Don’t Get Around Much Anymore

Sometimes work can be fun. I recently completed an assignment for The Global Jukebox to put together a list of the greatest jazz singers of all time, along with representative songs to showcase their greatness. It’s been very enjoyable listening and curating the list, and I learned alot along the way. For example, Nina Simone used to live in my neighborhood.

Originally I had wanted to do the top ten or maybe twenty artists, but it was hard to stop. I extended it out to thirty, albeit with fewer songs as you get on down the line. The list features both old and newer singers, spanning the entire history of jazz. Some central to the genre, others maybe coming in from neighboring forms such as blues or pop, but nevertheless great contributors to the legacy of jazz as an art form, and particularly to the vocals. It also really gets across the variety oh jazz styles out there and how it’s evolved over time.

Even though list is definitive because I say it is, naturally that’s absurd. It’s necessarily pretty subjective. Of course Ella, Satchmo and Lady Day are 1-2-3. After that you can debate the relative ranking of the performers or maybe point out someone that I neglected to include. That’d be a fun debate. Regardless, all the performers and songs listed here are pretty great.

Here’s a link to the playlist on Spotify. Enjoy!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4VZSjgb7157yUQ9KmrSvvd?si=S0mnQa89RGK3_Og5q0KVRg

Greatest Jazz Singers of All Time for The Global Jukebox

1. Ella Fitzgerald – How High the Moon, I’m Beginning to See the Light (w/ Duke Ellington), My Romance, I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm, The Lady is a Tramp

2. Louis Armstrong – Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Jeepers Creepers, Cuban Pete, Hello Dolly, What Wonderful World

Bonus: Ella & Loius – Cheek to Cheek, Dream a Little Dream

3. Billie Holiday – Gimme a Pig Foot and a Bottle of Beer, Strange Fruit, Lover Man, Stars Fell on Alabama, God Bless the Child

4. Tony Bennett – (I Left My Heart) In San Francisco, Anything Goes (w/ Lady Gaga), There Will Never Be Another You (w/ DaBrubeck)

5. Sarah Vaughn – Black Coffee, Lullaby of Birdland, Body and Soul

6. Johnny Hartman – Lush Life (w/ John Coltrane), My One and Only Love (w/ John Coltrane), Our Love is Here to Stay

7. Frank Sinatra – Fly Me to the Moon (w/ Count Basie Orchestra), Summer Wind, Luck Be a Lady

8. Dee Dee Bridgewater – Afro Blue, St. James Infirmary (w/ New Orleans Jazz Orchestra), Love from the Sun (w/ Theo Croker)

9. Kurt Elling – Nature Boy, Matte Kudasai, Steppin’ Out

10. Esperanza Spalding – I Know You Know, Cuerpo Y Alma, Funk the Fear

11. Gregory Porter – Liquid Spirit, Holding On

12. Chet Baker – Do It the Hard Way, Everything Happens to Me

13. Nat King Cole – Unforgettable, Smile

14. Shirley Horn – A Foggy Day, Makin’ Whoopee

15. Mel Tormé – They Can’t Take That Away from Me, The Christmas Song

16. Etta Jones – Bye Bye Blackbird, Etta’s Blues

17. Joe Williams – Five O’Clock in the Morning, Don’t Get Around Much Anymore

18. Nina Simone – I Put a Spell on You, Mississippi Goddam

19. Bessie Smith – Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out, Devil’s Gonna Git You

20. Ray Charles – Mess Around, America the Beautiful

21. Joni Mitchell – Goodbye Porkpie Hat

22. Billy Eckstine – Oo Bop Sh’bam

23. Dinah Washington – Destination Moon

24. Jazzmeia Horn – Out the Window

25. Patti Cathcart – I’ve Got Just About Everything (w/ Tuck Andress)

26. Dianna Krall – Peel Me a Grape

27. Bobby McFerrin – Thinkin’ About Your Body

28. Norah Jones – Don’t Know Why

29. Harry Connick Jr. – It Had to Be You

30. Etta James – At Last

Victory Hearts

In the home studio realm, I’ve been leveling up on electric guitar and learning alot.

My guitar is a semihollowbody, a Joe Pass edition Epiphone Emperor II which I picked up used, and is actually very nice guitar. Very playable, excellent feel and sound. It’s great great for a clean sound, and perhaps surprisingly, heavy rock too. It’s first electric guitar I’ve ever had that I really like playing, that feels natural to me. I’ve been practicing every day, getting it all together with control over my tone, effects, amp feedback, and which strings I strum, mute or let ring.

Now, every electric guitar player I know has a pedalboard. No two pedalboards are alike. Guitarists spend they’re whole lives tweaking it, taking it apart and putting back together, adding, removing and rearranging the pedals. It’s a personal quest for their true tone, the outer sonic expression of their inner self, much like saxophonists with their reeds and mouthpieces already.

Naturally once they’ve perfected this singular, super-advanced electronic system capable of such a vast range of tones, moods and sounds, they settle in to two or three presets for ninety-five percent of what they play.

I cut to the chase and use just one box, with three knobs and two buttons, but capable of producing all those sounds in a single pedal. I spent some time playing my Vox StompLab pedal thru my amp and trying out all the different sounds, looking for the one true preset, and narrowed it down to a handful of contenders.

I’ve mainly just been woodshedding one song so I can record it. It’s The Story Lies, originally written by Martin on the guitar. And although his setup is pretty different (he plays a 12-string), he’s been giving me guidance on how to craft my tone and improve my technique, at least as it applies to his songs.

My first attempt at recording I came out of the back of my giant Roland JC amp. The sound was awesome but the amp is super loud and super noisy. I couldn’t hear anything else when I was tracking, even if I used headphones. And the feedback which I wanted to capture turned out to be impossible to control. If you accidentally let the E string ring it just dominated everything.

So I took the amp out the equation and re-patched. I now have the guitar going DI into input 1 and thru the stompbox on input 2. Without the additional drive and chorus from the amp I dialed up the preamp in the stompbox to make it suitably nasty. This soon began to look like a reasonable approach.

It’s amazing just how much sustain the FX adds; t’s like playing an organ vs. a piano and really changes the way you approach the arrangement. I laid down a really good take of my part, only to discover that it clashed with the keyboard part in the verse, with both instruments competing too much for the same space. Which is ironic, since I changed around the guitar part to try and make it fit better, giving it more space and chakka-chakka. I came up with a new part that’s closer to Martin’s original part and it fits much better. I laid down a solid take tonight. One small victory, Woohoo!

Martin of course has lots of great songs, and I tend cover about one every album I make. It’s good to do other people’s songs from time to time cuz it makes you try out new ideas in recording, sound, instrumentation, arranging, themes, moods, everything really.

Meanwhile, he’s been busy with a recording project of his own, and he’s been exploring and branching out too. He recently mixed a number of songs he’s been working on the last couple years. Martin’s songs tend to be guitar-oriented rock featuring his overdriven tenor sax. Some songs are almost power pop, others lean towards prog and are challenging in surprising ways, and his lyrics are thoughtful and clever, sometimes fun and sometimes serious.

Since he’s been putting time and effort into his mixes, he’s leveled up at that, mainly by backing down the compression and reverb and riding the faders more. You can hear his latest collection of songs at:

https://soundcloud.com/user-746959159

Folding Time

It’s been a while since I wrote a post about origami, but I’ve been pretty busy with origami stuff since I got back from Spain.

First off, going back to the new year, I’ve been doing work for Origami USA, taking over the scheduling function for the annual convention. This involves several activities, the most important being to create the schedule of classes for the convention. This is supported various kinds of software, whose maintenance and authoring I’ve taken over.

On the OUSA web site there’s forms for teachers to put in the class the want to teach, with fields for class level, availability restrictions and lots of other things. Then there’s a app built in MS access to take the teacher input and construct the schedule, with helpful validation. The pipeline is convoluted and idiosyncratic, reflecting a history of changes over many conventions. Serena, the previous Schedulemiester and creator of the Access app, has been very helpful with training and handing things off. Of course now the convention is on hold and surely soon to be cancelled, so in a sense the whole effort is moot.

Of course eventually the plague will run its course and we’ll all be able to play outside again. My first thought when I saw the Access app is that we should convert it to mySql and have it run on the web site. I talked to Robert Lang, our webmaster, about this. He said it’s already on the roadmap for 2021, and if I want to jump in and take the lead on it, I’d be more than welcome. I felt I needed to come up to speed on the existing workflow first, so we came up with a plan to use the current system for the New York convention in June, and try and do the migration in time for the Chicago convention at the end of October.

Along the way, the convention committee started asking for changes in the app to reflect changes in the organization of this year’s convention, so in addition to Serena’s training I started hacking into the guts of the Access app. At this point I’ve pretty much grokked the whole thing, and I might as well reach out to Robert and see about starting the migration.

And if the time is not right, I have another project in the offing … dusting of the Foldinator!

Second, in Spain I learned there’s an active international origami community on Instagram, so I created an Instagram account to follow other artists and promote my origami. My handle is zingorigami. Check it out. I’ve been posting three times a week. Right now I’m going thru my extensive backlog of photos of models I’ve already designed and folded. Hopefully soon I’ll get around to photographing some of my new stuff and posting that.

Third, I’ve been working on a new origami book. It’s going to be Classic Origami from Air and Space. This is sort of a sequel to my last book, which also had a theme around aircraft and spaceships, but was a kit book aimed at a beginner to intermediate audience. The new book will feature mainly advanced models, notably my classic Rocketship, U.F.O., and my newer Blimp, as well as my Hot Air Balloon and a handful of other models. The notion is to sell it as a digital download from the OUSA web site, since everybody sitting at home these days is gonna want new stuff to fold. Mostly OUSA downloads are diagrams for single models, or sometimes a collection. I’m gonna put a bit of production values into mine, with a cover and and intro, good photography and all. Hopefully down the line I can publish it as a print book.

I started a while back by putting my anchor models into InDesign to do the page layouts and figuring out how I wanted to present things. This was basically copying them from the diagrams for the individual models. I realized I had somehow never finished diagramming my Rocketship. I know I taught it some years ago; it must’ve been from a CP. There were just a few steps to go, the part where it’s 3-D. So I started folding one to get up to the point where the diagrams ended. When I went to make it 3-D I discovered an unnecessary fold that was interfering with a new fold I need to make. I ended up redesigning and re-diagramming the whole model, making the paper usage slightly more efficient, the proportions slightly more elegant, and cutting out about ten steps from the folding sequence. Now the Rocketship, U.F.O. and Blimp are all done. It’s just a matter of rounding it out with few more less complex models, doing the photos, and putting it all together. It’ll probably eight to ten models total, 32 t0 40 pages in all.

Stay tuned for future announcements.

Nothing’s Gonna Change My World

Today was the start of social distancing all over New York City and elsewhere to try and prevent the spread of the plague. I’ve been working from home since the beginning of the year, so this doesn’t affect me very much. The biggest thing is that activities outside of work, mainly gigs, rehearsals and jam sessions, have all been suspended.

So I’m getting deeper into my home studio recording project. At the moment I’m practicing alot of electric guitar, in addition to the usual sax and keys. I’m finally learning how to play thru and amp with effects and get control of my sound.

Spring is just around the corner, so it’s getting nicer and nicer spending time outside. I guess I can do things like hiking and biking working in the yard just fine, and probably whatever shopping is necessary.

Jeannie and Michelle are both working from home now too. Well, Jeannie is working and Michelle is attending high school remotely. Meanwhile Lizzy decided to stay upstate for spring break, even though her classes are all online thru the end of the semester as well. Jeannie had a crazy week last week cuz she works doing IT in a publishing company, and was up to her eyeballs in setting people up with VPNs and laptop computers. Luckily, we all have enough space here to not get on each other’s nerves, at least so far.

As I said, it’s day one. It should be interesting to see how things unfold in the weeks ahead. Things are far from normal, even if they don’t feel like it right now, and it’ll be a long road back.

Spain Pics

It seems like everywhere you look these days there’s alot of gloom in the air. Here’s something cheerful: pictures from our trip to Spain last month. As usual, the galleries are under password, so ping me if you want login credentials. Enjoy!

http://zingman.com/fotooz/
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2020/2020-01/
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2020/2020-02/
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2020/2020-03/
http://zingman.com/fotooz/2020/2020-04/

When The World is Running Down You Make the Best of What’s Still Around

A couple weeks ago I got word that friend Mike K., who was the singer and guitar player way back in my first band in high school, had died. He was right around my age. I haven’t seen him in many years.

Then Friday my friend Gus died. Gus was the drummer in several of the bands I’ve been in, going back to when I got back into playing music eight or nine years ago. First was The Relix, and then Left Hook, which we formed when The Relix folded. Gus was in his early sixties. I last saw him about a year ago.

So I’ve been thinking about how bands come and go, and more generally, relationships and situations in life. Everyone is in it for their own reasons, and you never know when things will end, even if everything seems fine. Then you stop seeing people you were close to because everyone is always busy with their lives and goes their separate ways, and one day it’s too late.

Then Saturday Eric, the drummer for my jazz group, abruptly quit. Apparently he got a job playing with a big band in Manhattan, and it’s a better gig for him. The next day Rich, the piano player, decided he’s leaving the group too. Jay, the bass player, looked at the situation and declared it to be the end of an era.

This all caught me by surprise. I guess there were signs the group had plateaued, even as I’ve been focused on continuing to improve my own playing. I think Gary and I, as the two main songwriters, were still keen on honing our songs. I thought we had another album in the offing, indeed we had a bunch of great songs; it was just a matter of lining up the studio session. But those guys were beginning to loose interest. Ever since I got back from Spain it felt like one or the other was missing rehearsal, and several times we had to cancel.

It was a good run for sure. We had a quite a few great gigs and recorded an excellent album. When we started playing together, I brought in a few of my songs, and this inspired everyone else in the group to start writing too. We were together about three years, and we came out of a jazz circle that went back a few years before that, also to the time I started playing again. It was probably the best of group of musicians I ever played with, and I improved alot in that time. So it’s really too bad.

Now it’s back to square one, starting over. Sometime a new group emerges from an old one, sometime not. I’m asking around. And this while I’m trying to get a new rock band off the ground too. Ah well, we’ll see how it goes.

Living in the Limelight

The gig Friday night at the Bean Runner Cafe went great. Nice to have a venue where they know and like you. The group sounded relaxed and comfortable. We played ten of seventeen songs we had prepared, mainly because we stretched out the solo sections on a few tunes. We had a few more standards than usual, including Stolen Moments, Bye-Ya, Jordu, Ornithology and Four on Six. After who knows how many years, I played a solo on All the Things You Are that I was really satisfied with, relaxed and flowing, spontaneous and in the moment. We also did a good number or our originals, and I was happy with my perfromance on Lift Off, my tribute to John Coltrane, which is very difficult to play. I guess all my practicing has been paying off.

In the home studio realm, my two current songs, The Story Lies and Who Speaks on Your Behalf are coming along. I got the bass part for the first song done a week or two ago, and the second one is there except for one riff. The Stories Lies is a groove number and I gave it a fun, funky bass line. Once I started practicing, I really wanted to nail the whole track in one take, to capture all the dynamics over the course of the song and really focus on the phrasing. I got pretty close. I ended up with a very usable take, and did only minor editing. In one section I was rushing a little so I pulled everything back a fraction of beat. You can’t push a click track like you can a human drummer.

Meanwhile I have most of Who Speaks on Your Behalf tracked, but there’s a riff at the beginning and again in the middle of the tune, a twisty run of 16th notes that just kicks my ass at that tempo. At first I couldn’t play it all; now the challenge is to do it cleanly. I don’t know how other bass players do this kind of thing, but I laid out the fingering to take advantage of open strings, and used a few hammer-ons and pull offs rather than striking every note with the right hand.

I’m still trying to get the new rock band off the ground. I put out an ad for a guitarist who sings and writes, and this dude Joe answered. He sent me some demoes of his songs. Good stuff, I like his lyrics and the way he creates drama in his songs, and he can certainly sing and play, although he doesn’t really know jazz harmony. We got together for a rehearsal a couple weeks ago with Ken on bass and Steve on drums. We did a couple of my songs and a couple of Joe’s, and some plain ol’ jamming. The vibe was pretty good. Ken and Steve definitely grok my songs, although Joe was hearing them for the first time and didn’t really get the chords, and we were all learning Joe’s songs new.

Tonight Joe came over to my house and we got alot deeper into learning each other’s songs and talking about our influences and what we want out of a band. It seems like a good fit. He learned my song Ghost in the Machine pretty readily once I broke it down and explained the chords. We were supposed to get together with the full band later this week and I was feeling pretty psyched about it.

But then our bass player Ken had to bow out out temporarily. He’s the director of crisis communications for a major international bank and so his day job has been crazy the last few weeks because of the caronavirus epidemic, and it looks like things may well get worse before it gets better. Ah well.

Back at the Bean Runner – Haven Street Live Jazz

!!! Correction – the date is Friday February 28 !!!

What with all the recent travel and excitement, I almost forgot to mention there’s a gig coming up, just over a week away!

My jazz group Haven Street returns to The Bean Runner Cafe in Peekskill, Friday February 28 at 8 o’clock start time, $10 cover. This is one of our favorite places to play, and we always have a good time and get good crowd. Should be lots of fun, so come check it out!

Like a Wheel Within a Wheel

Now we get to the trip inside the trip, like a tunnel that you follow to a tunnel of its own. We arrived in Zaragoza late Friday night. The train station was sparsely peopled, and we wandered down, thru the concourse, up the other side to exit on the correct side. From there is was was a long pedestrian bridge arcing above a wide highway, whose reticulated walking surface made our luggage rattle out a rhythm as it rolled along. It was colder and windier here than by the seaside, very bracing. Zaragoza is in the desert and the mountains, although often strongly foggy.

The hotel was one building past the conference center. The whole neighborhood was built for some kind of Expo about twelve years ago, and it had that kind of vibe, all modernist right angles. The hotel was nice, stark yet cozy, modern and European. There were some friendly faces in the lobby, our the conference organizers and our hosts. I knew a few of them who had been to origami conventions in the states, and everyone was warm and friendly.

Next day up bright and early for breakfast. I met a few fellow folders including Robert Lang, David Brill and Jared Needle and Matt Green. More bacon and eggs and croissants and cappuccinos. Yum!

Over at the conference center I set up my exhibit. This was first international exhibit, most of ’em here had never seen my work before. I brought a box a small suitcase as carry-on luggage, about fifteen models. The idea was sort of a greatest hits collection.

The evening before our flight to Spain I went around the house and picked out my favorite models and set them on the table to see how they went together. There’s some air and space ships, a set of single-sheet polyhedra, a series of big animals and one of small animals. The big animals include my Elephant and Dragon, but they were a bit too small for the others in that series, the Oliphaunt and Moose.

So I started folding a new one of each. I ended spending most of the next day folding Dragons and Elephants, and my exhibit was the last thing I packed, just before leaving for the airport. It was totally worth it, both models turned out great. For the Elephant i found a 12″ square of scrapbook paper, mainly white with bright paint splatter design, evoking a circus. I didn’t know how well the paper would fold but it ended up being perfect for the model, not too thin, not too thick, not too soft and not too stiff. It came out quite well, nicely sculptured, and was one of my most admired models in the exhibit.

For the dragon I used so-called shiny paper from the Origami Shop, which is an excellent paper, thin an crisp, and sort of sparkly on one side. I started folding a blue dragon from a 16″ square, but once I got the base finished it was clear it would not be bit enough. I went up to a 24″ green square. Probably a 20″ square would have been perfect, but I didn’t have one. Still it worked well at that size, and was compatible with the Oliphaunt, just a slightly more ancient dragon than I had in mind.

Once my stuff was set up I took a look around. There was tons of fantastic stuff there. The exhibit space was nice, bright and well-lit, and got a good amount of traffic over the weekend, not just from the convention but from the public at large.

I knew about half the artists there. There was so much great origami, and (unlike OUSA where I see many of the same people every year) alot of it was new to me. It’s impossible to try and describe it all, you’ll have to wait for the pictures. One thing I’ll say is there was alot of interesting stuff with tessellations. I had kinda thought tessellations were pretty much played out, but here was alot of new, expressive work. One artist named Roman particularly caught my eye with a 2-d interpretation of a 4-d Torus. Wow.

The conference opened with remarks by Ilan, the conference chair. The organizers were mostly French, Spanish and Israeli. The format was much like a Monday at OUSA, with seminars and discussion, no teaching models and not alot of actual folding. Everybody there was a world-class origami artist because CFC2, a.k.a The Conference for Creators, was invitation only. It was an honor to have been invited, and It was really amazing to be among such high-level artists. I missed the first CFC, in Lyon, France in the summer of 2017 because I was ill. So making it to this one was extra special for me.

The topics included aspects of the creative process, hand vs. computer diagraming, photography and photo diagramming, spontaneous public origami exhibits, preparing papers for exhibiting, traditional handmade papers, how to social media, and connections between origami and other creative disciplines. There were also several roundtable discussions. Very inspirational.

The pacing was pretty leisurely. There was breakfast, a couple talks, coffee break, another talk or two, another break, more talks, then dinner and/or evening activities. It stretched out so dinner wasn’t until 8 or 9 o’clock. This left lots of time for socializing and hanging out. The attendees included Spaniards, French, Americans, Brits, Germans, a couple from Poland and another from Austria, a few Italians, a few Israelis, a friendly guy from Denmark, and another sharp friendly guy and from Belarus whose English was so good at first I thought he was Scottish, a lady from Switzerland, and several people from South America. Maybe seventy or eighty people total.

I re-struck relationships with people I hadn’t seen in years and made some new friends. I was happy to discover alot of people were familiar with my work and hold it in high regard. Some cited my models as points of inspiration or reference for their own work. That’s a huge compliment from artists you admire.

The French people were telling us to come the French convention next year, the Spanish said to come to the Spanish convention, and the Germans said to come to the German one. This last one sounds pretty tempting cuz it’s one of the larger conventions in Europe, and I seemed to hit it off comfortably with the Germans and Austrians. But everyone said: you gotta go to the Italian convention, it’s a great time and a huge party.

Zaragoza has a very active folding community and many of them are connected with IMOZ (Escuela Museo Origami Zaragoza), the world’s largest permanent museum for origami. Spain has it’s own origami tradition independent of Japan’s, dating back to the 7th century when paper was introduced to the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors. We took a tour there the first evening. It’s quite impressive and includes quite a few works by Yoshizawa and Erik Joisel, and a variety of other stuff, historical and modern, Spanish and international.

We walked around the old downtown for a while, to eventually arrive a restaurant for the convention banquet, which was mainly standing like a cocktail hour, as were the lunches, to promote mingling. The other nights’ dinner was at the hotel, and seated. One night Jeannie and I sat a table full of Germans and Austrians, the other was Spaniards and an Argentinean. More socializing, ham, seafood and fine red wine.

Sunday was the last day of the conference and in the evening, after the official end, were more tourist activities. We went to a place called the Tower of Water, built for the Expo. It was a funny building, a glass and scaffold skyscraper maybe twenty stories high, enclosing a large interior space in which hung a giant sculpture of a splashing water droplet frozen in time. We took an elevator up then spiraled around a continuously ramping balcony back to the lobby. The building had no current use, but at working electricity. One of our hosts had a key to get in.

We wandered thru the Expo grounds, which was broad pedestrian avenues, curvy concrete bridges, and the aforementioned cubist buildings. Parts of the complex, like the conference center (the Etopia Center for Arts and Technology) and the hotel were in active use. Some of the buildings seemed to be offices or apartments. But alot of it was just empty. Not run down or abandoned, just unused. Kinda reminded me of planet Miranda in the movie Serenity, but, you know, not all creepifying. Apparently there was a plan to convert the buildings to other purposes after the Expo, but then the housing bust happened and the money vanished. We ended up at the Aquarium, which was pretty cool. The focus was on the major rivers of the world, so they had alot of fish and reptiles that you don’t normally see.

Bit by bit, over the course of the weekend, people started to get out packs of paper and do some actual folding. I’ve been working on a Human Figure base, derived from my Astronaut, since my nephew Matthew asked me at Christmastime if I could design a Golem. So I folded lots and lots of variations, looking for expressive possibilities, and for different way to approach the neck and shoulders, which is the key to any animal model, human figures included.

Finally Sunday night was the inevitable late-night folding. A bunch of us, under the direction of one of the EMOZ curators, folded a giant corrugation, about three meters square. We didn’t get much sleep that night, but still got up before sunrise to take the train back to Barcelona and on to Montserrat.

There’s lots more happening in the origami world these days, but that will have to wait for another post.