Category: Music

A few weeks ago Michelle was watching a video online by that girl who does those online videos about Fibonacci numbers and fractal dragons, but this one was about Schoenberg-style tone rows. I was exposed to serailism in college, but never thought it was particularly tuneful or interesting, although I must say the girl did a really haunting Mary Had a Little Lamb based on the idea. Anyway Michelle and I had a good discussion about music theory and composing, and I gave her a few straight triadic ideas to play around with.

Recently I’ve been going updating my web site so the whole thing uses style sheets. This is a long overdue endeavor and I’ve dusted off some old pages I haven’t looked at in a long time. One was about The Perfect Shuffle, so naturally I wrote a tone row based on the perfect shuffle sequence of a twelve-card deck. I kinda always thought all tone rows were more or less the same, but I played this one on the piano and it sounds pretty compelling. It goes like this:

C Db Eb G D F B Bb Ab E A F#

It has the interesting property that the second half of the pattern is the same as the first half, but flipped upside down. It also has the property that the intervals between the notes are pretty varied from narrow to wide. In fact I think just about every interval from a semitone to a Major7 appears once, and a tritone appears twice.

Now I’m thinking about how to use this riff compositionally. One idea is to generate a bunch more patterns based on perfect shuffles of different sized decks, and arrange them into a kind of phase fugue. I wonder how that would be to listen to.

Left Hook is announcing it’s second show coming up on May:

Saturday May 9. 9:00 PM
Dudley’s Bar & Marina
94 Hudson Park Rd. New Rochelle

This is a cool place down by the water, with really good food too. Should be a great time.

Meanwhile here’s a reminder to come see us this Saturday April 11 at The Fisherman’s Net in Pelham.

Also, I’ve updated out web site at lefthooknyc.com and created a new facebook page at facebook.com/lefthooknyc so you can go and like us an receive info about upcoming shows.

Winter lingers and we endure. It’s March already and there’s still a foot of snow on the ground, and it’s snowing heavily again right now. Apparently this February was the coldest on record in 80 years. Damn global warming. The Left Hook inaugural gig was cancelled due to a snowstorm last Saturday. It’s getting rescheduled for April, so hopefully the weather will be nicer by then.

Young Wolfgang Skywalker announced a few weeks ago he was going to leave the band after the gig, one week after he showed up for rehearsal dead-dog tired and lamenting about being buried under schoolwork. Ah well we knew it was a matter of time, and now’s a good time to make the break. We’re bringing in Ken “Dr. Pluto” on bass. He rehearsed with us last week. Hit fit right in, and already know a bunch of our songs, and knows Gary from the jazz circle. He should have no problem getting the set together in the next five weeks. So cool, onward and upwards.

We’re now starting to look for more gigs in earnest, so we need to put together a web site. I recently updated my music site with links and pages to my current bands Left Hook, 7 Jazz West, and The Day Trippers. I had started this as part of my ongoing wintertime upgrades to my web site, but once I was done, a realized that the new pages, even thought they the requisite band info and links to video and stuff, are pretty plain design-wise. So another round of updates in the offing. Unfortunately, I’m really buried under work for my day job right now, so it may be a while until I can circle back. Meanwhile we’ll be recording our next few rehearsals, so we can get some audio up so people can hear our sound. Watch this space for future updates.

And as luck would have it, The Day Trippers seems to have run it’s course. Between the question whether to add another singer, the logistical difficulty of getting together to rehearse, and the lack of upcoming gigs, this looks like the end, at least for the time being. Still it was a good experience and a lot fun, and gave me a great change to work on my vocals.

As one door closes another opens. I’ve been trying to get a project going to play my originals for some time now. I’d asked Ken to join, but he’d been busy with other projects. Now he has one less project (he was in DT too) and is very interested. Also this cat Charlie from the jazz circle, whom I approached in the fall, came back to me in January saying he now has some time and wants to get together and jam.

Charlie and I got together yesterday with me on piano and him on guitar. I showed him six of my tunes. He picked them right up and was really into them. He got down Checker Cab, Get on Back 2 U, and Ghost in the Machine. We also looked at Heat Wave, Your Dancing Shoes, and (IGBA) Beautiful Day. This is great news cuz a lot of guys can’t handle my songs; you need to be proficient in jazz harmony and odd meters. So hopefully we can get together soon with Ken on bass, and then all we’ll need is a drummer.