Live, learn, leave
Here’s announcing my updated recording Face the Heat (2018 Remaster) is now complete and available for purchase as a CD or digital download at:
https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/buzzytonic6
Links for iTunes, Amazon and Spotify to follow soon, so watch this space. Meanwhile check out the updated page for the record at:
http://zingman.com/music/facetheheat.php
Enjoy!
Okay let’s see. Out with the old and in with the new year. 2019 wow. Our troubled world keeps on spinning, weaving its joys and sorrows into the fabric of our lives. We’re back into the groove with the new year, with its new demands and challenges. Things already happening fast. Work has been busy, I guess you could call it a kind of comfortable chaos, the Devil you know. Lizzy had been showing initiative, getting things done during her winter break, painting furniture, redoing her room, throwing away stuff. She told me she wished she could find some kind of work for a few weeks, and Anna said she needs some help with the Global Jukebox. So now she’s interning there.
Rewinding a bit, we had a nice break for the holidays. Christmas Eve mass at Christ Church was absolutely beautiful with the choir doing Lessons and Carols. On Christmas day we visited family on Long Island and watched the classic Christmas movie Die Hard, which doesn’t really hold up well and makes no sense. Jeannie and I watched a few of the old Rankin and Bass holiday specials too, including the one with Heat Miser and the one with Burghermeister Meisterburgher. It turns out the actual animation for a lot of those was done in Japan. One of their last productions made was the 1977 cartoon of the The Hobbit, which was the thing that got me into Tolkien and Middle Earth as a kid. (Compare cartoon Gandalf to the Winter Warlock.) Shortly thereafter the animators founded Studio Ghibli and began production on Nausica: Valley of the Winds.
We went upstate after Xmas to visit my parents. Martin and his family were there too, so it was a really full house. When were unwrapping presents my Mum mixed up my little 3- and 5-year-old nieces names and chaos ensued. Ah, fun times. I got to play chess with Martin and my nephews too. I haven’t played in a long time, wish I could play more.
We met up with Larry and Jackie one night and went out to a restaurant in Hamburg called Grange that had a Cheese Describer to enumerate and describe the cheeses in our appetizer. One was described as “the most adventurous” along with a slew of adjectives. They also had raw scallops and other weird food, all really great! Michelle got a plain pizza. We visited Denis and Sarah while we were up there too, which is nice cuz we haven’t done that in a couple years and their kids are getting bigger.
Unfortunately I’ve been sick off-and-on since the day after Christmas. One thing after another. Shoulder, stomach, back, head cold. Comes and goes. It’s the cold and dark time of year. But you know, emotionally and spiritually okay. Now my feet are hurting again after being basically okay for over a year. Hope it passes soon. I’ve been trying to relax and take it easy. Luckily I had a few days off and I can work from home when I need to.
We had to give up on getting the Honda fixed at the Honda dealer. We took it there three times and they didn’t do anything, and lied about the service they performed, wanted to charge us $600 to change the spark plugs. Bad scene.
After we got back we had Nick and Lisa over one night, good to catch up and good fun. New Year’s Eve was fun too. Jeannie and I went out to dinner with Gina and Andy from the rock band to see our friend’s band Sue and the Fun Ghouls featuring the inimitable Shredder on guitar. I knew Sue, Shredder and the drummer George from ICS. My other friend Mike is gone and they have a new keyboard player, and she’s really good too. They’re one of the best local bar bands in Westchester and they played a great set. Good to see them and it was a great time.
I got my record made and it’s now available online. More on that next post.
Also a reminder my jazz group, Haven Street, is playing this Saturday night at the Green Growler in Croton-on-Hudson. Last rehearsal, first time back in the new year, we put together a set list. Everything sounded great. Not just my playing, the whole group was really on. Jazz is funny cuz improvisation is so central the whole thing. You memorize all this stuff to have at your command just so you can forget about it and be in the moment. When you’re not playing you’re best you get the feeling you’re falling back on canned riffs, and it’s still pretty good. But when you’re really on it’s like magic, taking flight, beautiful and expressive and spontaneous. We’ve been able to hit that level more and more consistently, so I’m expect it’s going to be a good show.
Well we’re winding things up for the year. The last few weeks have just flown by. The Xmas tree and decorations are all up and the shopping is mostly done. Lizzy is home for winter break, Michelle is done with school and Jeannie and I are off work until the New Year. All the deadlines were slain and we ended it up with a nice holiday party for my work, at a cool event space near our Manhattan office. Work has been going pretty well recently. We’ve hired a couple new guys into our team and feels like everyone is working together effectively and even having some fun.
You’ll be happy to know our chimney and furnace have been fixed, I got a new car key from the hardware store at a quarter the price the dealer wanted, and we even got a new deadbolt installed on our front door. I got new the tires on my car and the oil changed too, but since then the engine has been a bit, um, funny. More on that in a future post.
Things have been progressing with the Global Jukebox as well. I have been working with Martin on a suite of features to let users and build and share journey-style content, and a tool for building a musical/cultural family tree. Last week had a meeting last week to check in with Ray, our design consultant, in which Anna & co. ratified the wireframes and direction for a new landing page and multiple, configurable entry points into different areas of the app with an optional interstitial page to provide contextual content. The following day we had a meeting with an organization called City Lore, whose goals align with ours and are looking to provide the project with some funding. Happy news.
It’s nice to have a few days of time off to look forward to. Of course our time immediately fills in with things we haven’t gotten around to in a while. Yesterday was Jeannie’s family’s big Xmas party. Denis and Sarah came into town. I played Super Smash Bros. with Michelle and her cousins.
Been working on music. In our rock band we decided to learn twelve new songs over the break and be prepared to get them together as a group in the new year. Alot of 80’s stuff plus some other thins. I’m singing lead on five of them. So today I found copies of the lyrics and chords as well as audio recordings, and started practicing them on piano.
I learned Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody on the piano, which is alot of fun even if the sheet music is not totally correct to the record. I’ve even been playing a handful of Christmas Carols including Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas (which as it turns out was kept from being number 1 on the charts back in the day by Bohemian Rhapsody), Steely Dan’s Charlie Freak (not often thought of a Christmas song despite the hipster Dickensian twist on the story of the Gift of the Magi in the lyric and the sleigh bells in the arrangement), plus a couple of numbers by Vince Guaraldi.
In jazz world we’re preparing for our gigs in the new year too, so I’ve been woodshedding a good handful of standards on the sax, as well as our originals. I’m going to make some demos of a couple of my new compositions and arrangements soon, hopefully over the break.
One last piece of news. The remix of my 2010 Buzzy Tonic record Face the Heat is done. I’ve been listening back and making finer and finer tweaks until it’s become as good as I can make it. So now all that’s left is getting the CDs made and setting up the online distribution. So more on that soon.
We have more gig in our holiday season run with G-Force, at Chat 19 in Larchmont this Saturday night. I’ve never played that venue, but Gina seems pretty excited about it and says they always have a good crowd.
I’m thinking of upgrading some of my equipment to make load-in, setup, teardown and load-out quicker and easier. In particular I’m looking for a new lighter keyboard stand, a smaller stage mixer, probably eight channels instead of sixteen, and maybe a couple mic stands if I can find some where the legs don’t flop around after they’ve been collapsed. For the moment I’m thinking of putting a hair scrunchie arond the base of the mic stand to hold the legs shut.
Anyway, as it turns out, the first few gigs in the new year are for the jazz group, so it’s time to hype that.
Haven Street will be playing:
Sat Jan 12, 8pm – The Green Growler, Croton-On-Hudson
Fri Jan 25, 8pm – The Bean Runner Cafe, Peekskill
Fri Feb 1, 6pm – Silvana, Harlem
We’ve played the Growler before. It’s a fun and cozy place with a huge variety of craft beer, and the people who run it really like like music. Sure to be a great time. We might even come back for Sonic Thursday there on Feb 21.
I’ve never played the Bean Runner, but some of the guys in the band have. It has a reputation as a great place for jazz.
Silvana is a happy hour gig uptown Manhattan. That’s supposedly a good jazz venue too.
It’s been a little while since we’ve a rehearsal with the full group, so rather than honing our originals we’ve been exploring the world of standards with an eye toward adopting a few as our own to incorporate our own versions into our repertoire. We’ve also been taking the opportunity to get deeper into extended soloing and group improvisation. That’s been fun and interesting. For the Growler and Bean Runner shows we’re the only band on the bill, so it’s full sets including both originals and covers. So come on out and see us. Should be a really fun time!
So last week the new G-Force made it’s debut at Dudley’s Friday Night, followed the next night by a show at Victors. Both gigs went well, with the second being tighter than the first, and with a bigger crowd too. There was a really entertaining drunk chick who stole Gina’s tambourine and ran around the bar shaking out the beat. Later sang a song with the band. I thought she was a friend of Gina’s but none of us knew her. She was a friend of the drummer’s sister or something. During the intermission she was hitting on me until I went over to the bar to get a drink and introduced her to Jeannie, who was sitting right there. Then she took off. Funny how that always seems to happen.
I must say Vinny is not only a really good guitar player, but he’s a great asset when it comes to loading and unloading, and setting up and tearing down the PA. He must have experience lifting heavy things, cuz he knows what he’s doing. Very efficient, always there at the right time with another pair of hands.
Monday night was maybe the first rehearsal ever where we didn’t learn any new tunes. Instead it was all tempos, endings and transitions. I’d say now most of the songs ought to be pretty damn tight. We have two more shows the next two weeks, and then we’ll learn a bunch of new songs when we come back in January.
We’ve also been having a series of really good jazz rehearsals. Unfortunately our guitarist Gary has been out sick, but we’ve been exploring cool new grooves and sounds as a quartet. Jay got genuine gut strings on his bass, which changes the tone considerably, making it much warmer and richer. Last Sunday we practiced at the drummer’s house. He lives right on the river near Croton-on-Hudson, straight across from where we went hiking last month. The next gig with the jazz group is in early January. Should be lots of fun.
Meanwhile on the home and auto front, it seems everything breaking down at at once and takes forever to get fixed. Nothing catastrophic but a series of minor inconveniences that by now are adding up.
First I’ve been meaning to get my car into the shop for an oil change and a new set of tires. The tires are not super urgent, but I’d rather get it done now than wait until springtime. I took it to the shop one day last week, but they only had 2 tires in stock. The said they’d order two more but now I have to take it back. And my car is full of amplifiers these days so I’d rather wait until after this run of gigs.
Next we have a fluorescent light fixture in our kitchen and ballast blew out on that. So that was an unexpected repair project. This is the second light fixture I’ve replaced this fall.
Then our furnace shut off one day and wouldn’t restart. We had go out to the garage and flip the breaker to get it to come back on. And just as it’s getting below freezing at night. After this happened two days in a row we called in a repairman. He fixed it temporarily, and now we’re waiting on a part.
It turns out the cause of this was that water got into our chimney pipe and dripped down into the furnace. The day it happened was windy and rainy and stormy. So now we need to get someone to go up on the roof and check out the situation, whether thing on top the chimney that’s supposed to keep the water out is intact.
And then to top it off, yesterday my car key broke in half. The metal key part separated from the plastic part that holds the electronics. What’s next?
Ah, one thing I’m thankful for is a moment’s rest this weekend. It feels like we’ve been on the go since the beginning of September. Now we have a much needed long weekend off from work. Lizzy came home from college earlier in the week. We had an excellent Thanksgiving with family. Jeannie made a turkey and everything, and was an excellent time.
Today we did what was likely the major raking of the year: four cans and four more bags full of leaves. Now the branches are mostly bare. It seems a little late this year.
I’ve been spending alot of time this weekend playing and listening to music. We saw the Queen movie last week, which inspired me to go back and listen to some of the early Queen albums I haven’t heard in years. My college roommate Rich was really into them, particularly Brian May’s guitar playing. So I put on Queen II and Sheer Heart Attack. Such great stuff, a unique combination of heavy metal, vocal harmonies, and wonderful weirdness. I’d say I appreciate it more now than back in the day, especially knowing they did it all with analog circuitry and a 16-track tape deck.
I went thru and listened to the entire setlist for my rock band, about three hours of music, just to get it fresh in my head for next week’s gigs, plus a bunch of new songs we’re considering adding to the set. I’m at the point where I know all the songs well enough, and I know about half of them really well. But every time I listen I pick up nuances in the arrangement that we can use to make our version sound better.
I’ve also been listening to more jazz. The guys in my band have been raving about new stuff from Christian McBride, Brian Blade and Joshua Redman among others. I found Joshua’s new record and it was great. Now Spotify is walking me backward thru his entire discography. Each record is more enjoyable than the last. Lots of great ideas in there.
I’ve been writing new music for the jazz group too. For our last gig we had four new originals – Closing the Distance (Gary), Fever Dream (Jay), A Fat Cat (a.k.a. El Gato Gordo, by Rich), and Lift Off (mine), which is roughly enough for half an album. We have a bunch of other songs we’ve been developing. One of mine, Mobility, is coming along nicely. It’s been around for a while but as of late it’s taken on a sort of Raymond-Scott-meets-gypsy-jazz quality. So I reharmonized it to be in the Hungarian minor mode and to emphasize the diminished quality. Also add a heterophonic ensemble jam toward the end.
Another song of mine, Son of the Sun has been slower going. It’s a pretty intricate number that switches meter alot, mainly between 5/8 and 7/8. We started it way back when, but then we didn’t have a regular drummer for a while and it didn’t seem worth it to try and teach every drummer who sat in. When Erik joined full time we were focused mainly on the last gig. Now it’s back to developing new material. Some of the band seem to think it’s a bit to outside of “our sound”. I find this kind of thinking really limiting and frustrating, but it didn’t help that the demo recording I had was from my heavy-metal fusion band from the 90’s. So I think I’ll put together a new demo with a sound closer to what I have in mind for this group.
Meanwhile I have two new jazz numbers I’m writing. One is based on the idea of a four-bar loop, and has a working title of Heavy Water. The other one, which is further along, I’m thinking of as a “melody” song, a midtempo number with the general feel of something like A Foggy Day or Dolphin Dance. The song explores major seventh chords, and has a bright, spacious sound, and a fair amount of modulation. It kinda started with me exploring the middle section of Sun of the Son, trying to make is sound less heavy. But then it quickly developed in an unexpected direction and became something new. It’s almost there, but not quite; I’m still kind of experimenting and exploring. I want to get the turnarounds really working tight. A great melody has a feeling of inevitability about it, like once you hear it you can’t imagine it going any other way.
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The big news on the music front is I had to buy a new computer last week. Down in my recording studio I have a Mac workstation that’s a few years old. It’s connected to a MBox Pro III and runs a particular version of ProTools. I should also mention that since the release of the third Buzzy Tonic album, Elixr, I went back have been remixing the previous Buzzy Tonic record, Face the Heat, originally released in 2011. I was never fully happy with the sound of that record, and since then I’ve become much better at mixing so I figured it was worth it. And it’s is been coming along here and there late nights and weekends. I was almost done, seven of nine songs in the can.
A couple of months ago the screen on the computer started flickering and then it froze, and I had to reboot. The problem went away and didn’t come back until last week when it started happening repeatedly, until finally wouldn’t come back at all after rebooting. Luckily I have everything backed up on time machine and only lost about an hour’s work from my last session.
So I was all set to buy a brand new IMac Pro, but then I got to thinking about how it would integrate with the current rig. There’s no obvious upgrade path from my current version of ProTools to one that would run on a new OS. And that’s to say nothing of my numerous plugin, some of which have licenses tied tot the machine I’m pretty sure. It just seemed like a potentially bottomless hassle and expense.
So Jeannie stepped in and helped me out. She found a used/refurb computer of the exact same model as mine on Ebay for like five hundred bucks, about ten percent of the cost of a new one. It arrived just two days after we placed the order. And all we had to do was plug in my Time Machine drive and restore the last backup and Viola! Back in business! The computer was able to launch ProTools and talk to the MBox and I was able to continue with my mixing right where I left off. All the plugins I needed were still valid. It looks like I may have some issues with SampleTank, a software synth/sampler which I’ll need when I get back to tracking. But I’ll cross that bridge later.
For now, I’ve finished my penultimate mixes for all nine tracks. This is basically the final mix before mastering. My workflow nowadays doesn’t really include a mastering phase. I’ll sequence the CD and make sure all the levels match, but all the tracks have a dynamic compressor on the main out, so if I need to make any adjustments I’ll just go back to the track. So I have to listen them all together, and A/B them against the old mixes, and against the newer album. I may end up tweaking the level of a compressor, or raising or lowering something by a dB or so, but that’s about it. I was hoping to get this project done by end of Thanksgiving break, but now the goal is by the end of the year. Then in 2019 I’ll start in on BZIV.
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Just a couple random things during my downtime. Michelle and I finished Avatar: The Last Airbender a few weeks ago, and now we’re watching Firefly. She’s hooked. Shiny! And I’ve been reading Robert Lang’s newest magnum opus Origami Twists, Tilings and Tessellations. I’m well over a hundred pages in and only midway thru chapter two.
You may be wondering whatever happened to the rock band since we had to kick out our old guitar player. Well, the new guy Vinny has been jamming with us a few weeks now. He’s really good and is a nice and fun guy too, and has learned the whole set. So it’s all systems go! Next rehearsal we’re gonna start in on some new tunes, mostly Xmas carols. We have a run of gigs coming up between now and the end of the year. Hope to see y’all at one or more:
November 30 – Dudley’s in New Rochelle
December 1 – Victors of Hawthorne
December 8 – Barney Mc Nabb’s in Tuckahoe
December 15 – Chat 19 in Larchmont
It’s been another busy week. The change of the seasons is arriving with rapid fury. First off they changed the local timezone settings last weekend. It’s been getting darker and darker but now it’s nighttime before five o’clock. Still getting used to that. I did get the Mustang out one last time, but today we had our first snowstorm. Got maybe 5 inches of wet heavy snow, enough to seriously mess up traffic. Now it’s raining and it’s all supposed to melt. Hopefully the morning won’t be too bad.
We went up MIT last weekend for their annual origami convention. I taught my Dirigible and it went over well. The class was very full and there were a couple people in the class who weren’t quite at the level required, so that slowed things down a bit. Despite my providing diagrams everyone didn’t quite get to the end of the model. I also see I need to explain the collapsing of the nose better in the diagrams.
The other model I folded was my Platypus. I haven’t folded one of these in a while, and it’s not diagrammed, so I did it entirely from memory. It went just fine, and we even finished on time.
This is the most technical of the origami conferences that I regularly attend. Alot of these people were at BOS and 7OSME in Oxford at the end of the summer, and now I kinda wish I could have gone. Ah well.
I did reconnect with Robby from rabbitear.org, who is writing origami software in javascript. I want to find a way to collaborate and contribute to the project, despite my being busy with so many other things. Also Adrianne Sack gave a lecture on the parallels between origami tessellations and certain kinds of fabric and textile pleating and folding techniques. Very cool. Of course Jason taught his crazy complex dragon, and despite it being a four-hour class he had to finish up during the evening free-folding.
I saw alot of my origami friends, and it was a good hang, and a bunch of people gave me good advice about planning our trip to Japan next year. Still, these things are always over too soon.
Back at home the next day we were back in Brooklyn, to see Kamasi Washington and his band play at a place called Brooklyn Steel. You may recall we saw Kamasi at the Montreal Jazz Festival back in June and it totally floored me. Well this time we came in knowing what to expect. The show was excellent. And restored my streak: now 8 of the last 9 shows we’ve seen have had a trombone. I think they’ve been touring pretty much continually since the last time we saw them. They did about half the same songs and half different. And some of the songs have evolved. The opening band, Butcher Brown were good too. Only downside was the venue was a cavernous warehouse space suitable for raves, with no seating and the acoustics could have been better, and the drinks very very expensive. Still it was a great concert and a fun time. I even got a t-shirt.
Driving to work the last few days it’s been peak time for the leaves turning color around here. The local parkways run thru hills of oak and maple forest. Combined with leaden grey clouds and heavy skies the whole landscape was one of striking, eerie beauty. Totally surreal.
Sunday it was a mild a sunny day with bright blue skies, so Jeannie and I went for a hike along the Palisades near the Tappan Zee Bridge (a.k.a. The Mario). Great views of the river, the trees and the surrounding countryside, and we saw lots of hawks and even a family of giant Turkey Vultures hanging out on the cliffs. Way cool.
Last weekend was the first (and last) weekend in a while where we didn’t have a gig with the jazz or rock band, a show to see, or travel plans. But there’s plenty of other stuff going on.
For one thing, over the last several weekends Michelle and I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender. I saw this show out of the corner of my eye with the sound down when it was originally on the air, cuz I worked at Nickelodeon at the time. But watching it for real, well it was just excellent. So much going on, such great characters and conflicts, and such an imaginative story world. I’m still blown away that, like Doctor Markoh from Full Metal Alchemist, the Dragon of the West Iroh has a silent “h” at the end of his name.
For another we finally got the contract signed to get solar power on our roof. This was a big research project and it took a long time to work out all the details. Hopefully we can get the installation finished before the snow comes, but right now we’re waiting on permits from the city.
I’ve been busy with origami. A couple weeks back I made a pair of Cuttlefish for the Origami USA Holiday Tree at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. This project came and went so fast I didn’t even take pictures! But had a similar pair already folded, shown here. The twist is that the cuttlefish is an animal (not really fish, BTW) that changes it’s body color to blend in with its surroundings, to express it’s emotions and to imitidate other life forms with vibrant displays of color and pattern. To simulate the different moods I folded on out a plain beige sheet, as if blending in on a sandy seafloor. The other I made out of the loudest psychedelic fractal paisley pattern I could find, and posed the tentacles spread as if ready for attack. Way cool!
My other recent origami project was to diagram my Dirigible. I’ll be teaching this at the upcoming OrigaMIT convention, and wanted to submit it for the convention collection. It turned out to be a bit longer than I expected. I had estimated about 30 or 40 steps, but it ended up at 51. Still it’s a great model and well worth getting down. I plan on using it in an upcoming book.
We had a really fun and interesting weekend full of music and visiting the old neighborhood. First off, my jazz group Haven Street played a gig a club called Shapeshifter Lab in Brooklyn. The gig was on a Friday evening, so getting into the area took about two hours for a trip of fifteen or twenty miles, going thru, as Jeannie put it “all three boros”. We took the route down the FDR drive which was at least fun and scenic since I rarely go that way.
It turns out the club was only a few blocks away from where we used to live in Park Slope in the year 2000. Fun and intersting to see how the neighborhood has changed. It still seems lively as ever. We found a great pizza place right around the corner form the club.
Shapeshifter is a very nice place to play, with a big stage, grand piano, drums and PA already set up, and even a professional soundman. You can tell they care about the music and the musicians. It’s run byt the son of the bassist Jimmy Garrison, who is famous for playing the classic John Coltrane quartet among many others.
Our set went well. As mentioned previosuly, the band has been sounding better and better, and the songs getting freer and more interactive. Everyone’s playing was in top form and the set was all originals, wide-ranginng and expressive. We had only and hour and we focused on getting more songs in rather than stretching out. We played eight songs, four from our first record, and four from our upcoming future record.
The second band that night was a big band doing avant-garde material. They were very good musicains, and intersting music. But when the main idea is to eschew traditional melody, harmony and song structure, there’s only so much one can take. Still I’m happy they kept alive my streak: the eighth band in a row I’ve seen with a trombone player.
After the show Jeannie and I decided to drive past our old apartment in Brooklyn to see how the neighborhood had changed. Driving home we went across the new Kosciuszko bridge, which was pretty neat. Then we decided we might as well drive past our old apartment in Queens from the mid 90’s since it was pretty much on the way.
Saturday it rained all day. In the evening we went out to see Ravi Coltrane at the Village Vanguard. Wow, what a sax player! A very high level of vrituousity, and very expressive. He has alot of his father in his sound, but is doing his own thing, very modern and up to date. The thing that impressed me probably the most of anything is his tone on the soprano sax is so full and fierce it’s actually baddass! He also had a great group with him: piano bass and drums.
We hadn’t been in the Village for a while, and it was just a few blocks away from where I used to live in the early 90’s. It was Saturday night of Halloween weekend when we got out of the show, so it was extra fun to watch the people all dressed up and going out to party.