548

We’ve been having fun learning a bunch of standards for this gig, to mix in with our originals and expand our repertoire. New songs include A Foggy Day, All of Me, Have You Met Ms. Jones?, Stolen Moments, Sugar and more. Hope to see you there.

Feelin’ Alright

Well the season of darkness and cold is closing in upon us. The end of the year, the end of the decade. Lots of changes are happening, and more coming soon. I’ve been trying finish off a bunch of old things, and move forward with a some new things. Rolling with the changes, the dude abides.

One nice thing is that the gang all got together Thanksgiving weekend to play D&D. This time Michelle is DM’ing, and wrote an original dungeon for us to play, in which a local prince was kidnapped by a gang of orcs and ogres and the party went off to rescue him in some caves in the hills. It was definitely a success and we all had alot of fun, and the plan is to play again over Christmas break.

About half the party continued with the characters from my campaign and the rest created new ones. Lou and Valerie are still a pair of Dwarves, one a fighter and on a Paladin, both lawful good, so that makes for lots of melee might and some interesting roleplay. Katie is now kleptomaniac Hobbit Druid, and Phil is some kind of Gnome prankster, while Addie is a demo-ogre Barbarian, lots mayhem and fun. Michelle had a really cool cleric, an acolyte of Thor, who even had a magic hammer, and another, a halfling thief, who converted to Posidenism so she could wield a magic trident.

I thought of taking over one of these, but instead I brought back one of my previous characters, Hiro, a half-Elf Sorcerer/Monk. The idea with this combination was that he’d be a potent innate spellcaster, while his monk training would let him attack with a staff and open-handed strikes: a formidable fighter without needed swords or armor, which hinder the use of magic. In our old campaign he was a very high-level character, but I had to wind him all the way back to 6th level. This makes him third level in each of his classes. Not powerful enough for massive fists-of-fury kung fu attacks, nor advanced enough for third level spells like Fireball and Lightning Bolt. And Michelle would not allow me to bring in a really powerful staff from my previous campaign, so he didn’t have much in the way of magic weapons. In fact he’s not at all a badass, and after a couple encounters that consisted of getting seriously wounded and running away, I had to figure out a new way to play the character. It turned out my best option alot the time was throwing stars!

…

As far as the recording project goes, I must admit I’ve been hung up on getting together the cover art for the release of Sun of the Son. I did in fact find an old cassette of the original version, but the art is a halftone screen print an well nigh unusable. So now I’m just meditating on the question of what direction to take, waiting for an image to suggest itself. Maybe I could use some photos of some origami dragons or something.

Nevertheless I’m going ahead starting in on some new recordings. I’m have a set of half-developed originals I’m gonna save to see if I can develop them with the new group, if it gets off the ground. I have a set of players who are all into the idea of doing an originals project. Now it’s a matter of finding a day when everyone can get together.

So for now I’m circling back to do a couple covers from my past, both dating from around the same time as Sun.

One is the Story Lies, one of my favorite songs written by Martin. He’s done a couple versions of it, one with sax and one without. Mine is gonna take the sax version even further and make it funkier and clavinet-oriented. For now I’ve just been studying the song, learning the correct chords and form, and to sing and play it at the same time without having to think about it. They chord changes are really frickin’ cool I must say, with a rather killer-sounding unusual modulation as the backbone of the song. I’m thinking of figuring out the guitar part, just so I can have some of that heavy crunchiness. At Martin’s writing used alot of patterns that he’d shift around the fretboard in clever ways, while taking advantage of open strings. He might have even showed me once. Plus I’ll get a chance to use my new stomp box.

The other song is Who Speaks on Your Behalf by The Cheshire Cat, a great band out of Buffalo from back in the day. This one is a fairly complicated prog-pop number with heavy synthesizer riffs, and bombastic drumming by Ryan Boyle. I’ll probably change around the instrumentation to be closer to my current favored palette while keeping in mind the spirit of the original. Again I’m at the point where I’m learning to sing and play it. This one is a little more work.

In other news, the jazz group Haven Street has a gig coming up at Hayfields Cafe in North Salem on Fri Dec 20 at 7pm. Sort of a dinner gig. So in addition to our usual set of mostly originals sprinkled with a few covers, we’ve worked up a bunch of Christmas songs. This has been tons of fun, taking songs that everyone knows and making them our own by changing the groove and the harmonies. Probably my favorite is We Three Kings, done sort of in the style of John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things.