Still Rock’n’Roll to Me

The other night I took Jeannie and the girls to see Billy Joel at Madison Square for her birthday. Billy is one of Jeannie’s all-time faves and it was Michelle’s first arena concert, so they were all very excited. Billy’s grown on me over the years too. Last time I saw him was in the 80’s at the height of his pop phase and at the time I thought he was pretty cheesy. He spent a few years not doing much and somehow emerged as one of the all-time greats of rock. Now he’s not exactly touring, but doing one show a month at the Garden, supposedly indefinitely until he stops selling out. I might go back again in the summer.

He’s never sounded better. Since he’s put on weight his voice has more power and resonance, and a soulfulness it never had before. Billy’s piano playing keeps on improving too. He reminds me of Bud Powell, with hands like bear paws flying around while his fingers hardly seem to move. We had great seats BTW, directly behind the stage looking down at the band. I could see Billy’s hands quite clearly and I can tell you he doesn’t always follow the way the music is in the book!

Billy has a great band too. He’s got nine players and between then cover all the sounds from all his different styles and really nail the sound of the record. Horns, guitars, synths, drums, percussion, everything. This group has been together a long time and have a really good collective vibe and are really tight.

Yet at the same time the set was pretty loose. Billy kept on throwing in improvisations, bits of other songs, changing the lyrics to little jokes (“It’s a pretty good crowd for a snow day”), and extemporaneous raps between songs. He was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ coming to America, and threw in part or most of When I’m Sixty-Four, The Night Before, and A Hard Day’s Night, as well as Let It Snow and Layla as intros/interludes. At one point he looked at the next song on the set list (I could read it off the teleprompter) and played a different song entirely.

As far as the actual set goes, Billy played alot of deep tracks mixed in with the big hits, and skipped all of his songs I don’t like. Highlights include Miami 2017, Vienna, Zanzibar, Allentown, Movin’ Out, Captain Jack, New York State of Mind, Always a Woman, River of Dreams, and Scenes From an Italian Restaurant. I checked the set list from his January show and he did about half the same songs and half other stuff. The encores were Big Shot, Still Rock and Roll to Me, You May Be Right, and Only the Good Die Young.

Great show. Happy birthday honey!

Super Winter

January was very, very cold. Some people have told me it was the coldest on records in 20 years. It was down to 3 or 5 degrees a lot of mornings, and even on warm days it only got into the teens. It takes a lot of energy to endure the extreme cold and by the end it feels like a miracle to survive. Luckily no on in the family got sick, although pleanty of people were out at the office.

Last week two of the guys in our band called in sick for practice, the lead singer and one of the guitarists. So Mike the bassist and I split the vocals. Some of our songs worked better as a quartet than others, so toward the end of session we just started calling songs to jam. I called two from the Infinigon days that went over so well we added them to our set. One is Burnin’ for You by Blue Öyster Cult. The other is Money by Pink Floyd. I had heard Mike jamming on the opening riff to warm up once before so I knew he knew it.

February came and started with a really warm weekend. It was up into the 40’s on Saturday and the 50’s on Sunday. Everything melted, and I even started up my Mustang and let it idle in the driveway for 20 minutes or so. I thought of taking for a drive, but the roads were all full of slush and salt, so I waited.

Today it’s heavy snow again. Already to 6” or so since I woke up. And in the middle of if the tree people finally showed up to take the logs off our yard and cur down the stunp. They’re at it now with a giant truck-crane-claw and a chainsaw. I’ll bet the lawn underneath is totally trashed but at this rate it’ll be quite a while before I can see it.

New Recording: Now and Forever

Here’s a new recording of Now and Forever, a jazzy ballad. You may recall Michelle came up with the lyric and the tune a couple years back (she was in third grade at the time; she’s now in fifth) and I helped her put it into shape and work out the arrangement. We recorded it for Jeannie for mother’s day. I liked it so much I decided to do my own version. I ended up making it a duet, so Michelle is still singing on the track. It came out very nicely.

I’ve also been experimenting with EQ on the bass, since that’s one of the keys to a really good sounding mix. Been trying to get more power and definition in the low end while removing the mud. You can hear new mixes of Is It Safe? and Black Swan.

I think this set of tunes is pretty much done, except for final mixing and mastering. We’re up to five, which is a good album side. Now it’s onto the next batch of partly-written tunes that need to get fleshed out. I’ll let you know in a while how that’s coming along.

Music Site Update: Elixr

Back from xmas break. Had a brief trip upstate to visit family and friends. Heavy weather driving both ways. Great to see everyone and glad the everyone is doing well. My dad got eye surgery and for the first time in my life doesn’t need to wear glasses anymore. Discovered the Hamburg Brew Pub.

The new year is off to a cold and snowy start. Last night we had a foot of snow, canceling my band practice. Both the kids had no school today, extending our xmas break. Took a good hour and change to shovel out, even with Lizzy’s help. Luckily the snowblower started right up after not being used for almost a year.

I’ve been updating the music section of my web site at zingman.com/music. I’ve added a link for The Relix, and added links to the new tracks on the Buzzy Third page, Is It Safe to Go Outside? and Black Swan, which prettty much bring me up to an album side. I changed the working title of the third Buzzy Tonic record to Elixr. It’s an anagram of Relix and also a play on the whole Buzzy Tonic theme.

I also came up with a logo, which makes a much better place holder for the eventual album cover than what I had before. This particular task has been on my todo list for a whole year; indeed made a sketch last xmas vacation. Constructing something like this in the computer is extremely tedious for me, so instead I drew it by hand and traced over in sharpie to get the right combination of precision and looseness. This is a technique I used a lot in college when I was studying design and architecture. Then I scanned it and played around with filters in photoshop until I caem up with something I liked. It’s been a long time since I used photoshop this way. I was able to achieve a rich look buy building up lots of layers of effects with varying transparency, a lot you’d build up layers using paint.

Even though I like how it turned out the colors don’t particularly match what I had going on the BZ3 page. Like I said it’s a placeholder for the eventual album cover, so I’ll continue to play with it. Meanwhile enjoy!

New Recording: Is It Safe?

Just in time for winter, I finally finished a rough mix of Is It Safe to Go Outside?.

Musically it’s sort of a power-pop song, but with some clever interplay of parts and a bass line that seems to turn the time around. The song was written by Martin and my version is based on his demo. In fact I kept his original guitar and bass parts. The song has been mostly done for a while, but it took a long time to track the backing vocals and piano parts. My velocity on the recording project is down this year, because first I was finishing my book and then I joined a band was focused on learning new songs and upgrading my gear. Now that’s all done and hopefully progress will level out again. I have a few more mostly finished songs that I hope to polish off soon, and then a few halfway-written ones to dig into in the new year.

Reindeer Games

Rewinding again to catch you up, and like I said we been busy. Thanksgiving day we woke up and realized for the first time since Labor Day we have a stretch of four or five hours where no one had something they needed to do or anyplace they needed to be. We had TG dinner out on Long Island with family. A very nice day. Next day we declared Slack Friday, in which we all laid around the house and played videogames and that sort of thing, and diligently avoided the mall. Jeannie turned me on to Candy Crush. Finally something useful I can do on my Android thingie.

Last few weeks have been busy at work. Year-end reviews. Planning. Strategic planning, technical planning, roadmaps, many meetings. It looks like the whole middle-tier project is a go. More on that as it unfolds. We’ll be taking the ring to Mordor in a fellowship of nine companions. Hope we don’t run into any spiders.

We only have three weeks between TG and Xmas this year, compressing the whole works. Getting the tree up and all the decorations, doing the cards, shopping for gifts. We’re up to twelve nieces and nephews this year, as well as two wonderful kids, and a wife and siblings and in-laws and everyone else. I guess that’s a blessing if there ever was one. The good news is we figured out good gift ideas for almost everyone by now and have most of them bought.

We’ve gotten snow three times now in the last week, mixed with a bit of sleet and freezing rain. We have a good 6″ on the ground now, maybe more but not yet a foot. Also our front yard is full of giant logs. The tree people finally came to chop down our elm tree, but they only did half the job. They cleared away the minor branches, left all the big limbs on the ground and the trunk is still standing. It’s amazing how tall that tree is. Still over 100 feet without the crown. I wonder if I can sell the wood for lumber.

They’ve been canceling and rescheduling the kid’s event left and right cuz they’re all very skittish about the weather. Up in Buffalo they get three feet of snow and they just carry on, but not down here. Last night Lizzy had her Christmas show, rescheduled from Saturday, with her group Young at Arts. They’re very good and do fairly highbrow stuff like Benjamin Britten and Aaron Copeland, and some pop stuff too. Lizzy is in the a capella group, whose performance of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was to me the highlight of the show. They had the whole hall spellbound. Michelle was in the Xmas pageant at ICS tonite, which was carols and the nativity story, very warm and festive. Saw lots of friends from school I haven’t seen a while.

Three more days until vacation. One more big demo deadline. We’ve all been extremely busy and can use a break. The big thing I’ve had to let slide is my ongoing recoding project. Over the weekend I finally finished tracking Is It Safe?, adding some backing vocals. I have three songs pretty much ready for mixing: Is It Safe?, Now and Forever, and Black Swan. In addition I have three older songs that I want to tweak/remix: Rocket to the Moon, Sea of Tranquility, and Karn Evil 9, 2nd Impression. This will give me an album side, with the ELP tune as a bonus track. My goal is to have this done by the new year and start in on a batch of new tunes in January.

Relix Rewind

Rewinding a bit, The Relix played two shows the week before Thanksgiving. Both went well and some great moments, but revealed some things we need to work on. For the first show, we had some feedback issues with Lee’s hollowbody and pedalboard interacting with the PA, and some issues with the vocals not being loud enough. Lee’s gonna start bringing his rig to rehearsal rather than use the house setup until he has some better control of his sound. Also we’re gonna do a vocal-only practice soon and set up our PA and see if we can make sound killer or if we should replace it with a newer board with better reverbs. The other issue is we need to figure out how to draw a bigger crowd. The Thanksgiving Eve show was kinda disappointing because we all knew it’s a good bar night, but the weather – freezing rain mixed with snow – kept people away. Still it was a good show on a musical level and a fun time.

Here’s a video montage of the show at Victor’s.

And here’s some pictures, mainly of gig at Seaside.

After Thanksgiving half the band was sick and one guy fell off a ladder putting up Christmas decorations. I’ve been fighting a cold and sore throat on and off. Not enough to knock me out but enough to make my singing kinda croaky. This week we finally got together for a rehearsal. We spent about half the session tightening up endings and transitions, and the rest of the time on new material. We ran down six songs, all of which feel like keepers: Domino by Van Morrison and Touch Me by the Doors were both suggestions of mine. Domino is just a great feelgood song and gives us another horn-oriented 60’s tune while getting away from the Motown thing. Touch Me has some really weird changes when you try to work ‘em out, and one of the all-time classic sax solos. The others were Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet, a bit of change of direction for us, and Runaround by Blues Traveler, which has a great harp part for Paul, and Devil With the Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly, which is right in our core zone.

Origami Site Update

Yikes! It’s late November already. Winter coming soon. Tons of leaves all over nowadays and the trees are mostly bare. Hoping to get the Mustang out one more time. Run baby run.

Lots going on. Work had been busy with deadlines, planning and releases. I worked part of last weekend, and I’ve been slammed all week this week, but there’s the holidays coming up. Also the plus side, I’ve been learning Scala, which is the first really new thing I’ve done at work in a while. On the downside, I ran out of time over the weekend and didn’t work on my recording project. I’m getting close to finishing two songs, Is It Safe? and Now and Forever. Guess they’ll have to slide one more week.

I taught a Special Session at the museum last Sunday. My dog Timber and cat Sophie. Class went well. One of the students was a total whiz kid, and another was her dad, who’s not a folder but still did really well, although I had to explain everything in much more detail. I dropped off my models for the Holiday Tree and gave myself a quick tour of the museum while I was there. The dinosaurs and the whale room remain essential highlights.

I’ve been getting ready for a pair of gigs coming up with The Relix. We added a few new songs and have been sharpening up the ones we already have. Trying to get from a run-of-the-mill bar band to a truly awesome bar band. I think we have what it takes but it’ll take time to get that tight. Right now we’re in the better-than-shitty category. Looking forward to the shows. Should be a really good time and I expect we’ll get better each gig. So ya, lots of practice. I’ve been working especially on my singing.

This last practice our bass player was sick so I had to cover all the bass parts with my left hand. It went pretty well, in that my left hand has gotten pretty solid and I was able to cop a fair imitation of most of the bass lines. However, the sound wasn’t the same, and I don’t know all the songs as well as I’d like, so there were a few “I’m thinking” clams, especially when I was singing too. Nevertheless it went pretty well, and Mike will be back for the show, and I got an interesting new perspective on the songs. I’ve been practicing soloing in Light My Fire over the bassline, and I’m glad I did cuz I was able to keep it together and still pull off a pretty good solo.

But the main news for this post is that I’ve started making new updates to my web site. The first thing I did was to update my origami pages to include my new models from 3013. I have nine of them, and there’s still a month and change left in the year, so there may even be one or two more. I also update the page for my book now that I have a cover image and know the real title, which BTW is now Origami Animal Sculpture and not Origami Untamed. There’s even a link to preorder it.

Beyond that the big change in the offing is to add some kind of slideshow or multi-image capability to the pages for the models. Once that’s in place it’s on to the music site, hopefully just in time to line up with a new round of songs. As I mentioned I’m getting close to finishing two more songs. I’ve also taken on doing an upgrade to the Relix site, so watch for that.

Speaking of updates, I finally got the second proof of my book this week, so there was a mad scramble to review it and get feedback to the publisher. The good news they fixed most of the layouts for the diagrams, and got rid of the GoOfY CaPiTaLiZaTiOn thing they were doing. The bad news is, for some reason they didn’t fix all the layouts, so there’s still one more round of reviews ahead.

In completely unrelated news I found out today that John F. Kennedy grew up just a few blocks from my house, up the hill on Pondfield Road.