Category: Music

Haven Street in Brooklyn

Here’s announcing my jazz group Haven Street will be playing at Shapeshifters Lab in Brooklyn, Friday October 26 at 7 pm. Should be a good show, featuring half originals of our debut record, half new stuff, and maybe a standard or two.

Spoiler alert: I’ve been getting deep into All the Things You Are. It was Gary’s idea to do an original arrangement. It’s a song I’ve played a million times, but recently I realized I was just kind of riding my way along the changes without having much to say, so I decided to really learn it. With a song like that the melody and the harmonies are so strong it’s kinda hard to go a fresh new way when you solo, but the material is so rich it’s really worth it to explore. I found a really cool version by Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan that I’m kind of using to influence my approach.

Also I should mention that Eric Puente is now our full time drummer. He brings a great energy and swing to the group, and it’s great having him on board.

What Keeps the Planet Spinning

Been busy. A week ago we went upstate to visit my parents, and also Lizzy at college. It was a fun trip, and Lizzy is doing well and having a good semester. While we were up there we took a trip to my uncle Ron in Welland and celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving along with that side of the family, including my cousin Tom, whom I haven’t seen in years.

We all caught Lizzy’s cold on the trip and been trying to shake it off ever since. Meanwhile back home Gina caught cold too, so we had to cancel our gig last weekend. We also had to kick out our guitarist, so now we’re looking for a new guitar player again. We don’t have any gigs for about six weeks, then it’s a run of four gigs in a row in late November thru mid December. Hopefully we’ll find someone.

The weather is turning cooler and it’s dark in the morning when we get up and in the evening by suppertime. We finally took out the air conditioners and had to start running the heat in the morning. And there’s been a ton or rain. At least Sunday was nice and clear. I took the Mustang out and Jeannie and went for a hike, first up around Kensico Dam and then a woods nearby called Cranberry Preserve, which has a stone quarry that looks to be where they got the stones to make the dam.

OrigamMIT is fast approaching. I’ve been diagramming my new Blimp, which I’m going to teach there and contribute to their collection, and is going to go in a future book.

The Debut of G! Force

Last Saturday night was the debut of my new rock pop dance party band, G! Force. It was a fun and successful night. The venue was Victor’s of Hawthorne. I’d played there a couple times before, but never got a huge crowd (once was a snowstorm, the other the day before Thanksgiving). But this night the place was packed. The music went over well, and the band was reasonably together, considering we learned 40 tunes in about six weeks. The bar even invited us back for another gig in November.

We played two long sets, about an hour and a half each. We do a mix of tunes from the 80s up to the present, with a few reaching back to the 60’s and 70’s. To give you an idea, the first few sung by Gina were Exes and Ohs by Elle King, Mercy by Duffy, Domino by Jessie J, Valerie by Amy Winehouse, and No Roots by Alice Merton. Gina has a powerful voice and pulls off that kind of stuff of really well. She also sang lead on a number of rock numbers like Any Way You Want It, Working for the Weekend, and Hit Me With Your Best Shot, as well as some disco tunes like I Will Survive, Boogie Oogie, and Hot Stuff. I sang lead on a bunch of numbers including You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want) by Joe Jackson, I Want a New Drug, Cheap Sunglasses, Drops of Jupiter, Closing Time, Vehicle, and I Just Want to Celebrate. I’ve really been working on my singing and it’s definitely been been improving. Some of the best songs we do are duets: Stop Dragging My Heart Around, Get Lucky by Daft Punk, and Tub Thumping by Chumbawumba.

There were a handful of good sax tunes in there as well. And unlike in previous bands, I’m playing a bunch of synthesizer sounds in addition to the usual piano and organ. It’s fun and a throwback to the 80’s when these songs were new. Right now I’m just calling up various presets but I’d like to put some time into crafting the sounds on some of the tunes.

Gina of course is polished and professional, has a fantastic voice and uses it well. Ken on bass is awesome, especially on the funk and disco numbers. He even had a few solos. Andy on drums is not the steadiest drummer I ever played with, but his playing earnest and powerful. Walter on guitar is versatile and can pull of all the parts in a variety of styles, and had some really good solos. He was the last to join and got it together very quickly. He seems most at home with the hard rock numbers. Unfortunately he tends to turn up his amplifier too loud, and he and Gina don’t seem to get along very well. Ah well, we’ll see how everything plays out.

Now that we have the basics together we’re gonna work on refining things and getting tight. Our next show is in two weeks. After that we have a few weeks to maybe learn a few more songs, then a run of shows from mid November thru mid December.

Come check us our at:

Barney McNabbs on Tuckahoe Rd in Yonkers, Saturday October 13.

G! Force Live

Here’s announcing my new rock band G! Force will be playing our debut gig Saturday September 29 and Victor’s in Hawthorne NY, starting at 9:00. Wow that’s only two weeks away!

We do a combination of rock, pop and dance music. Unlike my last band we’re doing alot of newer stuff, from the 90’s and the 21st century as well as from the 80’s and earlier. It’s a really good group, versatile and solid, and things came together pretty quickly. The lineup is Gina Gee on lead vocals, Walter O on guitar, the inimitable Ken on bass, and Andy on drums, with yours truly on vocals, piano and sax. I’ve never been in a group with a female lead singer before, and it opens up a whole new set of material we can do. I’m singing lead on about 14 out of 40 songs, plus there are few more that are essentially duets, which are probably the most fun.

Hope to see you at the show!

Also here’s a link to our facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/G-Force-585865498482960/

It has few videos from a recent rehearsal, and a really sharp-looking logo. I’ll be making a proper web page for the group as soon as I get around to it.

We have more shows coming up, so look to this space for future announcement. So does my jazz group Haven Street. Between the two have six shows confirmed between now and the end of the year!

Don’t Ask Me Why

Well we’re getting into the home stretch of summer. Lizzy is back to school; Michelle has one more week of vacation. Things have been pretty mellow and relaxing, but at the same time really busy.

One thing we wanted to do this summer was go camping. We didn’t get a chance to go last summer at all, and the summer before it was just one quick trip. Now the kids are older and the other families we used go with, well their kids are older too. So this time it was just me and Jeannie, like when were in California. We were up in the Catskills, so Martin and his kids came by for the afternoon. And we did get to build a fire and go walking in the moonlight and do a little hiking and commune with nature and have a nice trip thru the countryside. Well hopefully we’ll have a chance to do more of it next summer.

Our streak continues — six out of the last six bands we’ve seen have had a trombone player. We saw Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden last week, his hundred and first show there. Lizzy was originally supposed to come, be Jeannie’s sister Mary came instead. It was a good time. I worked in the city that day and we all met up for dinner. The show itself was great. We him recently, or at least it feels like it; it was four and a half years ago. So it was basically the same band and the same show. The band of course is excellent, nine players including horns, percussion, multiple guitars, a second keyboardist, faithfully reproducing all the sounds on all the records, and jamming it out and bringing it alive. And Billy Joel has become a much better singer since the days when he was making records. In the first half of the set he tends to mix it up and play alot of his deep cuts that I’ve never heard live before, and sliding into a batting order of hit after hit by the end. Billy is also a monster pianist, but because the songs are so tight most of his virtuosity comes out in random snatches of improvisation between songs, where he’ll suddenly riff on some Art Tatum or Rachmaninov.

Work has been busy. We’re preparing for a major release and it’s all bug fixes and chaos. I guess it’s not as bad as it was this time last year. And you know, at least I’m healthy. We’re also really active with the Jukebox these days, preparing for a major release with alot of new feature work and far less chaos.

The jazz group Haven Street has a few gigs coming up, including one in Brooklyn in October. We’re also starting to plan out or next album and recording date. Everyone is going to be missing a rehearsal or two the next couple weeks but we’ll hitting it in September.

And the big new thing is my new rock band G! Force. We’ve been rehearsing for a couple months and have thirty songs down. Our first gig is in September and we have several more after that. More on the group, the lineup and the setlist in a future post. But for now I’ll tell you it’s a fun and very exciting project, and it’s sounding great, and it’s going to be a busy fall for music

Heavy Skies

Last Friday my jazz group Haven Street had a gig at Hayfields in North Salem, NY. It was a cool place and a fun time. Hayfields is out in the woods past Katonah, and it’s a sort of cafe restaurant with wine and beer and yummy food fresh farmer’s market fare. They treated us really nice.

The band set up in an enclosed porch area with roll-down plastic screens in case there’s a change in the weather. Which was a good thing, because right at the start of the second song the sky opened up and it started pouring down rain. A few songs later I announced the next song was called Heavy Skies. Just then a huge gust of wind came up, knocking everything over in the outside area just beyond us and causing a general panic. We had to stop the song and start over. The rain continued off and on the rest of the night.

All in all it was a good show. The crowd wasn’t huge because of the storms, but a good number of people turned out and enjoyed the music. We played most of the music of our record, plus four new originals: A Fat Cat, Fever Dream, Lift Off, and Closing the Distance, as well as a handful of covers and standards. The group’s sound and playing and solos were all right on, a couple minor glitches in the new tunes aside. The Hayfields said we sounded great. I hope we get to go back.

On the way home the weather turned stormy again. At one point it looked like we had just missed a tornado touching down. There was debris swirling in the air everywhere. At another point it the roads were starting to flood and I drove thru some pretty deep water.

We were supposed to go camping the next day, but we had to cancel cuz of the weather. In fact we were supposed to go the week before but that got rained out too. So we replanned again for next weekend. On Sunday the weather finally broke and it went from weeks of being in the 90’s down to the 70’s. In lieu of camping Jeannie and I decided to go for a hike.

We picked Anthony’s Nose, a trail near the Bear Mountain Bridge. It’s only about three miles there and back but the first half is very steep, about 700 feet vertical, and very rocky. The view from the top looks down on the bridge, and across the river at Bear Mountain and Harriman Park, and the whole vista of that part of the Hudson Valley. You can even see the new Tappen Zee bridge far to the south. We did the hike in about two hours and afterward stopped by a scenic overlook to check out the eagles flying around. It was as great hike and we felt invigorated afterward, and now we want to do a few more hikes this summer and fall.

As the summer draws to a close we’ve been trying to maximize our weekends. It turns out Sunday morning is a good time for some good outdoor time. A couple weeks ago we went to the beach and swan in the ocean, and the week after that we went to a BBQ brunch out on Long Island for our friend Antonio who is moving to Florida for college.

This morning Lizzy drove off for her second year at college and now she’s on her way upstate. It was great having her home for the summer, but wow it went by fast. We’ll miss her but we wish her well.

Haven Street Live

Here’s announcing that my jazz band, Haven Street, is playing live:

Hayfields Market
North Salem, New York
Friday August 17 6:30 PM

This is our fist time playing at Hayfields, really looking forward to it. It looks like the place is a farmers market with a cafe offering food and wine where the group is set up. Cozy local vibe. Looks like fun. We’ll be playing two sets, so we’ve prepared a bunch of new material. Find out more at:

http://hayfieldsmarket.com/events/winter-live-music-nights/

This is the first of several upcoming gigs for my jazz band and mew rock band this summer into early fall, so watch this space for future updates.

Buzzy Tonic – Elixr

https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/buzzytonic5

Announcing the release of the long-awaited third Buzzy Tonic record, Elixr. This is my solo home studio project, focused mainly on original compositions. I started this record a long time ago, and midway thru I got into playing in live bands again, so there were lots of other things going on musically to keep me busy. But I kept circling back and and I’m glad I did. I must say I’m happy with the result. The mixing, and in particular the vocals, sound better than my previous works. I guess it took me this long to learn how to really mix a record. Now I want to go back and remix the previous Buzzy Tonic record, Face the Heat, before I start in on Buzzy Tonic IV.

Right now you can preview the record, order the CD or download the mp3s at CDBaby. Soon it will be available on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, all the usual suspects. Also coming soon: I need to update some pages on my web site. Look that for that in the near future.

Enjoy!

Cruisin’ Part I

Five of the last five bands I’ve seen live have had a trombone player. The latest group was Panic! at the Disco at Nassau Colosseum. I’ve never seen them before but have been a fan for a while. It worked out well cuz my daughter wanted to go see them with her cousins, so I went with my sister-in-law. Modern pop music has been getting back into my head for a while now, driven mainly by the fact that my kids are now old enough to have interesting taste in music and are turning me on to new bands. From the first time I heard them a few years ago P!atD stood apart due their over-the-top manic sensibilities and Brendan Urie’s incredible talent as a singer and a showman.

The show did not disappoint. In addition to the core band of guitar, bass and drums, he had a string section and a horn section, for a total of ten musicians on stage. Plus alot of tracks were piped in so the mix sounded very much like the record. Man, Brendon has a incredible range! Alot of his songs start off comfortable for me and go way to high! Like Freddy Mercury he mostly just sings but likes to sit down at a piano sometimes. The highlight of the show for me was Brendon actually had a grand piano on a flying saucer and rode from high above the mixing board station back to the stage. The rig give Keith Emerson’s famous upside-down rotating piano a run for it’s money. The other highlight was toward the end of the show P!atD played Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. It sounded pretty much completely live, although I’ll be they piped in some reinforcement on the vocal harmonies.

The next day we all went on cruise to the Caribbean, all the siblings and nieces on Jeannie’s side of the family, and of course Jeannie’s parents. I’d been on a cruise once before (not to the Caribbean) and found being trapped on a boat with basically nothing to do not very much fun. Unlimited food and drink gets boring by the second day or so, and there’s usually little to no access to musical instruments or that kind of thing, not to mention the tiny cabins and low ceilings. So this time I planned ahead. I started a D&D campaign.

Playing Dungeons and Dragons was actually Michelle’s idea. We had a family D&D campaign a few years ago but the two of us were the only ones really interested, so it kinda petered out. Michelle recently got the 5th edition rules and has been trying to get an adventure going with her friends from school. Then she told me her cousin Abby wanted to play. Then Abby’s sisters and brother wanted in too, and their dad Lou. Lou and I were in a party together back in the early ’90’s. Apparently they all watched Stranger Things and now D&D is popular among high school kids. Who knew?

So suddenly there was a party of six players, with me as DM. Of the group, Michelle, Lou and I were experienced players. I read up on the 5th edition rules and picked a module. The module was one of mine from when I was in high school: The Isle of Dread. This was so old it was written under the “Advanced” rules. But it fit thematically because the adventure was about traveling to a faraway island. We rolled up characters the weekend before. The party consists of a human Cleric (Michelle) whose god is Thor, a halfling Rouge (Abby), and Elvish Wizard (Phil), an Elvish Druid (Val), a human Ranger (Katie), and a Dwarven fighter Carmine the Invincible (Lou).

Another things I did to make the voyage tolerable was to go to the gym in the mornings. The boat actually had a pretty nice gym, including free weights and a bench press set up with a rack so the weights wouldn’t fall all over the place in storm. I must say lifting weights on rocking boat provided and extra level of challenge. Also I watched the last half of Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood with Michelle in the evenings. Totally mind blowing. Who would’ve guessed that Selim was a humonculus?

Anyway, I honestly had no idea how the D&D would go but I did what I could and hoped for the best. It turned out great. Our first session was on the first whole day at sea. And we basically played the whole afternoon. Everyone was into it, and eager to get into character and learn the riles and play and have fun. We were in a big lounge in the stern of the ship with view of the ocean on three sides, in a cluster of chairs and couches, coffee tables and end table.

The campaign started with the characters meeting for the first time at a tavern in some medieval seaport, listening to an old pirate tell a tall tail of treasure and danger on some haunted island far away in the sea, in order to recruit a crew of adventurers. The party escaped the tavern as a brawl erupted, found a ship and set sail. They reached the island and met the natives of a local village, then trekked off into the jungle in search of the lost temple. Soon enough they had their first encounter with a phalanx of undead skeletons. Then the real excitement began…