Dig a Pony

Spring continues to tease us with alternating spells of warm and sunny then cold and stormy weather. We got out in the yard again last weekend to turn over the flowerbeds and plant some seeds. Also, I initiated project dirt 2022. If you recall, my neighbor across the street had a big pile of dirt that was dug out from having a swimming pool put int. A year ago he encouraged me to take as much as I wanted. I ended up taking fifty or sixty wheelbarrows to fill in low spots in my yard, and grade the area around my newly expanded patio. This year he moved what’s left of the pile closer to the street and again asked me to help get rid of it. Now I’m just filling in a few remaining low spots, mainly in the front where there were once giant trees and the ground continues to settle years later as the stumps underground continue to decay. Also I did the front yard last last year, and was getting tired of the job toward the end. So far this time I’ve put down six wheelbarrows worth, and am maybe about half done. In the end It’ll probably be twelve to twenty loads total. Anyway, it’s good to spend some time out in the sunshine.

Clubs and concert venues are finally opening again after more than two years. We saw the first of a run of spring concerts last week. The Ed Palermo Big Band played the Iridium in NYC. They’re famous for doing big band arrangements of prog rock songs, particularly the music of Frank Zappa. Usually each show has a different theme, and that night they did a tribute to Gary Brooker featuring the music Procol Harum mingled with a bunch Beatles, Yes and of other prog psychedelia. The highlight was toward the end of the show, when the band did A Whiter Shade of Pale, and the horn section joined in on the organ solo toward the end, and just went round with it and built it up to be absolutely huge and soaring. I’m hoping they’ll do Thick as a Brick Sometime.

Global Mobile

Spring is finally here, woo-hoo! The weather was really nice last Friday and Saturday, and I began the spring cycle of yardwork by raking off all the leaves and sticks and debris from the lawn and flowerbeds and under the hedges and on the edge of the patio. Things look much nicer now, and it good to be spending time outside doing sutf again.

I attended a really fascinating meeting last week for the Global Jukebox. Anna wants to create a Global Jukebox mobile app based around some new Journeys. Journeys are guided multimedia experiences in the Jukebox to tell a story, and feature music, text and graphics, sometimes video, plus a responsive map showing the origins of the songs in journey, linked up into a path. She assembled a team of world-class musicologists and cultural scholars to develop the content, and this was the kick-off. My role on the project is as software engineer, so I mainly sat back and listened. The theme for new journeys is the roots of American pop music, tracing its origins back to various kinds of folk music being sung at the beginning of the era of recorded music, and further back to various diaspora from Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and other places, and how the various cultural threads and musical forms came together and influenced each other over time. It was a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion, and I can hardly wait to see what emerges from it.

Meanwhile in my other consulting gig, the Digital Lab at Consumer Reports is picking up momentum. I’ve become immersed in discussions around internet privacy and consumer’s digital rights, both from and issues and policy point of view, and also at technical level. I’m taking over a demo/prototype app, built by a third party vendor, to help people manage their internet privacy. I’ve gotten over the hump WRT setting up tools and all, and have already fixed a few bugs and deployed the front end app to production. Today we had an onsite meeting to discuss strategy as the project, and larger R&D group, move into a new phase. Consumer Reports is a unique place with their own corporate culture. It’s funny how the place is so close to my house, even though the team is all remote. The campus in Yonkers is pretty cool, with lots of testing facilities for household appliances, electronics, and all sorts of other consumer goods one might buy. They have an amazing audio listening room and a completely silent, soundproof room next door. I must say it was weird being back in an office after all this time. There was a handful of people there, some for the first time like me, and others who hadn’t seen their colleagues in a long time.

I’ve been listening to alot of music lately. I did a deep dive into Frank Zappa, after seeing a documentary about him. Zappa has a ton of albums, many of which I’ve never listened to. Live in New York, from 1978, features the Brecker Brother and David Sanborn as the horn section. Mostly I was surprised in particular about the depth and extent of his orchestral works, which existed as a parallel thread to his rock stuff for his entire career. His last album, The Yellow Shark, a recording of his final concert, is a live orchestral performance of his work, and most excellent, fun and interesting. Fun fact: Jazz from Hell was the only instrumental to receive a parental advisory sticker for inappropriate lyrical content from Tipper Gore’s Parents Against Music group of the 1980’s.

The next deep dive was into Joe Jackson. I’ve been assembling and maintaining a songbook of lead sheets to practice on piano, and I got up the letter J in my practice rotation. I was trying to get the bass line together for Stepping Out, which is not so easy when also singing and playing the right hand. I found a demo version on Spotify, on the deluxe edition of Night and Day, and the bass line is alot clearer and more prominent than the actual record. Way cool. Then I listened to bunch of his early records, which I don’t know too well. His start off very guitar-driven and new wave, sort of halfway between Elvis Costello and The Police.

I’ve been listening to alot of Joe Henderson, Horace Silver and Pharaoh Sanders, as we’ve been exploring new material for the jazz group. We’re also doing African Skies by Michael Brecker, and I found several versions of that. The original by the Brecker Brothers and the classic one from Michael’s solo record Tales from the Hudson. There are also a couple cover versions, which leads me to some new bands I want to check out.

Look Sharp!

Well it looked like spring was right around the corner. Last Friday was a beautiful day and I even went for a bike ride, but then Saturday and Sunday it snowed. No heavy accumulation, but enough to make a mess. Up in Buffalo the girls went skiing this weekend. Down here Jeannie and I decided the ski season was over two weeks ago and packed our stuff away until next winter. Ah well.

Meanwhile, I started a new consulting gig a few weeks ago, with the Digital Lab at Consumer Reports. More on that as the situation unfolds, but so far it’s lots of fun and very cool. It’s an R&D lab working in the space of consumer advocacy, digital rights, and online privacy. The people seem smart, organized and forward thinking. I’m doing a combination of hands-on software development, architecture, planning, design and think-tanking. Only problem is, it takes up all my time. Suddenly I’m very busy all day long, and have to plan ahead to slot in all the things I need to do over the course of a week. Hope it doesn’t cut into my saxophoning too much.

Speaking of which, one project I always do in the late winter is to update my photo galleries for the previous year. Considering there was a pandemic going on, we did a fair amount of traveling, and captured enough pictures for a few nice galleries (at least compared to 2020, when we didn’t go anywhere after February). I started thinking I wouldn’t have much, since we didn’t use the snapshot camera at all. However, everyone takes pictures on their phones nowadays.

As usual, these friends-and-family galleries are password-protected, so contact me if you need credentials. Enjoy!

Waiting for the Sun

Been waiting for spring to begin, but still hoping to get one more ski trip in. I really want to start spending time outside, biking and skating and working on the yard. I’ve been feeling good so I’m going to go up in weight on my workout in the next few weeks. I’ve also added pull-ups to my routine.

It looks like the pandemic my finally be ending, so I’ve started looking to get out of the house and go see some jazz and other music concerts. Lots of interesting acts coming around the next few months. I also want to see about getting some gigs for my band. I haven’t played a gig since February 28, 2020 (wow, two years ago to the day). I really don’t know where to start. That group broke up and my new group has a different sound, although you can still call it jazz. I suppose I can start by calling up all the places we used to play.

We’re trying to get together a demo to play for the clubs, so we’ve been taping our rehearsals. We’re sounding really good overall, but you always compare everything you do to the best music you’ve ever heard, and there’s room for improvement to really live up to our potential. We need to focus on a handful songs for a few weeks to get them really tight, to have a really killer demo.

I’ve started the process of transitioning my website to a new host. I ran into issues with my current host not being able to host a Unity app, and their customer service was so terrible I decided I want to get rid of them. However, I’m doing it one step at a time, since I want to do some long overdue upgrades to my site’s architecture, deployment and other things. For one thing I want to deploy via git instead of ftp. So for now, I have a placeholder home page at: https://zingmanstudios.com

More to come soon, so watch this space!

It’s the Time of the Season

So last weekend we went skiing for the third weekend in a row, back up at Catamount in the Berkshires. We were able to catch up with our friends Seth and Cathy, whom we haven’t seen much since before the pandemic started. The conditions were good, and I’m getting more comfortable with my new skis every outing. And once again it was really cold.

Then we had a few warm and mild days, to the point where Saturday it was close to sixty degrees and full of sunshine, and most of the snow had melted. I took the Mustang out for a rare February ride, and after that got on my bike and cruised around the neighborhood. Then Saturday night it turned cold and snowy, and Sunday there was a fresh layer of snow over everything.

I recently read a biography of tenor sax legend Michael Brecker, who used to live one town over in Hastings, and passed away fifteen years ago. He was of course one of my biggest influences in the 80’s and 90’s, with his great big sound, killer chops and boundless imagination, depth and soul in his playing. Among many other things, Mike provided an example of how to apply John Coltrane’s ideas in a contemporary setting and in a rock and funk idiom and then go beyond. His first solo album from 1987 remains one of my all-time favorites. Unlike most biographies of famous musicians, this one gets pretty deep into his actual music, his approach to practicing, improvising and writing, and insights into how he achieved his monstrous technique and applied it in all kinds of different musical situations.

Meanwhile, in my home studio I’m in the middle of tracking three short, singer-songwriter style songs written on guitar. I’ve been be practicing to get my guitar chops up, and experimenting with sounds, phrasing, tone and effects. I think I have two of the three guitar parts in the can. I hope to have full arrangements sometime this spring.

And now that Bluezebub is finished, I’ve been bringing new material into my jazz group. I’ve been listening alot to jazz-adjacent jam bands like Snarky Puppy, Galactic, and Butcher Brown, and hoping to bring some of that kind of thing into our group. We’ve been experimenting with free-from open jams, which is promising and alot of fun, but not very efficient in terms of greeting material. One thing we did was to learn an old song of mine called (I Miss My) Baby in Bb, which has a sort of open funk jam in the beginning and end, framing a funky blues as the main part of the tune. Then Ken listened to Bluezebub, and told me really likes it and would like to play Sun of the Sun off that record. Like Baby in Bb, I wrote Son of the Sun for my 80’s fusion band Event Horizon. It’s a much more advanced song, largely in 5/8 and 7/8, with a long sinuous solo section in the middle.

So now we have this old-school fusion energy in the group. I guess to be fair it was there from the beginning, as one facet of our set is songs by The Brecker Brothers, Weather Report, Grover Washington Jr., and that kind of thing, as well as jazz interpretations of rock song by groups like Steely Dan, Joe Jackson and The Police. And a good chunk of it is pre-fusion modern jazz. About half the songs are originals, mostly of mine, but they come from songs I’ve written for my last few groups and have adapted to this group.

But now I’ve written my first song specifically for this group. It’s called Dr. Pluto, and is a loping funk jam with some Monk-inspired changes and rhythm motifs. The lead on the head is designed for Ken to play on the bass with this auto-wah pedal he’s been fooling around with. It sounds pretty cool and deservers a showcase. Meanwhile I can explore a sort of contrapuntal role on the sax, something I rarely get to do. The arrangement is kept loose on purpose, to give the band a chance to stretch out on it and let it evolve and go somewhere. I’ll bring it to rehearsal this week, and we’ll see how it goes.

Winter Wonderland

It’s been a fun few weeks. A week ago we went skiing, me Jeannie and Michelle, at Catamount up in the Berkshires. It was a great time and we got in ten runs, most of them on Walther’s Way, a nice curvy blue trail with a long, strait run out at the bottom. Last year we hadn’t been skiing in seven years or so, and it was great to get back into it. We went once and it was amazing. Definitely a blessing to still be skiing in our 50’s.

Last season I bought new boots and demoed new skis. This year Jeannie got new boots too, and we both did a full-season demo/rental, where we can keep our skis if we like them instead of getting back our deposit. Skis have changed since we got our last generation of gear, getting on twenty years ago. The fashion now is for shorter, wider skis with a narrow waist. They’re better for carving, and better with some powder on the mountain, but don’t seem to hold a strait line as well, and don’t have much control on ice or scraped-off slope. I got used to mine and like them pretty well, although I can’t seem to go as fast. This fits okay with my current skiing style, which is more about cruising than hot-dogging. Jeannie isn’t digging her new slats. I’m still not sure if I’m gonna keep mine or try something else. I like the ones I demoed last year better than the ones I have now.

We went for the late session, starting in the afternoon and going into the night. On the was home we stopped by a restaurant called Four Brothers Pizza. They actually have four locations between our home and the ski slope, this was the third one. I must say it was great, better than I expected. The food was great, hot cappuccino and soup most welcome. Deep-dish Chicago style pizza; I guess we’re far enough out of the New York City Area. The decor was murals of ancient Greek and Roman temples, landmarks, seascapes and scenes out of mythology, very well done, over-the-top but nevertheless appropriate to the ambience.

During the week we went to Hades Town, a Broadway show. It was the first Broadway show for me in many years, although Lizzy and Michelle have been to a few the last several years. We met Jeannie at her office, a major book publisher, and they had some of their all-time best books on display in the lobby, including The Call of Cthulhu, and D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. We went to dinner and went to Yum Yum, a Thai food place in Hell’s Kitchen, one of our favorite lunch places back in the day when Jeannie and I both used to work in midtown. Good to know they’re still there and the food is as good as ever.

One thing that struck me about walking around midtown is how empty the place was. I’ve been in that neighborhood when it was wall-to-wall pedestrians and you had to practically elbow your way thru the crowd to move at all. This night you could move around with ease. Maybe five percent or less of the usual level of foot traffic.

The show itself was great. Hades Town is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set to the music of old time Appalachian folk, blues, country and jazz. The songs were great, clever and moving, and the performers were fantastic too, especially the actor who played Hades, but the trombone player stole the show.

Then this last weekend we went up to Buffalo to take Michelle back to school for her next semester, and we brought our skis with us. In the past we’ve been up there around Xmastime and brought our skis, but it’s early in the season and there’s a good chance it’ll be too warm or there won’t be enough show. I haven’t been to Buffalo at the end of January for many years, and I gotta tell you, neither of those things were a problem. There were two feet of snow on the ground all around, and the temperature was below 20 degrees the whole time. I grew up in Buffalo, but I’ve almost forgotten what a real winter feels like. Nevertheless, I was quick to adapt.

We went to Holiday Valley, which is the mountain where I learned to ski. Lizzy joined us as well as Michelle. It’s not particularly high compared to the Catskills, let alone Vermont or the Sierras, but it’s enough to be fun. I haven’t been there in thirty years. They’ve made some improvements with more and faster lifts and more lodges. The day we went the high was 12 degrees, so we were hoping the cold would keep people away, but no such luck. We had to circle the parking lot three times to find a spot, and when we got to the base lodge the lift lines were pretty long. But once we got up on the mountain it was fine. Our friend Larry joined us, and he’s been skiing there alot and knew his way around. We went to the back side, to a lift called Tamarack or Tannenbaum. The trails there were beautiful, winding and woodsy with lots of good powder. Perfect soul skiing. We did run after run and went in for hot cocoa after a couple hours. Then we did one more session, up and down the Mardi Gras lift and trail, which was long and strait, mainly going for all-out speed. I think we did twelve or thrirteen runs in all. By the time we got off the mountain it was twelve degrees below zero.

Afterwards we went out to dinner at Ellicotville Brew Club, one of a growing number of craft beer places in the Buffalo area. While we were gone, there was a major snowstorm back at home. Jeannie set up a a little web cam so we could watch our yard fill up with snow. To our surprise, our neighbor Kevin across the street came over and cleared our driveway. He has a giant snowblower and I guess he doesn’t have a chance to use it that often. He’s done a bunch other kind things for us (remember project dirt last year), and the bar happened to be selling variety packs of their beers, so we picked one up for him as a thank-you.

Bluezebub by Buzzy Tonic is Released

Check it out, my new studio album of jazz/jam instrumentals is now out in the world for sale, streaming and download.

On Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/3aTsS3lkRloyHqOfvPD6eo

On the iTunes store: https://music.apple.com/us/album/bluezebub/1605176979

I even got a batch of CD’s printed up, although at this point that’s mostly just for fun and promotional purposes.

It’s kinda pathetic the state of album distribution these days. Big tech is making harder for artist than ever. There are no record stores any more for physical media, not even online. CD Baby seems to have gotten out of that business. iTunes charges on 99 cents for a song, regardless of length. Even though there are only six songs, it’s a full length album and should be priced accordingly. But those basterds make the rules, not me. And Spotify pays virtually nil as well, unless millions of you turn on to it. Ah well, at least y’all can stream or it download it into your music library, and listen again and again. Hope these become some of your favorite songs.

And of course, Go Bills!

Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World

It’s post-holidays deep winter. We finally snow got some snow, followed by a pretty good cold spell, solidly below freezing the last few days. Gonna get down in the teens tomorrow. At least the snow makes the sunshine alot brighter. We’re starting to think about when we can go skiing.

There has been no jazz rehearsal in a month. The studio has been closed due to the pandemic surge. This week they’re reopening, with new distancing and mask protocols. But now our drummer has covid and needs to isolate for a week. On the upside, I’ve gone from practicing piano twice a week to four times a week. It’s a amazing what extra boost that gives to the finger dexterity and muscle memory, not to mention being able to explore different material and ideas.

I’m still waiting for my new record Bluezebub to come back from the CD manufacturing and to work it’s way thru the system to appear on iTunes and Spotify. I’ve played the record for a few friends and the all like the songs and the playing, but have commented in particular at how good the mixes sound. At first I was thinking maybe this was a left-handed compliment, even if well intentioned. After all an album is supposed to sound good, that’s just table stakes. But I did put a good deal of care into the dynamic compression as well as the mix itself. The mastering FX chain is different than my previous records. I sought to make it much more dynamic than a modern pop record, but much hotter and more saturated than a classic jazz record without loosing any of the tone. I guess I pulled it off.

Meanwhile I dusted off my in-progress rock record. I have three completed songs from before I switched my focus to Bluezebub. One, The Story Lies sounds great as-is, but I’ve made updates to the other two.

Why Not Zed? has a new bari sax part to replace the tenor sax, since I liked the bari so much on Bluezebub. Now it sounds way hipper, darker and heavier, sort of a Morphine vibe.

Who Speaks on Your Behalf sounded a bit to sweet, even though I had some buzzy synths and fuzztone bass in there. So I added an electric guitar part with lots of thick distortion (preset #18 on my Vox box). Just the right touch. I was inspired after meeting Mike, the guitar player on the original Cheshire Cat track, at a King Crimson concert last fall. I had originally eschewed guitars on my arrangement, bringing in synths and saxes to fill out the sound. But then thought of an approach to guitar that I could play and would work with the song, focusing on contrasting staccato and sustained rhythmic figures.

I’m getting more confident writing and arranging guitar parts, exploring different sounds and feels. So in contrast the the jazz record, which has no guitar at all, I’m gonna try and get guitar on every track of the new rock album. The next couple songs I’m putting down are gonna be based on rhythm guitar rather than piano as the spine. One thing watching Get Back made me realize is I can do pretty much anything on guitar that John can. It’s not so hard if you don’t try and get too complicated.

Anyway, here are the new mixes. Enjoy!

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bzvr/WhyNotZed24.mp3


https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bzvr/WhoSpeaksOnYourBehalf33.mp3


https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bzvr/TheStoryLies24b.mp3


New Year State of Mind

It’s been a little while since I last posted. Took some time off for the Christmas holidays. Both kids came home the week before Christmas for a whole week, which very nice. Lots of baking and gaming and listening to music and watching movies, and of course visiting with family. Lizzy’s boyfriend Tim came down too and spent a couple days with us. Mary’s came over on Christmas day and we had a great big feast. On boxing day we went up to Buffalo and visited with my parents and Martin for a few days. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them, and Martin’s kids are getting big fast. Charlie is thirteen now. Martin and I stayed up late talking, alot about music and software and things, but there’s never enough time to get into everything there is to say. We saw our friends Steve and Scott up there. Haven’t seen Steve in some time, so it was good to catch up. Both have been going thru difficult times. We did not see my friend John due to the the threat of heavy weather, nor Larry and Jackie due to the threat of covid. Nor did we see any of the extended family from Canada. Ah well, we’ll be back in a month, hopefully with our skis.

Over the break I read C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet and the rest of his planet trilogy, regarded as one of the groundbreaking classics of science fiction. (Earlier in the pandemic I tried to read Jack Vance’s Dying Earth saga, but I had to put it down because, you know, dying Earth and all that.) The planet trilogy is fascinating and very well written, but not what I expected. The first book is about a journey to Mars, in which the protagonist meets some wise aliens, including ones made of energy. The second takes place on Venus, and goes deeper into similar themes. The third book takes a sharp left turn and is set on Earth, in postwar England, and involves sinister research institutes, strange conspiracies, Arthurian legends, the Numinor, reanimated talking heads, and a pet bear, among other things. A surprisingly well executed combination of science, mysticism, philosophy, mythology, action and adventure and even terror. Still mulling it over.

Before the kids came home I wound down and wrapped up the year’s work. The last half of November into the first half of December was super busy. There was a big push of new work for the Global Jukebox, to support a talk Anna gave at a conference. Improved playlist and lots of other stuff.

I’ve also been looking for other consulting and software gigs, with an eye toward getting into web 3D, three.js, and Unity, with the long term goal of developing my own independent games. I’ve been working on my own but there’s alot to learn, so I’d like someone to pay me to get deeper into it while leveraging my existing skill set.

A while back I applied to a place that makes casual card and board games, looking to get into the online gaming space via Steam and Jackbox. It seemed like a perfect gig for me. However, between the time I made first contact and the time they set up the main interview, the job morphed from full stack engineer to Unity dev. The company wanted me to do an all-day Unity coding challenge. Normally I’d tell them to get lost, but this looked like a good opportunity to get up the learning curve faster than I otherwise would. In the end they didn’t want me for the Unity role, but the full stack role is still in the offing.

Meanwhile I’ve been working on my own little game, called Rock-Tac-Toe, so I plan to finish that up, both as a Unity application and as a web/mobile app, so I can compare the pros and cons of each approach.

Another area I’ve been trying to get deeper into is music software. Out of the blue I got a call from these guys from Switzerland. They’re academic researchers in computational musicology, and fans of the Global Jukebox. They have a database of 20,000 classical music compositions as midi files, and some kind of software tool to do statistical analysis on the corpus, and they’re looking to build a web application to publicly showcase their work. They seemed really eager to work together. I submitted a scope of work proposal, but unfortunately they were not clear about their budget, so it came in high. I submitted another, scaled back proposal, and am waiting to hear back.

In music, I finished my fourth Buzzy Tonic studio album. Unlike previous records, this one is all jazz instrumentals. I titled the record Bluezebub [Pandimensional Jazz Tesseract], after the song Bluezebub, the Devil You Don’t Know. It should be on Spotify, iTunes and Amazon any day now. I even got a small batch of CD’s printed up.

Now it’s on to the new rock record. More on that soon. For the moment I’ll remind you that I had three songs in the can before I switched my focus to the Jazz Tesseract, and several more in various stages of writing and recording. I started by dusting off the completed songs, and decided to add some new overdubs to two of them.

One of my goals for 2021 was to increase the amount of weight I lift when I work out. For bench press I went up 15 lbs., and am back up above 200 lbs. for the first time since six years ago, when I suffered a rather severe injury to my left shoulder and pec. For curls and most everything else that uses dumbbells I went up a similar amount, from 100 lbs. to 115, and from 50 lbs. to 90 for the light weight exercises. For 2022 I aim to add another ten pounds to every set.

The global pandemic looks to be entering its third year, with still no end in sight. We keep making and cancelling plans. We were supposed to go out to California last fall, then were thinking of going to Arizona this winter break. Now we’re thinking of going on a ski trip instead, somewhere more local were we can drive instead of fly, and spend most of our time outdoors.

And lastly, Go Bills!