Romantic Warriors

Well the big news this weekend is that we went downhill skiing. It’s been seven years since the last time we went, for a variety of reasons. This year the stars aligned: I have no band and no gigs, Michelle had no robotics competitions, everyone is feeling healthy, and most of all, we had three or four good snowfalls in the last few weeks; it’s the first traditional winter we’ve had in a long time.

We all need some new kit. My old ski boots no long fit, so I got some new boots. They’re lighter and more comfortable too. As it turns out my skis are so old that the ski shop refused to service the bindings and set them up for my new boots. I didn’t know that was a thing.

Meanwhile Jeannie sent her ski pants, gloves and goggles up to Lizzy, who told us she was going skiing before we started to make our own plans, and asked if we had any equipment she could borrow. So Jeannie got new ski pants, gloves and goggles, and while she was at it, she decided to get a helmet. Luckily her boots still fit and her skis are in good shape. Last time Michelle went skiing she was maybe fifth grade, so she needed a new ski jacket, pants and gloves and goggles too. We decided to rent skis and boots for her on the mountain.

We went up to Catamount in the Berkshires, a mountain about two hours from here that we know well. Our friend Seth, who has a house nearby met us there. We decided to go night skiing cuz the tickets were much cheaper and we didn’t really know how it would go or how long we’d last. Plus we didn’t want to have to get up early and drive. It turned out to be the right call. We got there in time to get the first two or three runs in in daylight. We were all kinda wobbly and unsure but soon found our stride and gained some confidence. The conditions were great and by nightfall there were virtually no lines at the lifts.

I decided to demo skis at the mountain. It turns out skis have evolved in the time we were away. I still think of my old skis as my new skis, even though they’re at least fifteen years old. They’re parabolic, from when that was in fashion, and replaced a pair of much longer and straighter skis from the late 1980’s or early 1990’s. Modern skis are still kinda parabolic, but wider in the middle and wider overall, with rounder tips. The skis are almost like two narrow snowboards. I’m told they’re designed for stability and I must say I was really impressed with how they handled. Once I got used to them I found I was able to carve and hold my turns with less effort and energy than my old skis; I could just lean and let them do the work. Also they’re much more consistent in how they handle across moving from deep snow to the occasional icy patch. So yeah, looking at getting new skis now.

We ended up skiing 12 runs and stayed on the mountain for over four hours. Alot of these were spent a nice wide gentle run where we could practice and gain confidence. After a few of these I was basically pointing my skis straight down the mountain and going for it. We ended the last run going all the way up top and coming down some blue runs.

Couldn’t’ve asked for a better time. And now that we got all new kit we’re hoping to go again before the end of the season. Lizzy went skiing the same night as us, up at Holiday Valley. The package Jeannie sent arrived today.

…

On the drive up and home, we listened to a bunch of records by Return to Forever, the seminal jazz fusion group led by Chick Corea, the groundbreaking jazz piano and keyboard player who passed away last week. Chick is one of my big influences, and I’ve seen him live a few times, including with his Electrik Band, doing a Mahavishnu crossover with John McLaughlin, and in acoustic trio setting. He has over 100 albums across all styles of jazz from the 1960’s to last year, and has tons of stuff I’ve never heard. Of course he has lots of stuff I know really well. I decided to focus on Return to Forever cuz I only own one of his albums, although I used to have a few on cassette as well. I haven’t listened to it in a long time. It’s great stuff, really holds up. Lots of mind-blowing synthesizers, and the other players, Stanley Clarke, Lenny White and Al Di Meola are total monsters. They’re capable of a wide variety of expressive styles individually, and as a group come together as a singular force. At times it’s more prog rock than jazz, but without lyrics.

Bring on the Night

Winter continues. Cold and dark, but at least we made it thru January. Too bad the Bills did not win the AFC championship game, but KC and Mahomes were just really so good. We did enjoy watching a few games with wings and nachos and beers. Josh Allen is young and the Bills are up-and-coming, and at least they’ll avoid renewing the Super Bowl curse.

Meanwhile, we had an epic snowstorm the last two days. A good eighteen inches, maybe two feet, the biggest snow in probably five years. I went out yesterday around noon to shovel and there was already a good foot on the ground, but light and fluffy. By the time I was done another inch had fallen. Today the snow stopped and we went out to shovel again, and it was all wet and heavy. Ah well, it’s done.

In preparation for the storm we watched the classic 1982 John Carpenter movie The Thing. Still a great movie after all this time. Great soundtrack too.

We’ve reformulated our Thursday jazz group with a new piano player Josh. He used to be in a group with Ken and the old drummer from Haven Street, Dan. He fits in quite well in terms of playing, vibe and temperament. In addition to standards we’re doing jazz adaptations of rock and pop songs. So far we’ve hit You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want), by Joe Jackson, which is a favorite that we used to do in a couple rock bands. Also Walking on the The Moon, which works great and turns into something dreamy and ethereal, and Peg by Steely Dan, which also works great, bouncy and bluesy. Next week we’re gonna try Some Skunk Funk by the Brecker Brothers. I went back and listened to the record Heavy Metal Bebop, which I haven’t put on in quite some time, and it just blew my mind, just how far ahead of its time it was. I also forgot that the drummer was Terry Bozio, before he joined Zappa.

In home studio land, I finished my guitar-driven rock song, Why Not Zed, back around Xmastime, and started recording another, All of the Above. I also hashed out the first few minutes, from the intro thru the verse and chorus and into the solo section, of the prog epic Plague of Frogs. But I put these all aside for a while to work on another jazz number. Lift Off was a song I wrote for Haven Street, inspired by John Coltrane’s Countdown, and featuring lots of half-step modulation inside ii-V’s superimposed on a harmonic structure borrowing tonal ideas from the standards Have You Met Miss Jones? and A Foggy Day. Gary brought his Wes Montgomery mojo, which fit the song perfectly and helped sharpen the arrangement.

For the studio version I’m recasting it for tenor sax and organ, with a typical rhythm section of piano, bass and drums. For bass I used an 80’s-sounding synth bass, just as scratch part, but then I like the sound of it and may very well end up keeping it. The tempo of the song is 210 bpm and I don’t know if I can walk that fast on the fender bass anyway. I’ve been experimenting with two bass parts (synth and bass guitar) for alot of this record, so I’ll come up with something else to do on the fender: counterpoint, accents and embellishments. Meanwhile I put down the piano track, which I really played. There’s an arrangement behind the head, then many choruses of comping, and a solo. I laid down the solo last night, and it came out well. even playing at the real tempo. Next comes the organ, which is key to the arrangement. I might end up swapping some parts between the piano and organ; we’ll see how it sounds. Then there’ll be a pass tweaking the bass and drums to give them more dynamics. There’s a drum solo in there too, trading fours with the sax and then just horn and drums for a chorus. Might add in a layer of live drums. Lastly, I’m really psyched to lay down the sax part. I feel like my playing has gotten alot better over the last year and I can really slay an uptempo bebop number.

At my new job I’ve been learning the Google Firebase platform. This is a so-called “serverless” suite of infrastructure components to run the backend of web and mobile applications. It seems to be just the thing we need, and includes services for hosting, auth, file storage, database, backend logic, and analytics. Saves us from having to spin up our own servers and databases and build it all ourselves. So far it all seems to be pretty good. There’s lots of admin controls and vast documentation; not surprisingly there’s alot to know to come up to speed. Still, after less than two weeks starting from zero I have a site with auth and file storage working end to end, and I hope to be talking to the DB tomorrow. Hopefully next week I’ll turn the corner into actual application development and figuring out how my piece fits in with our other products. I guess if there’s one thing Google is good at, it’s writing software. Nevertheless, it feels a bit like a deal with the devil you don’t know. They have their tentacles in so many pies, and the days of “don’t be evil” are long gone. Just this week I read about how they wiped out something like 100,000 negative reviews of the Robinhood app after it locked its users out from buying shares of some stocks, in order to protect some greedy hedge fund guys who way overreached. Interesting times, one thing for sure is they keep on a-changin’.

I Got a Feeling the Bills Are Going to the Super Bowl

A brave new year is underway. So far the winter has been pretty mild, if not exactly warm. Even as the chaos of the world continues to writhe around us, one surprising good thing is the Buffalo Bills are back! It’s been twenty-five years or something since they won a playoff game, and now they’re gonna be in the AFC championship! As a fan back in the day of Jim Kelly and Bruce Smith, I gotta say this is pretty fun and exciting.

One thing I accomplished in 2020 was to work my way thru the entire book Patterns for Jazz by Jerry Coker et. al. on saxophone. It took me about three years to do it in high school, and I must say my facility has leveled up. I’m now starting to work thru to book on piano, and am immediately encountering little tricky things I never thought of before, like how to cross over fingerings when going up a half-step after every riff. Meanwhile in soxphoneland I rediscovered a book called The Bebop Bible by Les Wise. It’s an encyclopedia of jazz riffs for major, dominant, minor, ii-V-II, etc., organized by starting tone. Should keep me busy for a while.

I also went up in weights on my workout toward the end of last year. Winter is usually the hardest time of year for working out cuz the cold makes you sluggish and more susceptible to injury. But so far so good. The last few winters have been pretty rough, so here’s hoping I can ride it out thru to springtime.

Our Friday night D&D campaign had a particularly exciting night this week. Michelle got me the book Tales From the Yawning Portal for my birthday last summer. It’s collection of all-time great D&D modules from the game’s entire history, and includes classics like the Giants’ Saga and The Tomb of Horrors. Since the fall we’ve been playing the Forge of Fury, in which the party explores a once-abandoned Dwarven Mine, which is now overrun with orcs, troglodytes, evil Drow Dwarves, dwarvish and orcish undead, animated armor and other strange Dwarven craftwork, and other assorted nasties. The module has a great pacing to it as each level flows into the next and the level of danger and isolation increase. Also, Michelle got all her cousins new dice for Christmas, themed to their characters, and I bought a pack for myself, all sparkly and cool colors.

This week they reached the very bottom of the dungeon, where a young Black Dragon dwells in an cave with a subterranean lake. It was one of the best combats ever. It began with the dragon killing half the party in the first six seconds, first with a bite attack (natural 20!) on Phil’s character Philbert, a Druid doing advanced scouting underwater with a Cloak of the Manta Ray, and then a breath attack on everyone else. Michelle plays the Cleric Thea and luckily was able to heal everyone. A few rounds went by where the dragon swooped in close to bite and claw, and everyone unleashed everything they had for spells and weapons attack. Lou, playing the Dwarven fighter Luca, jumped onto the dragon, hacked it with his great axe, fell into the lake, swam to shore, scaled a cliff wall and jumped onto it again. He delivered the killing blow just as the dragon used its breath weapon a second time, killing everyone in the line of fire (actually acid). The dead dragon crashed into a cliff wall just past the party’s position, causing further mayhem. The only other surviving member was Phil, who was still in the water. He was able to climb up the bank and heal Thea, who then cast Mass Cure Wounds to restore the party. Epic fun! Next week they’ll try and get out the hoard of treasure out in the middle of the lake. Who knows what nasties they’ll encounter when they get there…

In addition to D&D, other gaming, watching LotR appendices and now football on TV, Michelle has been really getting into baking. She got a cookbook of deserts for Christmas and has been making coffee cake, pumpkin break, cookies and other yummies. Much as this interferes with my new year’s resolution to diet and lose some weight, I find it hard to object.

And finally, I started a new job a couple weeks ago. Suddenly I’m busy all the time and have to plan ahead to get around to minor random tasks. So far it seems good and the people seem pretty cool and and decent. It’s a small company, only six or so engineers and half of them are doing stuff like hardware and industrial design, which is fascinating and a whole ‘nuther area of expertise.

The company makes electronic musical instruments and they hired me to create a media hub which can connect to all the devices and their companion apps and people can share musical content. Right in my wheelhouse. Also the first time I’ve started a fully green-field, all new technology stack with completely free reign in many years. So right now it’s basic requirements gathering and system design.

They do seem to really like meetings, including agile and all the overhead that goes with it: daily progress reports, sprint planning, backlog grooming and all that. It occurs to me that I’ve gone fifteen months of working without having to go to a single meeting that wastes my time, as I don’t use agile in my other projects. I’m wondering if I can help them get better at this, to be lighter and not conflate the map with the territory so much. Of course projects need to be managed one way or another, and alot of it is good, helping me get to know the people and the situation faster than I would otherwise. This week I plan to spin up a web server and start prototyping.

Long December

Well 2021 is here, and there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last. Our holidays were pretty laid back, but we made the most of things. Michelle and Jeannie were both off the week of Christmas and were working/schooling from home the week before that. We went up to Buffalo to visit my parents. We went up a few days earlier than usual, because we’d been isolating, and spent Xmas day there. Lizzy came and joined us, and we all came back downstate together. I must say it’s great to still be able to visit my parents after all these years, and fantastic that they’re doing well. My Mum cooked up an amazing feast and my Dad was out shoveling a good foot of show two days in a row.

On the downside we didn’t get to see alot of people we usually see over the holidays, including Martin, Denis, Larry, Nick and their families. And we didn’t really go out or go anywhere. We did manage to have Mary and her Family, along with Jeannie’s parents, come up for an afternoon last week when it was reasonably warm. We hung out in the backyard and built a fire in our firepit.

That night we watched the Bills game. The Bills are pretty hot this year and Lizzy is a huge fan. For me their Super Bowl run from 30 years ago is etched upon my mind, so it’s nice to daydream of victory. We’ve also been playing alot of board games. Ticket to Ride has become a family favorite, and both Jeannie and Michelle have been playing against the computer to improve their strategy. We also got a new game Azul for Xmas.

Now we’re all back at work and school. I’m finishing off some last loose ends for the Jukebox in preparation for a push to live. It’s down to syncing the song metadata and doing a round of QA. We’ll see how things shape up for the new year.

My project to build a scheduling tool for Origami USA has been coming along. I’m pretty close to having a working prototype, or minimum viable product. I’ve been working closely with Robert Lang, who built and the web site, and (not to surprisingly I guess) is an expert software engineer in addition to being a world class origami artist. I’ve been pulled into the committees for the OUSA web site and convention planning. Mostly it’s a fun hang. There’s a good number of people who’ve been there a while and know how to run things, and a few newbies like myself. All pretty friendly but with enough different opinions to keep things lively. Robert is like Mycroft Holmes, running everything on the tech side behind the scenes and handling a million details.

I’ve also started a consulting gig for a company that makes fun (but but very sophisticated) electronic musical instruments, which they want to to connect up into a social media platform. So far they seem like really great people. This could really be alot of fun, right in my wheelhouse. More info as the situation unfolds.

New Song: Heavy Water

The second of three new songs is nearly done. Listen at:

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/HeavyWater36.mp3


Heavy Water was originally envisioned as a funk-fusion thing a la the Headhunters, built on a riff played on the fender rhodes and clavinet, but it took on a more videogame vibe. Structurally it began with an idea of writing a song with four chords in a loop. This turned into two contrasting four chord loops alternating in an AABA pattern, with a middle section in a BBAB pattern, and then iterating in a fractal sequence. Layered on that are different levels of space and intensity to the groove.

Keeping with the whole computer jazz concept, the music explores the interplay between the human and the machine. There’s both a sequenced synthesizer bass and a fender electric bass played live. Similarly, there’s a synth in melody ensemble along with the saxophones.

I had a pretty specific idea of how I wanted two saxophones to weave in and out with the synthesizers. The middle part of the song features fugue-ish noodling in lieu of a more traditional solo section. It builds from being mainly tenor sax, to tenor and soprano together, and then all three. A breakdown and build before the final recapitulation of the head gives the return more momentum.

One great source of inspiration for the interplay of the two saxes came from a record called Two of Mind by Jerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond. I came across this record last year while listening to different versions of All the Things You Are. The way these two guys interact is just fantastic, a real joy to listen to, a forgotten gem of the cool jazz era. It turns of this is actually the second record they made together, and the first one is just as good, with a great version of Body and Soul.

Lastly I mixed in some machine noise. This was sort of a happy accident. I was down in my studio when Michelle fired up Jeannie’s 3-D printer to make something (a dice jail, I think). It made a really fascinating noise, kinda rhythmic but also melodic, kinda repetitive but also not predictable, in short very jazz-like. So I had to record it. It got me thinking about how one might print our specific shapes to make the printer play a melody. But that’s a whole ‘nuther project…

New Song: Autumn Eyes

The first of three songs I’ve been working on is pretty much done. All that remains is the final mixdown and mastering. You can listen to it at:

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/AutumnEyes30.mp3


I wrote Autumn Eyes for my former jazz group Haven Street in the winter of 2019. Lots of moody, modulating jazz chords and a strong, undulating melody. I originally called it Winter Wolf Whisper. I had the image in my mind of wolf cubs frolicking in freshly fallen, powdery snow, in gentle slow motion. Once I brought the song to the band the sound changed. I had envisioned it as a swinging mid-tempo number like Maiden Voyage, but as we developed it, the song pretty much became a ballad.

Of course doing it on the computer required changing the feel too. One big change was the drums. The main drum part is sequenced, and the playing is pretty minimal. I had the idea to augment it with a live drum part, mainly to get the sound of brushes, which I can’t to do with samples.

The spine of the tune is the piano part. The beginning has the sax and piano playing the melody in unison for eight bars. This was always a challenge to get tight playing live; maybe we should’ve changed the arrangement. But I wanted to use it in the studio version. For the sound, I blended a grand piano with a Fender Rhodes, to give it a bit more smoothness, fullness and shine. I did the bass part on the electric bass but adjusted tone to be jazzier. When we did this song live Jay played upright; the electric changes the character of the piece. I wrote the song with soprano sax in mind. I recorded a version on the tenor, but ultimately went with the soprano. It all hangs together nicely and gives a convincing illusion of spontaneity among a group of players. I tried to approach each solo differently in terms of melody, rhythm and pacing.

I added in some synth strings and bells, just some subtle backing. Last thing was I recorded a live drum part to blend in with the electronics. It’s mainly brushes on the snare drum and a few tom fills and cymbal hits too. I used the Jimmy Page/Gyln Johns method of mic’ing a kit with two mics. One is overheard focused on the snare. The other is well out in the room in front of the kit focused on the kick drum. As a sound check I played some grooves and fills and hits, just to get a sense if how this might work for other songs. It came out quite well.

Let’s All Give Thanks

Thanksgiving weekend came and went. Now we’re into December and soon it’ll be time to put up the holiday stuff and start playing Xmas songs on the piano. Back in the spring, I’m sure most people thought the pandemic would be over by now and life would be back to normal. As it is, it’s worse than ever and there’s no end in sight. Jazz rehearsal was cancelled last week and again this week, just to be sure not to spread it around. It remains to be seen when they’ll open up again. Michelle’s school closed too, and she’s back to taking classes online.

Still we did the best we could under the circumstances. Lizzy came home from college the weekend before. She and her roommates have been doing their best to socially isolate the last two weeks. It was nice having her home. I think Jeannie, Michelle and I have all kinda withdrawn into ourselves a little bit since we’re all home together so much. Lizzy added a dash of fresh energy to the mix.

And even if it was low key it’s still a holiday. Everyone was off work for a few days, and we hung out and played games and listened to music and watched some movies. Jeannie and Michelle did alot of baking and cooking, even though it was just the four of us. Pies and cookies, a full turkey dinner with stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberries and everything. Lizzy contributed a charcuterie board full of exotic cheese and meats and crackers. I made a miniature model of Stonehenge out of sticks of butter, but it fell over once the butter became soft.

On Black Friday we had Jeannie’s parents and her sister’s family over to hang out on my newly expanded patio. As soon as the patio project was underway Jeannie said she wanted to get a backyard fire pit. So we did. We tested it out last weekend, and named it Brad. It worked out great for the party. The weather was mild and we kept the fire going well into the evening. And of course more food. It was very nice. Even though we play Dungeons and Dragons every weekend, I haven’t seen my nibblings face-to-face since last New Year’s Eve.

In fact the weather has been mostly pretty mild through November, and I’ve gotten in a few bike rides in the Nature Study Woods, and a couple weeks ago Jeannie Michelle and I took a hike in Pound Ridge, near South Salem. We spotted some bear caves.

In another sign of the times, I’ve been working with the Origami USA convention committee on planning the next convention. For a while it was looking like the 2021 convention was gonna be back in Manhattan, but now it’s most likely gonna be another online convention. But this one is gonna be bigger, with multiple streams of classes, so building the scheduling tool is back on the menu. We’re also looking to some kind of VR audio/video chat system to take the place of the hospitality room and allow for unstructured social interaction. So I’ve been learning about different tools and products in this space, and the companies that write the software for them.

Meanwhile, it looks like work on the Global Jukebox is going to be slowing down for a while. We have a major release to live coming up in the next couple weeks, the culmination of a year’s work, lots of great stuff. We did alot more done this year than expected because I was able to put in the time. But all good things must come to and end.

In the new year it’s most likely back to working on it part-time, even though there’s a ton of stuff still on the roadmap. You see, The Association for Cultural Equity is a non-profit foundation, and donations are down this year, because of the pandemic, and the economic and political chaos that’s been raging all over America this year. Ah well. It looks like it’d be alot of fun to work at startup doing VR audio/video chat software, so I’ve started talking to a few of them. Wish me luck!

Lastly, the studio recording project proceeds apace. Autumn Eyes is basically done. One day last week I went ahead and recorded a live drum part to blend in with the electronics. I’m mainly doing brushes on the snare drum since I have no way to recreate that using samples. There a few tom fills and cymbal hits too.

I used the Jimmy Page/Gyln Johns method of mic’ing a kit with two mics. One is overheard focused on the snare. The other is well back in the room in front of the kit focused on the kick drum. As a sound check I played some grooves and fills and hits, just to get a sense if how this might work for other songs. It came out quite well. The sound is good, but obviously recording the whole kit together limits one’s options for shaping the sound in postproduction, so you’re gonna haft want that live feel. Also I’m not a tight enough drummer yet to play along to a click track consistently.

Heavy Water is getting close. The main part of the song features fugue-ish noodling by two saxophones and a synthesizer in lieu of a more traditional solo section. I had to be careful things didn’t get too muddled or chaotic to lose the mood, so a bit of editing was in order. I also put in a sort of breakdown and build section before the final recapitulation of the head. All that’s left here is to add some sound effects. I have a recording of the noise made by Jeannie’s 3-D printer that’s perfectly mechanical and quasi-musical sounding. I’m going to fade that in behind the intro, outro and breakdown sections.

Why Not Zed? is close to complete as well. I’m still experimenting with distortion effects on the sax solo. Even a little is pretty overpowering and drastically alters the tone. I’m gonna create a sub out channel for an overdrive amp to mix back in with the normal sax tone.

These songs should all be finished in the next few weeks. Then it’s back to figuring out what songs to work on next. I wrote a new song on guitar called All of the Above. It’s kind of a love song.

Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?

Since I started working from home full time about a year ago, I’ve been going for a walk every morning in lieu of a morning commute. (I’ll usually practice music in lieu of an evening commute.) Since the pandemic started, alot of other people in my neighborhood have been going for walks too, so I’ve been getting to know my neighbors past my block better than before, although we’ve lived here for many years.

I’m not the only one on my block who’s doing home improvements these days. The guy across the street is putting in a new deck, and the people two houses down are putting in a new patio too, although theirs is made of paving blocks not bluestone flagstones. My next next door neighbor Jose is rebuilding his front porch.

Over the weekend Jose helped my transplant my hydrangea shrub. You’ll recall that I tried to dig it out and basically gave up because I couldn’t get any leverage underneath to pry it loose. Jose is a professional landscaper, which is great cuz his yard always looks fantastic, plus he’s got alot of tools and knowledge. He had a couple shovels with extra long handles, which made it much easier to get underneath and pry the rootball from the earth. One we got it out, Jose had the idea that we could split the plant in half and have two of them. We planted one in the new spot I had picked out, and the other we put back close to where it came out, but about a foot further from the house and two feet further away from the patio, so it has room to grow.

Meanwhile things have been busy with work and various projects. I was on at least one zoom call eight days in a row. About half of these are recurring weekly meetings. While the circle of people I talk to face to face has grown extremely local, the circle of people I’m in social contact with has grown very wide indeed. In just the last week or two it includes people in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Long Island, New Jersey, Buffalo, Victor, Westerlo, Saranac Lake, Illinois, Texas, Florida, Colorado, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Singapore, Vermont, The Netherlands, Saugerties and Fredonia. Very 21st century.

Na-Na Na Na, Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye

It feels like I’ve been so busy recently I have no time to get anything done.

The patio is all finished, and it came out great. I got the patio itself done before the end of October, finishing up on Halloween day by filling in the cracks between the stones with sand. The last week of October was kinda stormy and rainy but the first part of November has been mild and beautiful again. The leaves area all golden all around right now. But the days are getting short fast. Suddenly it’s nighttime at five o’clock.

After the patio there was some landscaping to do. The main thing was to use up the pile of dirt that I created digging out the area. Some of it went to fill in low spots in the yard, and the rest to making a slope from the edge of the patio into the existing yard.

I have a hydrangea shrub in my year, right at the edge of the patio where it meets the house. The last task was to move it a couple feet so it would have more room to grow. Unfortunately the thing has grown so big that I was unable to get it out of the ground. I dug around it but couldn’t actually get underneath, and it wouldn’t budge. So I filled it back in and that’s that.

With that done and winter coming, hopefully I’ll get a bike ride or two in before the end of the season. And get back to origami soon.

The recording project proceeds apace. I got my strings and bells in on Autumn Eyes, just a subtle of backing in a few parts. For the bells I’m going for an 80’s DX7 era ice chimes kinda sound. Still gotta track the drum brushes and mallets parts; been thinking that thru.

I did a first pass at a sax solo on Why Not Zed, and the mood is right but I need to get more facile on this changes. It’s an easy part on guitar but on sax it’s got alot of modulation. Kinda like Well You Needn’t by Monk. I added a synth part too. Each new voice is pulling it in a different direction. I like the chaotic effect but it might be a bit much.

Stone Free

I’m still in the middle of mostly the same things. The dude abides.

The patio project nears completion. Just two more big stones to place, and three little ones. I been working an hour or two a day most days, sometimes more. The first week I got alot done, but the second week was slow due to several rainy days. I put in the fill but had to tamp it down and wait for it to dry and tamp it down again.

Last week I got back up to speed, putting in the bed of sand over the fill and laying the stones on top of that. I had originally estimated the amount of sand I’d need based on it being about and inch to an inch and half deep, but it was more like an inch and half to two inches. On top of that, the existing patio had sunk a bit over time on the side away from the house. I had to lift up and level off a bunch of old stones along with the new ones. I didn’t really count on the extent of this so it added a few days and I had to go back and buy more sand.

I should be done this week if the weather is good.

…

I’m close done two of my songs – Autumn Eyes (formerly Winter Wolf Whisper) and Why Not Zed.

Why Not Zed is a post-punk rocker. It now has the guitar and vocals down. All that’s needed is a solo, probably a sax, and maybe some noisy synths back there and some extra background vocals.

Autumn Eyes is a jazz ballad I wrote for the group last year. My recording is another experiment in computer studio jazz; I’d say it’s pretty successful. I played all the instruments, including a piano solo and bass solo, and all hangs together nicely and gives a convincing illusion of spontaneity among a group of players. I tried to approach each solo differently in terms of melody, rhythm and pacing. I was thinking asking Jay to do the bass part, but he wanted to play to a more-or-less completed track and I wanted to have a bass track laid down pretty early, so I did my own, and kept it cuz I like it. Now I’m experimenting with effects to get a good jazz tone out of a fender bass. Lots of treble and chorus.

I wrote the song with soprano sax in mind. Somewhere along the line I played it on tenor and the guys in the group said they liked that better. I recorded it both ways cuz I can’t decide. Each is good in their own way but changes the character of the song.

I still wand to add a little 80’s style string-synthesizer and maybe a few other background instruments for sweetening. Also gonna try some real drums, particularly snare drum with brushes and cymbals with mallets.

My third song Heavy Water is coming along. It was originally gonna be a 70s-ish funk-fusion thing a la the Headhunters, but its evolved into a more videogame vibe. Today I laid down a rough take of the sax. I have a pretty specific idea of how I want two saxes and a synth to weave in and out. But boy, I’ve gotta learn how to improvise on those changes. The original idea of the chord progression was to just have a four-chord loop, but I ended up using two contrasting chord loops, alternating in a complex pattern that catches me off guard from time to time.

In any event, I’m on track to have all these done before the end of the fall. That’ll put me at about 25 minutes of produced music this year – a new record!