Category: Music

New Song: To Be a Rock

You’re probably asking yourself, what’s up with John’s recording project? It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything about it. Well, rest assured it’s still going on. In fact, I completed a demo of my new song, To Be a Rock, back around Thanksgiving. It’s not even that new; I’ve been working on this song off-and-on since the springtime. I started it around the same time as Your Dancing Shoes. In contrast to that one, which is light and upbeat, this one is heavy and anthemic.

The intro is a bass solo which took me a while to be able to play cleanly. Now I have all the basic parts tracked, the piano, bass drums and vocals. But it’s missing something. I’m not quite sure what. Maybe guitars, or synthesizers, or horns, I dunno. But rather than just start slathering on layers I’m gonna let it simmer on the back burner for a while. Looking at my list, I have four or five more half-written songs — enough to complete an album. So I’ll work on fleshing out some of those for a while, and circle back once I have them up to a comparable level of completion. Next up: Plague of Frogs.

Meanwhile, here are the chords and lyrics.

…

To Be a Rock
by John Szinger

(bass intro) Dm
(chorus) Am (G/B) C Dm (C/E) F Am (G/B) C Dm (C/E) F Gm (F/A) Bb
(verse) AMaj7 FMaj7 EbMaj7 Bm D7#9 AMaj7 FMaj7 EbMaj7 Bm D7#9 E (D/F#) Gm

Man of steel man of stone
But what man can stand alone?
And even as you love them too
The ones you love will one day look to you —
Man of motion holding fast
But what man is built to last?
Like water be, take on the form
To find inside you’re solid to the core —

Dark night of gloom
Red sun of doom
Gotham metropolis
You know I never asked for this
Can you stand the day you stumble?
Can you bend or will you crumble?
Oh, to be a rock!

Every day another trial
How many steps to climb a mile?
Push that stone back up that hill
A thousand labors only to stand still —
Men of stone men of steel
But what kind of man is real?
Man of motion never rests
Each day put your mettle to the test —

Red sun of doom
Dark night of gloom
I never asked for this
Gotham or metropolis
Will you crack the day you stumble?
Can you stand or will you crumble?
Oh, to be a rock!

Day Trippers Video Montages

I’ve been going thru a bunch of video over the winter break. I cut together a couple montages of the last two Day Trippers shows, at the Crossroads back in October and at Lexington in December, to give y’all an idea of the sound in under three minutes. The Day Trippers are John Foote on guitar and vocals, Ken Mathews on bass, Rob Cassels on drums, and Yours Truly on piano and lead vocals. Enjoy!

Crossroads
Lexington

7 Jazz West – Caught on Tape

Here’s some video of the last 7JW gig back in November. I must say it’s a darn good perfomance. The sound and picture are really good considering it’s a smartphone camera, and it still looks kinda underground and edgy. Musically there are some moments where everyone in the group really shines. Mercy Mercy Mercy, Better Git in Yer Soul, Willow Weep For Me, ah, heck they’re all good.

Seven Jazz West are: Gary Trosclair on trumpet, Rich “The Hurricane” Ferricane on alto sax, John (Yours Truly) Szinger on tenor, Rich Paginello on piano, Steve Spitz on guitar, Ken Mathews on bass and Mike Oliva on drums.

Mercy Mercy Mercy
Willow Weep for Me
Better Git It in Yer Soul
All Blues
Chameleon
Joy of Spring
Blues for Wood

7 Jazz West Returns to The Bass Line

My jazz septet, 7 Jazz West is returning to The Bass Line:

9pm Friday, January 16
130 E 1st Street, Mt Vernon, NY 10550
(across from the Mt. Vernon East Metro-North parking lot)
(914) 433-1052

This septet plays a variety of modern, straight-ahead, hard bop, Latin, and funk jazz, ranging from Miles, Monk and Mingus to Jaco Pastorius, Horace Silver, Wayne Shorter, Hank Mobley, Clifford Brown, Joe Zawinul and more.

The Left Hook

Great news! My rock/funk/soul band now has a name. We’re calling ourselves Left Hook. Music with a punch, ya! This actually went down a few weeks ago but I’ve been busy with other things. Right now we’re on break until the new year, as are all my other groups. With Left Hook we’re getting close to having three sets of material down, and it’s shaping up to be a really smokin’ sound. So happy to be in a group where everyone is a good musician. Now that we have a name, we’re putting together a web site, and gonna record a demo of 8 or so of our best/tightest songs in the new year. Gonna do that off the board in the rehearsal studio, and come home and fly it into ProTools to mix. Oh and I gotta write a bio too.

And to top it off we have our first gig Left Hook coming up in February at a bar in New Rochelle. More on that as the time grows nearer. For now, we have maybe 6 rehearsals and gotta add 6 or 8 more songs to round out the set. Mostly soul and Motown classics that we all know already.

In case you’re wondering, the last Beatles gig was a bit of a mixed bag, due to problems with sound and power. We set started well enough, with good energy and musicality. The place was only half full but the people were into it. Got in some new songs that sound quite good, including Taxman, Rain, Hello Goodbye and Come Together. But as we went on the volume got louder until it was hard to hear the vocals onstage thru the primitive PA. Toward the end of the first set the power went out on the stage. I guess we blew a fuse. It took a long time for the bar to fix it, and after that the vibe just wasn’t the same. We ended up skipping the Abbey Road medley, much to my disappointment. Ah well.

Between the two groups, as well as the 7 Jazz West, this means I’m now looking to buy a PA to fill a small to medium sized room: something like a pair of 12” mains at 300-500 watts each, with a premium on lightness for the schlep factor; a 12 to 16 channel mixer (we need at least five XLR ins for microphones – four singers plus a sax in the Left Hook, even more if we wanna mic the drums) with built in reverb and compression so we can get a fat vocal sound live; maybe as many as 4 monitors so ensure coverage on stage. Right now I’m leaning toward powered speakers because then we can daisy chain them together for more power if we ever need it. Also non-powered mixers seem to have more flexibility in terms of bussing. So we’ll see how that goes.

Also, 7 Jazz West has a gig coming up in a few weeks and we’re doing My Favorite Things, with our interpretation based mainly on the John Coltrane version. During the Xmas Cabaret I played my soprano sax for the first time in a long while. It has a problem with the joint between the neck and body being loose. I think it may be even be a little leaky cuz its hard to play certain notes softly. So I’m looking to get a new soprano sax too. Hello Craigslist!

Day Trippers this Saturday!

My Beatles tribute band, The Day Trippers, will be playing this Saturday night, December 13, at the Lexington Grille, just over the Tappen Zee bridge in Bardonia, NY. This is our third gig and our ever-expanding repetoire is up to about 30 songs, two solid hours of material covering everything from the early Bealtemania pop to psychedelic blues and everything in between.

Show starts at 9:00. Looks like they also have good food there.

Christmas Cabaret

I’ve been really busy the last couple weeks with the Xmas Cabaret, a big fundraiser at Michelle’s school. Learned like 35 songs on sax and (one on) ukulele. It was a ton of fun. Last time I did one of these shows was three years ago, and I remember working my ass off because I hadn’t played a live show in years and needed to get back into playing shape on the sax, plus learning the tunes while transposing, skipping around the songs, and making my sound fit in with the group.

This time it was alot more relaxed, mainly cuz I already knew the people, and knew what to expect, and also cuz my chops are up and I can sight read and transpose and all that no sweat. Since Michelle L., the director, also runs the school choir, for this show she picked less traditional songs, by artists like Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Harry Connick Jr., Billy Squier, and some more mellow stuff like The Carpenters and Bing Crosby. It was the same crew, and great to see them all and perform together again. Mike L. on piano and musical director, his wife Michelle as show and vocal director, Brian and Kristen running the stage and props and sets and tech and all. Plus a dozen or so singers. The band was rounded out by George on drums and Shredder on guitar, both excellent musicians. They even let me sing the Clarence Clemons part on Santa Claus is Coming to Town. Six words, twice! They drafted Lizzy to do the sound, so she got some good experience running a mixing board.

It was a week solid of rehearsals, with performances Friday and Saturday night and matinee Sunday. And in between I taught an origami event at the Museum of Natural History in the city. I had been thinking of bagging it, but alot people signed up so I went. Even had a chance to check out the OUSA holiday tree before my class started. I’ve been donating models to them for a few years now and they have assembled quite a collection. In addition to my new stuff this year, I my stuff from previous years was well represented. The class itself went well. I was teaching models from my book Origami Animal Sculpture, starting with the Octopus since that was prominently displayed under the tree. Also got to the Common Loon and the Narwhal. Not bad for two hours. It’s funny, though, the more I teach the more I find ways to simplify the models to make them easier to get a across. I think if I had to do this book over it’d be that much more refined. Ah, well, a lesson to apply to the next one.

And, as you can imagine, tonight I’m pretty tired so I’m catching up on my rest.

Seven Jazz West

Switching gears completely, my jazz group has booked it’s first gig. We’re playing Friday November 14 at the Bassline Jazz Club in Mount Vernon, starting at 9:00. The address is:

The Bassline
130 E 1st St, Mt Vernon, NY 10550
(914) 433-1052

For those of you who don’t know, we play a good variety of modern jazz, straight-ahead, hard bop, latin, and funk, from cats like Miles, Monk, Mingus, Joco, Horace Silver, Wayne Shorter, Hank Mobley, Clifford Brown, Joe Zawinul, the list goes on.

Rehearsal have gotten a bit less relaxed now, as we want to get everything tight for the show: beginnings and endings, transitions, who’s soloing when and all that. Should be no problem, but we have a half-dozen or so new tunes in addition the ones we already know well. We actually have enough material for two shows, so if the first show goes well we’ll do another.

Now we need to come up with a name for the band. The top contender right now is the Seven West Jazz Band, or some variation on that, because there are seven of us and we rehearse in Westchester, and it’s short and easy to say. There are other ideas floating around. We’ll see where it ends up.

Night Trippin’

Last night’s Day Tripper gig at the Crossroads went quite well. The Crossroads is a really nice place for bands, with a good stage and sounds system, pretty large and pretty full of people. There were two other bands opening for us, and both sounded really good. By the time we got on stage it was almost 11. We did seventeen songs, just over an hour. If we had more songs we could have gone on longer, but that was all we had.

Musically most songs were right there. Good response from the crowd, and we had new people coming in throughout the show. A couple minor issues, coming out of the bridge of Here Comes the Sun, the ending of Lady Madonna, and on the last couple songs energy level seemed to be flagging a bit. We did some of the real high screamers early in the set – Don’t Let Me Down, Band on the Run and I Want You (She’s So Heavy), but my voice stayed strong the thru the end of the set, and I felt I delivered a good performance. My voice continues getting stronger in terms of range, endurance, control and expressiveness. Woo-hoo!

In fact we’re getting good enough now that I feel we need to work on taking it to the next level. Really tighten and polish the arrangements and vocal harmonies, string together the songs in threes or fours without a pause, work on our between-song banter, and generally keep the flow of the show going. As a singer I know the songs well enough now to focus more on performing them at an emotional rather than technical level. Plus we need to learn a bunch more songs. We seem to be learning about 8 to 10 per show, so for the next one we want to get up to the 25 to 30 range.

So I guess we’ll see when the next gig comes up and take it from there. Meanwhile the Crossroads also has jazz, so we may get a gig there with our jazz group.

Every Which Way But Loose

Everything looks bright and shiny on the band front these days. First, the Day Trippers have gig coming up (see my previous post) and we’ve been learning a bunch of new material, including Rain, Lady Madonna, Hello Goodbye, Dear Prudence, I Want You (She’s So Heavy), Here Comes the Sun and a few others. Hope we have time for all of them. I played an Abbey Road medley – from She Came in Through the Bathroom Window on – for the guys in the band. While they all agreed it sounded great and was a great idea, they also thought it was too much material to learn for this show, so it’s on the slate for the next one.

Second, my jazz project may actually be getting some gigs. Our drummer and leader Mike is booking us into a place called The Baseline in Mount Vernon. After a year of rehearsing we’ve gotten to the point where we sound pretty damn good, and I feel like people are missing out not hearing us. Personally I feel like my sax playing has gotten back to the point where it’s as good as or better than it’s ever been, and that’s saying something looking back at the days of Event Horizon. My tone is really great, and my sense of time has improved, and I can even slalom those bebop changes. But now I’m much more relaxed, focused on melody and phrasing and dynamics and expressiveness. On songs we’ve done a few times I know I can forget about the chords and just blow, and really tell the story. Now the challenge moves on to having something fresh to say each time. On top of that it’s a really good group and all the players are really strong. I particularly dig Rich, Mike and Ken on piano, bass and drums. So I hope this gig comes through. I’ll let you know when we have a date set.

Third, the rock band has reformed and it looks extremely promising. Two weeks ago I brought in young Wolfgang Skywalker on bass to meet Gus and Jefferson. Gus is our drummer, and he’s pretty tough on bass players he can’t groove with. But he fell right in love with Youngblood within sixteen bars of the first song. Even without a guitar it was an excellent rehearsal. The whole things sounded more solid and energetic. One of the songs we were considering dropping was Long Train Running, but with the new bassist the song had a whole lot more energy and was suddenly a keeper. And the group is moving in much more of a funk and soul direction, which I really like. At the end of the session we decided to add another James Brown song and another Sly Stone number. Also Youngblood amazed us all even more revealing he’d only been playing bass for two years (switched from cello) and is taking lessons with John Pattitucchi.

The next week were joined by Gary Guitar. He fit in really well. Like Gus and myself he’s a seasoned pro and knows tons of songs. He favors a clear jazzy tone that fits right in with the direction of the group. So now all we need to do is learn a bunch of songs and think of a name for the group and then we can start booking gigs. I’m expecting we’ll be ready around the new year.

Only thing I’ve been neglecting is my home recording situation. Well not exactly neglecting. I’m working on a new song, To Be a Rock, and it’s been slow going. I haven’t had a really big block of free time in a while, so it’s bit by bit. I had put down a scratch piano and drum track to lay out the time, chords and structure. Then I got to work on the bass line. The song begins with a bass solo, which is fairly hard to play, at least for me, so I had to practice it a while, and it took me several attempts at recording it to really nail it. So that’s in the can now, and it’s time work on the other parts. Listening back, neither the drums nor the piano sound very good to me, so I’m looking at having to tear them down and basically start over. Ah well. Should be worth it in the end.