Category: Music

Van Halen Adaptations for Piano

As my rock band lurches on I’ve been looking for new songs to add to the setlist. Going for an upbeat party vibe, and this led me to some early Van Halen. I’ve always felt that VH has something that none of their imitators did, and that’s old-timey jazz as one of their influences. The Van Halen bros. father was a big band sax and clarinet player, and of course David Lee Roth’s fondness of Louis Prima is well known. I also recently found out Michael Anthony’s dad was jazz trumpeter and MA also studied trumpet and jazz bass before he switched to rock.

So I got the VH songbook to work out a handful of their songs and make piano adaptations. (Last time I tried to do this, by ear, I ended up writing Heat Wave instead.) I’ve narrowed it down to just a few songs for now: Runnin’ With the Devil, Beautiful Girls, I’m the One, and Feel Your Love Tonight. These tunes have a boggie shuffle beat, lots great chromatic harmonic movement over 7th chords, and superb backing vocal parts, including a whole bop-do-wah shoobie-doo-wah section in one.

The books are funny because they’re designed for guitar players, with obsessively superdetailed tab and guitar-specific annotations to the phrasing, but no bass (or left hand piano) part at all. I guess this is alright cuz Bach sheet music (for example) is biased toward piano players. If you work beyond the idiosyncrasies of the notation to grok the underlying music, it’s really not so complicated to play. Of course I have to change some of the voicings to work better on piano – power chords can be pretty boring – but the basic concept of the interplay between comping and tossing in riffs, and Eddie’s phrasing and timing, reminds me a lot of Fats Waller and those cats. Since there are no bass parts in the music I have to go back and listen to the records and fill in my own thing to get the left hand sounding right. I’m doing a lot of stride and walking bass lines.

Then it’s onto the solos, where everything goes completely bananas. The good news is I can play fast, and the solos are all written out, and since Eddie is classically trained a lot of his solo lines remind me of Keith Emerson. The whole thing is very tight. The only thing is I have to go back and listen to the record to see how exactly its sounds compared to how it’s notated when the tremelo bar gets into the action. Figuring out the bass part here is a bit harder since Eddie loves to modulate when it’s time for the solo, and then play outside the changes on top of that.

The last thing is putting the vocal on top of everything else. David Lee Roth is pretty much in my range, but I’m trying to bring out his phrasing and style. One more gotcha: when you go back and listen to the records, they tune down a semitone. So the choice is to play it in E or Eb. Eb is slightly easier to sing, but I have to read all the parts down a half step. This is not so bad actually. But then I wonder when I bring it to the group if the guitar player will want to tune down or do it in E.

Of course the guitar player I have now says Steely Dan is too hard, so he’ll probably be scared shitless to do a VH song. The good news is, even though he doesn’t know it yet he’s been kicked out of the band. Bad news is now we have to find a replacement.

The Day Trippers

If you’re free this weekend and want to check out some live music come on down to Heights Fest in Berkeley Heights, NJ (http://heightsfest.com/). My band, The Day Trippers is kicking off the show at 4:00. It’s a fitting name since it’s a one-show-only Beatles tribute band. I was recruited to sing and play keyboards by my friend Ken, a.k.a Dr. Pluto, who is the bass player in my jazz combo. Ken is old friends with John, lead guitarist and mastermind, and his drummer Rob, who both live in NJ. We had one rehearsal over the weekend, and we all hit it off and the music came together really well. I was a bit surprised cuz I was singing lead and some of those Paul songs are pretty high; I figured my voice would be shot by the end but it got better as we went on. I could even hit the high notes in Band on the Run.

And So It Goes

It’s August now. Been busy with camping trips, seeing more family and friends, and getting things done at home. Work is still pretty busy too. I just finished a little skunkworks demo for my boss’s boss. My boss dropped it on me as she was headed out the door for vacation. Nice. Along the way I learned angularjs. It’s been a while since I’ve been deep in the javascript world, but angularjs seems like a nice framework, very helpful in writing logical, organized code. Or maybe my demo just happened to be in the sweet spot of what angularjs is good at.

Lots of churn on the band front. Right after my last post on the topic, our bass player and my good friend Mike quit the group. We got a new bass player now, who I found quite by accident. My friend Charlie guitar asked me to sit in one evening with his jazz group. I was unable to commit, but didn’t want to say no because we were scheduled to rock rehearsal that night, but with no bass I wasn’t sure it was on. I hit reply to all instead of just replying to Charlie, and one of the other guys in the jazz band said he’d be into playing bass with a rock group. This really confused me at first cuz the guy, Rob, plays piano in the bebop group. So he came down and it turns out he can jam on bass. He plays a fretless, which is pretty interesting.

Now the challenge moves to building up a set, getting more tunes and getting them tight. Our guitarist Jeff favors basic 70’s guitar rock and is reluctant to learn new material outside of his comfort zone. I like some of that stuff, but too much is not very interesting on the piano. So I’m trying to broaden the palette and some Steely Dan, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, maybe some Rush and Genesis and some other piano-oriented songs, as well as some more funk, ska, soul, new wave, etc. Should be interesting to see where it goes.

Meanwhile I have several other irons in the fire. I answered an ad for a group looking for a keyboard player in a Ronnie James Dio tribute band. They have some gigs lined up, so that could be fun. I also got an invitation to sit in with a group doing Beatles songs at some fair in New Jersey in a couple weeks, singing and playing piano with Dr. Pluto on bass. And lastly I’m trying to get Buzzy Tonic Live off the ground. Asking around to line up musicians. More on that as it progresses.

New Recording: Your Dancing Shoes

Here’s a rough mix of my new song Your Dancing Shoes. My friend Lee was supposed to come an lay down a guitar part, but we were never able to work out a time, so I did the guitar part myself. I used the Stratocaster thru my Roland JC amp. I had never really dug the strat before but this turned out to be just the right sound for the song. My part is pretty much straightforward rhythm. I had envisioned having a riffing lead guitar toward the end of the song, but since I don’t really solo on guitar I did that on sax. I’m sure now if the song gets too saxophone-y by then, but it’s pretty slammin’. So yeah, go ahead and enjoy.

Next up: To Be a Rock

New Song: Your Dancing Shoes

I’m close to finished song I’ve been working on lately. One feature of this song, which I’ve wanted to write for a long time, is a horn section break in the mode of Domino, Spain or Sir Duke. Last night I laid down the horn section tracks. All that’s left is some percussion and maybe rhythm guitar, and then onto mixing. I’ve been focusing on simplicity in my songwriting, at least in certain aspects. This one has a eight-bar chord progression that changes every two beats and loops over and over the whole song, nice and soulful.

Bb Eb C7 F7 Bb Eb C7 Bb
Bb Eb D7 G7 Eb C7 F7 Bb

The finished track should be ready soon. Meanwhile, here’s the lyrics. Not the deepest thing ever, but lively and fun.

…

Your Dancing Shoes
by John Szinger

Put on your dancin’ shoes
Don’t wanna hear about no bad news
I spent my nine to five just payin’ dues
So put on your dancing shoes

Throw down your safety vest
Kick off your working boots and give it a rest
Don’t wanna hear about what’s worse or best
Just wanna see you in that party dress

I’ll loosen up my power tie
Put down my thinking cap and let it all slide
Been payin’ dues yeah since the nine to five
Now all I wanna do is catch your eye

So put on your dancin’ shoes
Ain’t got time tonight to sing the blues
Yeah spent my nine to five just payin’ dues
So put on your dancin’ shoes

(horn break)

Now your decoding ring
And your utility belt don’t mean thing
My smoking jacket and my fancy pants
Now all I wanna do is see you dance

So put on your dancin’ shoes
Don’t wanna hear about bout no bad news
Ain’t got time tonight to sing them blues
Just put on your dancin’ shoes
Yeah put on your dancin’ shoes

(horn break and out)

Rock and Jazz

The summer’s been buzzing along nicely. I took some time off after OUSA and did some traveling, lots of seeing family and friends. Today we went to the beach, which was nice even though the sun never came out and eventually is started raining. Still we got a good swim in the ocean. All back home now. Tomorrow it’s back to work for the first full week in a while. Still lots of other fun stuff coming up this summer.

In origamiland I’ve gotten back all the models from my various exhibits, and am preparing a new round of exhibits. These will both be sent out by mail. One is Centerfold in Ohio, at the end of July, It’s the biggest origami convention in the Midwest. I wish I could go this year, but the logistics are too much. The other is for a bookstore in Lake Placid. They contacted my asking if I could do an event there. It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to make the trip this summer, but I figure since they were nice enough to reach out to me, and several of the chapters of my book are Adirondack themed, it might be a fun idea to send them a box of models to display and promote the book.

The third thing is I’m now starting work on the ebook version of my book for Tuttle. This ought to be fairly straightforward. They’re doing the actual production. I’m providing guidance and approval on the layout and format as necessary, and re-rendering any art assets that need t be scaled. Lastly, updating all the photo galleries on my website to use lightbox for slideshows has been in the offing for a long time and is inching closer to reality.

But this blog post is about how things are going with my bands. I’m happy to say it’s all going great. My jazz band seems to have solidified around the time I became a regular member, with a new bass player and piano player too. Things are now getting really smoking, with an ever-expanding set of material, played at a higher level of musicianship. One night when I came in I warmed up on the intro to Liberty City. The bass player Ken jumped right in, and so I found out he’s a big Joco Pastorius head. Now we’re doing The Chicken with Joco’s Soul Intro, and I get to do all the wailin’ Michael Brecker tenor parts, which is tons of fun. Last week we had another really amazing cat sit on alto, and I feel like my playing rose up a to meet him.

In the rock’n’roll realm it looks like the new group is going to work out, and sound better than the old group. The two guys that came in are Jeff on guitar and Mike on Vocals. At this point we’ve rehearsed three times and have about thirty songs. We’ve pretty much combined the best of our set list with the best of theirs, and started adding new material. Among the new songs I’ve learned are: We’re an American Band, Them Changes, (Ain’t Nothin’ But a) House Party, I Got You (I Feel Good), Dancing Days, Godzilla, Love Me Two Times, Can’t You Hear me Knocking, Brown Sugar, Honky Tonk Woman, Come Together, Miami 2017 and Dear Mr. Fantasy.

I’m singing lead on the Stones songs. Mike says he’s sick to death of singing these songs, but they’re a lot of fun for me. You don’t need a lot of range, you just belt it out. These are all saxophone songs too, so I need to manage switching between singing and playing the horn. We’ve also jammed a few others like The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, Money and some other Pink Floyd, but these seem a bit sprawling for a bar set. The consensus is we need forty songs before we’re ready to gig out. And of course we need to get the ones we have tight, but that’ll come naturally.

The big thing now is we need to come up with a name for the band before we can start booking gigs. We’ve been brainstorming and tossing around ideas. So far the one to beat is The Strolling Jones.

Let’s Pick Up the Pieces

Today is the first really hot day of the year, and hot night too. Sitting around with the windows open and the fans on trying cool down.

Work has been going well. Only one more homework left in the Scala class and then it’s onto learning web frameworks. We’ve had two perfect sprints in a row, beating the previous record we set last month of one perfect sprint ever. Today my team’s boss called a meeting to discuss what’s going right. I told her “We’re awesome.” I also told her good code begets better code. I’ve been working quietly to improve our code quality for some time now, and I think it finally got to a tipping point where we’re spending less time on bugs and technical debt and more on getting it right the first time.

I tracked the bass part to Your Dancing Shoes. It took a few attempts because there’s very few places to punch in, so I had to get it essentially in one take. Had to practice it to the point where it was tight and grooves well.

My new rock group seems like it might be a thing. It’s made up of two guys from the Relix, two guys from another band, and the drummer who had been in both. The new guys are Michael on vocals and Jeff on guitar. Both sound really good. We got together last week and jammed a solid two hours of music, twenty songs or so. So there’s one set already. We’re picking a bunch more songs for this week. So I’m learning a bunch more new songs again, which is always fun. Now the challenge becomes getting them to learn a few songs I want to sing, because my songs tend to be a bit harder and not everyone is as fast at learning songs as me.

Meanwhile in jazzland, I got my tenor sax fixed, and it plays great, especially on the low notes. Last week we had a really excellent jam with the group. This dude Charlie sat in on guitar, and he was really good, reminded me of Keith Martini. Everyone’s playing seemed up a level from usual that night and we had some great moments. Left with a really good feeling. Charlie invited me to sit in with his group, which rehearses on Monday and has a few of the same players as my Wednesday group. I met this really smokin’ alto player Omar, who really had the Charlie Parker bag down. Very melodic with that bebop slink, reminded me of Ron Palidino. Best sax player I’ve heard in a while.

Random Reflections

Let’s see … lots of bits and pieces these days.

I spent the weekend hanging out with Seth and Mark at Seth’s cabin in the Berkshires. Good to get away from the wife and kids for a spell and eat lots of barbecue. We went on a nice hike to a waterfall. You should know that Mark is an amazing musician and leads the band Cracklin’ Foxy out of Saranac Lake, NY. I learned the only music Mark hates more than Happy is anything from the soundtrack to Frozen. Also Mark has grown a mountain man beard. I think it was 20 years ago this weekend Seth invited my out on his dad’s sailboat and we cruised up an down the Hudson.

I’m over the hump on my Scala class. It’s actually making sense now. I submitted the homework on Huffman encoding and got a perfect score. I’ll admit I googled the problem, but hey, that’s what you do in real life when faced with a programming challenge. Rather than just copy what I found, I took several different solutions and read them and compared them until I understood what they were saying, and then created my own solution that best expressed it to my sensibilities. This week I finished the last lecture, and there’s two more homeworks to go, but the last one is another double, pushing up against OUSA.

Jeannie is back at work, starting a new job after switching jobs followed by a spectacular flameout a couple months ago. Woo-hoo. Meanwhile the kids are counting the days until the end of school.

I’ve been rockin’ my own work of lately. Ever since Olga got sacked it’s been so much easier to concentrate. Today at work I wrote over 200 lines of code! Also I came across a situation (marshalling data parsed out of an xml response) where the Scala approach is better than the way I’ve been doing it in Java all these years. Would have been far less code.

My train reading these days has been the Conan the Barbarian series by Robert Howard. It turns out these were originally published in Weird Stories magazine in the 1930’s alongside the first C’htuulhu stories, and Howard and H. P. Lovecraft were friends similar to Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Conan is perfect train reading. I had to give up Game of Thrones because it got to be so rambling and pointless. The Conan stories OTOH are nice and short, with tight plots, heavy on action and with a supernatural twist. I can usually read a whole novella between my morning and evening commute.

The Relix are officially defunct. Our drummer Gus finally quit last week, frustrated with auditioning new singers. He’s now trying to start a new group with Mike and me from the Relix and some guys from his other band, which also crashed and burned. We’re getting together later this week. I learned Space Truckin’ tonight in honor of the occasion.

Meanwhile I’ve written and begun recording two new tunes. One is called Your Dancing Shoes, and it’s a catchy blue-eyed-soul number with a big horn break in the mode of Domino or Sir Duke. I’ve asked Lee, the erstwhile Relix guitarist – the jazzy one – to lay down a guitar track for me, and he enthusiastically agreed. Now I just have to get the bass part clean enough that I’m satisfied with a take. I’m going for no punch-ins on this one because the there’s not very many gaps in the part, and it’ll just groove better.

The other song is called To Be a Rock, and I plan on asking Frank, the other – straight ahead rock – Relix guitarist to sit on that one, cuz it matches his style. In fact I wrote these two songs with these guys in mind. I hope he agrees because even though I could probably play the part myself, I want to capture his sound, which I have no idea of how to reproduce. This song still needs some development; I feel like it’s missing a part toward the end.

Since I’ve become a regular member of my Jazz combo I feel like I should learn the tunes. I have an older version of the Real Book (1980’s) than everyone else, and it’s just chock full of errors. I also want to get my chops of for slaloming changes of the bebop and bossa nova numbers. I finally had a chance to practice sax this week. I’d been noticing for some time that it’s been getting harder to pop out those low notes. I went over the horn with a leak light but the low notes are all tight. They ought to be; I just had the horn repadded two years ago. I finally discovered the problem is the octave key. So tomorrow I’m gonna call up Virgil Scott and see when I can get the horn in. For now I’ve fixed it with electrical tape. I noticed it’s the third spot on my horn fixed in such a way.

Live update – four firetrucks pulled up to my neighbor’s house a little while ago. They loitered four about an hour and just took off.

The last topic for tonight is origami. I finished my Dimpled Dodecahedron, wetfolded it and all, and it came out very nicely. Only one step away from the Stellated Dodec, v2. The closing is working out different than the previous model since I can’t remember how I did it before. I still have two weeks before the convention and hopefully I’ll be able to finishe a few more ideas. The big problem now is that my folding style has grown so complex it’s very difficult to fold these models even for me.

It’s All Part of My Rock’n’Roll Fantasy

Lots going on these days. I finally had a long weekend to relax and catch up on some stuff. Went up up to see Martin, Kath and the kids. That was very nice. Martin is in his mountain man phase now, working on a ZZ Top beard. Also got himself some ducks and chickens and honeybees, and is thinking of getting a cow. Wow. Abbie is now old enough that she’s walking and starting to talk and is a full-on little person. Charlie and Match are happy and energetic and sweet and curious.

My scala class remains really cool but is also a huge time sink. I’ve talked to a few people including my friend Nick, and no one I know who’s taken this course has completed it on the first try. I’m now more than halfway thru – up to week 5 of 7 on the lectures and homework. My last homework was the first on where I got less than a perfect score cuz I ran out of time. Couldn’t do it during the workweek due to deadlines, nor over the weekend due to visiting Martin. Ah well, this week’s lecture seemed pretty easy, but the homework is to implement Huffman encoding. On the plus side my team at work completed our second perfect sprint in a row.

Unfortunately the lowest thing on my todo list is working on origami. The convention is coming up in just a month and I want to have some cool new stuff. Since I gave my one-and-only Stellated Dodecahedron to Uwen for the Copper Union exhibition, I undertook to fold another one. It’s been sitting ninety percent done on my table for three weeks now. On the way I came up with another idea in the Dodecahedron series. I’m calling it the Dimpled Dodecahedron and it closely resembles the Archemedean Icosidodecahedon. It’s sitting there ninety-five percent done. Ah soon.

Speaking of origami, my publisher is trying to arrange an event at Kinokiyuma bookstore during the OUSA convention, and also drop-shipping a shipment of my book to them and to OUSA in time for the convention. I’d be great if that works out.

But the main monkey business this days is with music. First off, my jazz combo invited me to join them as the main tenor man. Of course I accepted and am looking forward to attempting to channel John Coltrane and working on my soloing skills. Also thinking of dusting off some of my originals from Event Horizon and seeing how they go over.

Also, after weeks of just practicing, I’ve gotten back to recording. Worked on Your Dancing Shoes last night, got down a solid take of the piano part, which forms the backbone of the song.

But, you must be asking, what about the Relix? Last we heard the group was on a positive upswing. Well, all human organizations are fragile, and the Relix is entering a, um, transitional phase. First our guitarist Lee gave notice. Lee was the 12-string and hollowbody guy and added a perfect complement to Frank’s straight-ahead rock sound. The good news Lee agreed to lay down a guitar track on Your Dancing Shoes, which is right in his zone.

Immediately after Lee our singer Paul gave notice. Paul is going thru a tough time right now, but it still came as a shocker since it seemed that music was the main source of joy in his life. Of course not having a lead singer is a bit larger problem than losing a second guitar, plus Paul is also a great harmonica player and guitarist too. So we’ll see where it goes from here. We’ve got some replacement singers lined up to audition, but even they’re good, chemistry is important too. The guys in the rhythm section have both mentioned the idea of starting something new and have independently asked me to join them. I think if I start something new I think it’s gonna be Buzzy Tonic live, doing a mixture of my originals covers that showcase my singing and piano playing and reinforce the style I’m going for. Kinda getting back to what I was trying to do with Erik, but not so unplugged. Not sure if I’ll be able to fit the sax in, but that’s a secondary concern. The minimum viable product would a be a power trio – me with bass and drums, but I’d prefer a guitarist as well as a co-lead singer (Mike and Gus both sing backup) and preferably someone who writes. Even so, I have 20 or more songs ready to go, including 6 or 8 of my originals. Like I say, we’ll see how it goes.

Never Gonna Do It Without My Fez On

Friday night the Relix played a great show at The Fez in Stamford, CT. It turned out to be a really happening place and our best show so far. The Fez is a Moroccan restaurant on what must be the party block in downtown Stamford. Every place on the block is a restaurant or bar, and there’s tons of people, especially college kids and lots of hot chicks, walking up and down the whole time. We seemed to draw a good number of people off the street with our music. The owner of the Fez turned out to be a really nice guy who really cares about live music. There was a piano player up front when we arrived, doing Body and Soul and that kind of thing, and the joint was already full from the dinner crowd.

We didn’t go on until ten or so. The owner even emceed and gave us an intro. The place stayed full thru our first two sets, which ran until after midnight. As I said, this was our best gig so far. We now have alot of songs covering a broad range of styles, which we know well and can string together into a solid entertaining program. It really felt like we were hitting on cylinders. It helped too, that the place has a good PA and the stage was small, which meant was could hear each other really well. The third set was a bit more loose and jammin’ but still quite good and a lot of people stayed with us to the end, around 1:30.

Just as we were finishing up the cops showed up. It wasn’t clear why they were there – apparently just to exercise their donut privileges – but they had three cars and they parked right in front to block us from loading out. Anyway Dude invited us back. I want the band to learn The Fez by Steely Dan for the next show.