Category: Music

Jazz Demos — Dark Skies

Here’s a new song of mine:


Work on the last couple tracks for the third Buzzy Tonic record, Elixr continues apace, with the epic and angular Plague of Frogs, the new and funky Leave the City Behind, and the poignant Ballad of Galadriel in the offing. But meanwhile I’ve taken on another recording project, albeit of a much lighter nature.

My Saturday jazz group, the Haven Street Quintet, is advanced enough that I figure it’s worth trying to do some originals. It’s kind of amazing to me how few musicians actually write, but to me it’s always been part of the deal, even if only aspiratiionally in the days before I figured out how. Alot if my earliest songs were jazz compositions, and in fact I wrote quite a few before I took on the added challenge of writing lyrics and singing.

In a way writing jazz song is much easier than writing a rock or pop song, because all you really need is a sketch: a melody, some chords, a feel, and maybe an overarching concept. Then you leave it to the musicians to fill in the details and bring it to life.

The first couple of songs I brought to the group we already fully composed, first played by my 80’s fusion group Event Horizon – (I Miss My) Baby in Bb and Solstice. And although the sounded pretty good, they weren’t really right for the direction of the group. Baby in Bb in particular is an uptempo funk, and doesn’t translate on an upright bass. Also I wrote it on alto sax, and it lays just terribly on the tenor. So we’d have to change the key as well as the groove to make it work. Solstice doesn’t have any of those problems, but it’s through-composed enough that learning the structure is non-trivial. Might as well move on!

I have about a half-dozen ideas I can use as the basis for songs for the HSQ. The first of these I’ve named Dark Skies. It’s based on a fragment I’ve had in my head for a long time, but always needed something to complete. I was humming it on the way home from jazz last Saturday and came up with a bridge that was perfect. Came home and banged it out on piano.

There’s no point in trying to track a jazz song on the computer, because the performance is where it’s at. So I had the idea to make a quick demo just to get across the sound. It came out quite well, and was a amazingly fast to record. I tracked the piano on MIDI, and then just repeated the head a second time to provide a backing for the first solo. The bass and drums are MIDI also, just an outline of the rhythm and harmony. The drums are little more than a click track with some pauses and accents. But then I put a sax track over it and that really brought the whole thing to life. I nailed it on the first take. The effects are all well-known presets I just dialed in, some reverb on the horn and some compression on the master out. It only took a couple hours from start to finish.

Hopefully we’ll do it at practice next week and it’ll light up with the band. If all goes well I’m gonna try to knock off a jazz demo every week or two while I finish the last couple tracks of my rock album, a sort of side project within a project. Best case scenario we’ll have some fun and unique new material for the group, and it’ll push us toward the next level. Worst case I’ll have a nice little collection of jazz demos.

Higher and Higher

The LEFT HOOK gig at Burke’s Saturday night was a pretty darn good time. It’s larger and nicer venue than we’ve been playing, and we had a good turnout, with a whole a bunch of people coming to help our drummer Gus celebrate his birthday, and a few of my friends, including Nick, who came all the way from Long Island and took a bunch of pictures of the band, which I’ll post sometime soon. Woo-hoo and thanks alot!

Gus is back to playing his regular drums, which helps the sound alot. Also, last week I finally got my Mark VII sax in for a final adjustment. It took Virgil only a few minutes of fiddling with the various bits of cork around the keys of the upper stack. Now it’s playing totally great. It literally has never sounded better! I have all the tone and growl that I really love, plus a great clarity in the low end, even playing very softly. So now I have two world-class tenor saxes in great working order, the beauty and the beast. I’ve been enjoying hanging out with Virgil, he’s got lots of stories and lots of knowledge on musical instruments. It almost makes me sad my horn is all fixed up now.

We added a bunch of new songs for this show, including The Letter by Joe Cocker, Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel, Beginnings by Chicago, and Cheap Sunglasses by ZZ Top. All went over really well. I think Beginnings in particular, which we used to end out first set, was a winner. We worked on that on for a while and made our own arrangement. I’m emulating a whole horn section on sax, and Mike and Gary are covering the vocal harmonies between them. We even have a percussion break toward the end.

The surprise hit was Cheap Sunglasses. This one was a bit of a late addition, after we’d tried out and discarded a bunch of other new songs for various reasons (vocals were to high, the groove too mellow, that kind of thing). We only rehearsed it twice. It’s a bit heavier than most of our material, but basically a boogie blues, and right in Gary’s zone on guitar. Ken and Gus and got a tight groove going on on the bass and drums. I sing lead on it, and it’s right in my zone vocally too, and I do an Abacab-like solo on the organ over the coda. Big crowd pleaser.

Since we’ve been working so much on new material, we only had a chance to run thru the whole set list once before the show. Overall it was still quite good, but there was the occasional tempo problem (mostly starting too fast) or missed or sloppy transition from one part to the next. Still, we know the songs well, and they’re great songs, and the energy and sound was always there. The vocals keep getting better and better too. I guess you can say the better we get the higher our standards get.

As usual, the second set was the tightest, had the best energy and the biggest crowd. There were a few time where Ken and Gus were really right together in the groove and it felt fantastic. One was Dance to the Music, which we really bombed in rehearsal. For the third set I used to joke that we should just do two or three long jam numbers like Dazed and Confused or Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. But now we finally have enough songs to have a full third set, and not just of the leftovers, but songs we know well. We even ended up doing a couple extra encores, including Foxy Lady, which someone shouted out as a request. Gary launched into it and Ken and Gus joined in, and sang. I think I remembered most of the lyrics. Good fun. And we even got paid more then we’ve been so far.

Winterlong

All quiet on the western front. It’s getting into the second half of winter and I’m starting to feel hopeful about spring. Lizzy is in Switzerland. Michelle got her braces off the other day.

I’m working from home these days, and I must say for the most part it suits me. My health is better then it’s been the last few winters. No getting up before daylight to stand out on the train platform in the bitter cold. No colds or flu, no back or leg pain.

I’m still rehabilitating my shoulder. I can do all the exercises I used to before I injured it, pushups and free weights, but on bench press I’ve plataeued, and every time I try and add weight it starts to hurt, so I go back down and wait a few weeks to try again. This last time the soreness went away faster and I’m ready to try again after only a week.

I have a pullup bar that sets up in a doorframe, and I’ve been using it in the doorway of wizard room (the closet under the stairs) for like 2 years. The other day the molding there cracked, so now I’m thinking about how to rebuild it stronger.

OTOH with working from home there’s less human contact. I’ve been getting out on the weekends, to dinner and the movies (Star Wars) for Jeannie’s birthday, to a party at Nick’s, and surprisingly saw a really good jazz group at a fundraiser at Michelle’s school. The band director is an amazing drummer, especially at Latin jazz.

For Valentine’s day I took Jeannie out to a local restaurant, Infusion, that I’ve passed by hundreds of times but never went in. But then I found out the bass player Jay from my Saturday jazz group was playing there with a guy on vibes as a duo. It turned out to be a very nice place, classy, dimly lit, with very good quasi-French food. They seated us right up near the band so I was able to suggest a few songs: My Romance, My Funny Valentine, All the Things You Are, that kind of thing. They were really good. Just the perfect thing, and a really pleasant surprise.

Before I found out about Jay’s gig the plan was to go to Burke’s bar, where LEFT HOOK is playing next week, to check the place out. So we went there afterwards for a drink of two. It’s a pretty big place, a step up from the joints we’ve been playing. The calamari is yummy and they got lots of different beers. They have a nice big stage, but we still have to bring our own PA. I don’t think they had a band that night cuz it was pretty dead. I’m sure bitter cold snap was keeping people home.

…

The Global Jukebox project is coming along. There was a bit of a crisis a couple weeks ago cuz they’d used up the money for my initial contract but we were only about halfway thru the projected work. By the end of the first week we were already several weeks behind schedule, as we discovered that the database needed some serious work, the codebase I was taking over was a mess, and there were lots of little things they’d need to go live that they’d never thought of. Growing pains getting from a prototype to a product. Like I said, they’re not software engineers. But they found some more cash and were able to extend the project a few more months, and they’re working on getting funding for a whole year. I hope it comes thru. They have alot of great ideas and I’d really love to be able to do it right.

I finished a major milestone build last week. Done the first major round of refactoring and getting the core features in place. Still lots of little cleanup and loose ends, but I hope to have something sharable soon.

I’ve also been learning Python and Django (the D is silent), since our database guy has limited availability and there’s lots to do on that side.

…

Believe it or not I’m still negotiating with my publisher about the origami airplanes and spaceships book. I thought for a while it was totally dead, but now it may happen after all. The point of contention was the graphics they want printed on the paper. I have a pretty strong idea of what I want and what I don’t. My feeling generally is that it should be pretty minimalist and not detract from the folded form. After they saw my samples they thought it’d be a useful guide, but wanted to have their staff graphics guy do the graphics, and to add insult they want to pay him out of my advance.

Then the sample graphics they sent me were a travesty. It was not my model, and not for my book, but it was a picture of a very cartoony robot slapped on a sheet of paper that didn’t look like anything like a robot to begin with. It looked like they reinvented the back cover of Mad Magazine!

So I said no way, I’ll do the book my own way and get another publisher. Then they decided they wanted to negotiate. First they agreed to pay their graphics guy out of their share. Then I said I’d only go with them if they gave me some sample graphics for my models and I approve of them. Surprisingly they agreed. So that’s where we are now, waiting for them to produce some graphics.

…

I’ve been thinking of buying a new synthesizer. It turns out Moog is making reissues of their classic analog synths, but with modern components and with midi and digital control/memory/recall. You can get a full-stack modular moog a la Keith Emerson for a mere $35,000, not including keyboard, ribbon controller, extra modules, etc. Or you can get a modern day MiniMoog for about a grand.

BTW, I learned the other day the original voice of R2D2 was an ARP 2600 synthesizer, one of the first “semi-modulars”. It also appears on a bunch of Rush albums beginning with 2112, and on Edgar Winter’s Free Ride, which my rock group learned and then abandoned because it was too high for our singer.

So in closing, here’s a reminder that LEFT HOOK has a gig coming up a week at Burke’s Bar. We learned 5 new (keeper) tunes including Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel and Beginnings by Chicago. Very rockin’!

More on the Sax Situation

Last weekend we had a big ol’ snowstorm, over two feet in 24 hours. Clearing out was just fine. We went out Saturday just before dark, with about a foot on the ground, and cleared the front steps and a narrow path down the driveway to the street. Sunday morning it stopped snowing. The snowblower started on the first pull and took less than two hours to clear everything out. It immediately got warm after that, up above freezing every day, with some days in the 40’s or 50’s. Even though it’s been melting fast there’s still plenty of snow on the ground.

Toward the end of the week I finally had the chance to take my Mark VII tenor to my repair guy. His name is Virgil Scott and lives in Yonkers and works out of his house. He’s fixed everyone’s horn from Michael Brecker on down, and also runs one of the few remaining swing big bands on the scene. Been playing sax for over sixty years! So you know he knows what he’s doing.

My man replaced all the pads on the upper stack, plus a couple more on some side keys. Now pretty much the whole horn has new pads. He also replaced a few random bits of felt and cork, and made some adjustments. He even knocked out a couple of minor dents. I had thought he would need to take apart the horn at the bow to do this, but since the last time I visited him, he invented a special tool that goes in thru the neck.

After I got the horn home I took it pretty much all the way apart, cleaned and polished and oiled everything, and put it back together. Along the way I put on a few more bits of felt and cork, and got rid of the last of the clacking. It’s never looked nicer, shiny but well worn like C3PO. It plays much better too, especially in the low end of the range.

One or more of the new pads in the upper stack – I think it’s the B – may not be closing fully on all combinations of notes. Virgil says this is to be expected, as there’s lot of mutually interdependent things to adjust, and that I should bring it back in a couple weeks, after I’ve played on it a few times and it’s had a chance to break in, for him to give it a final once-over. Meanwhile, I clamped those keys shut before I put the horn away so as to give them a chance to seat better. I’ll bring the horn to jazz this week and see how it goes.

Left Hook at Burke’s Bar

Destined to replace the mud shark in your mythology, LEFT HOOK is moving up and kicking off our Slightly-Less-Crappy Bars of Westchester and Greater New York Tour of 2016 next month.

LEFT HOOK
Music with a punch!
Westchester’s classic rock Funk & soul party band

Saturday February 20, 10:0 PM
at
Burke’s Bar
645 Bronx River Road Yonkers

Actually Burke’s Bar looks like a nice place, and apparently they have a dinner crowd, so why not come out and get some dinner before the show. See you there!

BZ3 Update

I updated the page for the ongoing new Buzzy Tonic album, Elixr, at:
zingman.com/music/buzzythird.php

The page now includes links to the mixes of my three new songs, Your Dancing Shoes, To Be a Rock, and (When My) Soul’s on Fire, plus info and lyrics. That’s more than half of side two done. Only two songs left to go, the serene and poignant Ballad of Galadriel, and the epic and proggy Plague of Frogs! It’s a good thing too, I have a whole bunch of other song ideas ready to go outside of this album, and I’m writing new stuff for my jazz group too. Anyway, here it is, enjoy!

New Recording: Soul On Fire

We’re more than halfway thru January and winter has finally arrived in earnest. We got out first snowfall last night, and the start of a spell of sustained below-freezing temperatures. I’m weathering it alright. It helps that I’m working form home these days; don’t have to wait out on the train platform in the early morning. With the new Star Wars movie out Michelle asked that we watch episodes I – III, so we did over the weekend. I must say, they’re much better than I remember them, except episode I, which is even worse! I’d forgotten the bit where Jar Jar gets his tongue electrocuted and develops a speech impediment. Yeesh! Still, it’s frustrating because they could have been such really great movies if George had put a more effort into the characters and the dialogue and less into over-the-top CG action set pieces. Ah well it’s over now.

I’ve been able to get around to a few random tasks. I don’t have as much time for recording now since I’m mostly focusing on live bands, but I finally finished tracking the long-awaited Soul On Fire. I had laid down a sax part earlier but wasn’t quite satisfied with it. The new track is also the debut of my new Reference 54 tenor. It sounds quite good. I usually do a few takes and edit them together create the best total performance, but in this case I just used one take as-is with no alterations.

While I was at it I circled back and added a few synth parts to To Be a Rock. Martin had listened to my last mix and though it was missing something, and suggested I think in terms of David Gilmore. Well I didn’t add a guitar track, but I think I have something of that kind of feeling.

The Saxophone Situation

Today I had the chance to take a good look at my old horn, and made an inventory of the work it needs. Much to my relief I found the leak on one of the lower side keys that would account for the low-end tone problems. Everything else looks pretty tight. So I’m gonna get that replaced, plus the three pads in the upper stack, and a few bits of cork and felt to dampen the clacking. After that I expect it’ll play just fine again, and pretty much all the pads will have been replaced in the last two years. (Last major pad work I had done before that was 1999.) Then I’m gonna take the whole thing apart and clean and oil it, and put it back together. I’ll probably continuing using this horn for the rock band, particularly for gigs, and use the new horn mainly for jazz.

The Global Jukebox

I recently took on a very fun and interesting client. It’s Alan Lomax’s Global Jukebox Project. For those of you who don’t know Alan Lomax was musicologist who, beginning in the 1930’s went all around the world, from Texas to Siberia to all over Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and even Buffalo, NY, building up a comprehensive library of folk music from all different cultures. Then he thought about ways of comparing them scientifically to see if they reveal anything about the relationship between the characteristics of the music and characteristics of the culture. It turns out they do.

Along the way he invented a thing called Cantometrics to evaluate the music along an exhaustive list of parameters. The results are really quite revealing – as a musician I’d even say mind-blowing – and are encapsulated in his book Folk Song Style and Culture. Highly recommended reading. It’s very well written, and ultimately speaks directly to the question of why all human cultures make music, and why different kinds of cultures make the kinds of music we do.

Except now you don’t have to read the book, because we’re building a web site to bring it to life! The Lomax foundation has literally thousands of hours of field recordings, backed by an immense a meticulously catalogued database. We’re pulling it all together to present interactively, using different ways to visualize the relationships including maps, trees, lessons and journeys.

I must say it’s a refreshing change from corporate, agile-driven software work. As the front end developer and UX/UI designer, I have alot of freedom to shape the site. They’re academics, and while they’re very smart and care deeply about the work, they’re not software engineers or interaction designers, so they’re also very hands-off and trusting about things in my domain. They also tend to be more laid back, creative and open, so it feels alot like R&D work. Right now it’s a fixed-length contract, but they have enough ideas for years of work, so I hope they have enough money too, and the gig transitions into a long-term relationship.

This is also by far the oldest legacy codebase I’ve ever worked on. The original Cantometric data was originally encoded on punch cards in the 50’s thru the 70’s and entered into an IBM mainframe computer at Columbia University. Sometime in the 80’s someone ported it to C or maybe Pascal, and into a relational database on a PC or a spreadsheet on a Mac or something. Then apparently in the early 2000’s they ported it again, this time into a modern platform that was web-ready and could be queried using mySql. Then they spent an enormous amount of time digitizing all the music and cleaning up the data. That bit still isn’t quite done, and my first programming task had to do with rights and clearances.

Still, it’s interesting how computers were part of the vision from the beginning. In Folk Song Style and Culture there’s an appendix explaining the software at the time, mainly the data encoding and the statistical analysis work. I haven’t looked forward to reading an appendix so much since The Lord of the Rings!