Why Not Zed?

It feels like spring is just around the corner. The sun is coming out now and again, and the snow piles are melting. And so I’m starting to come out of hibernation and sift thru the old to shed or refresh, with an eye to making space for brave new things to come. Since rock the band has been gigging so much I’m looking into a new keyboard, stand and some other stuff to improve my sound and make the schleppage lighter. More on that soon.

And as I continue to organize my back pages of songs and lyrics, here’s one I came across that’s fully compete but I’ll probably never use. My brother-in-law Lou is a singer-songwriter. He wrote and recorded an album of songs for children, He’s My Bear, when his kids were little. One day a while back we were talking and he had a bunch of songs for a follow up. I thought it might be fun to produce. So we made a demo of four or five songs and I began laying down the actual tracks. However life keeps you busy and we were never able to complete the project. Along the way I wrote a song for the record called Why Not Zed? It’s basically a scrambled A-B-C song, using the Canadian pronunciation of the last letter of the alphabet, as in Zed Zed Top, or Why Why Zed. It turns out a lot of Americans aren’t hip. So take off, eh!

…

Why Not Zed?

A – B – C – D
Dinosaurs and cheese
H – I – J – K
Elephants sneeze
1 – 2 – 5 – 3
Blue green red
Double-U, triple-X
Why not zed?

One half, zero
e and pi
Radical two
The golden rule and i
L – M – N – O
Toes knees head
Who what when where
Why not zed?

-jfs 1/14

Slope

2018 was a good year for music. I put out three new albums (well, two new ones and a remix/remaster of an old one) and both my live bands started gigging regularly.

This year is shaping up to be a good year too. I’ve already played six or eight gigs between my two bands. Now I’m getting going on putting together new material for the next round of studio projects.

With the jazz group Haven Street it’s time to start thinking about the next recording. We’ve grown alot musically in the last year, both in terms our writing and our playing. We’ve been working on depth, range and dynamics in our improvisation, and on group improvisation ideas. And the writing provides vehicles for different kinds of playing.

Our first album, which we were mixing a year ago, had nine songs: four by me, four by Gary, and one by Jay. We now have nine new songs, three by me, three by Gary, two by Jay and one by Rich. This probably more than enough but it’s a nice number, and it’s good to have a depth of material going into the studio.

The most recent song is one of mine, tentatively titled A Lazy Lady. It’s a languid, melodic slow swing groove with lots of major seventh chords and shifting modalities. We don’t have another tune that sounds like it, so it’s a worthy contribution to the set. I actually wrote it around Xmastime but we didn’t get into rehearsing until recently cuz we were focused on a series of gigs and wanted to sharpen the material we had. Once we did, the band instantly got into it and started contributing ideas, and pretty soon it was clear that the song would be a winner.

For a while I had been pushing for the group to do Sun of the Son, a song I originally wrote for Event Horizon back in the ’80’s. It has a lot of meter changes and a heavy synth-laden fusion sound. Rich in particular though it was too prog-y for our group and would take too much time to really learn well and make our own. So I started in on making a new demo for it, making it more latin and less electronic, and re-imagining the middle section. Now that I have another new song the group digs the urgency has gone away, but the track has kinda taken on a life of it’s own. It’s gonna be much more than a basic demo, more like a full arrangement. I’m not sure what to do with it; might end up putting it on my next album.

In the rock world we continue gigging with the G-Force band. With the group lineup stabilized we’re adding new songs every show. We’ve probably added a dozen since the New Year. My favorites among last few (because I’m singing lead) include It’s Only Love by Bryan Adams and Tina Turner, I’m No Angel by Gregg Allman, and Rio by Duran Duran (which has a nice sax solo too.) We’re learning a bunch of new dance stuff too. On the other hand, we still have maybe five of the top ten most overplayed bar band songs in our set, and no matter how many new songs we add, there’s a steady thread of songs of that kind.

The last gig we played in Connecticut. The we had to wait to set up because the dinner crowd was really going on long, but they fed us and food was great. (Dragon Roll Burrtio!) It was first bar we’ve played in a while without TVs on in the room. There were plenty of people enjoying the music. It’s amazing how a dancing crowd can really make it fun. On the other hand, the set up and tear-down all the time is getting to be a drag, as I’m still getting over problems with my feet. Ah well, hopefully with the spring coming it’ll get easier.

Last weekend I was feeling particularly bad and spent most of my time hanging around the house listening to music. Explored a lot of long-forgotten 80’s prog-jazz crossover stuff on spotify. We also got a new King Crimson DVD from the same tour we saw last year, with the seven headed monster configuration of the band including Mel Collins on winds, Jakko on vocals, Fripp, Tony Levin, and three drummers. They played at least one song from each of their first seven albums, including lots of mellotron stuff, as well as updated arrangements from the later parts of their career. All in all an amazing job of unifying an incredibly diverse set of material. There were a few songs I didn’t know that well so I went back and found the original tracks. That got me thinking about lyrics.

In addition to planning the next jazz album I’ve been thinking about my next studio solo album for Buzzy Tonic. I have a the first three or four songs ready to go, and now I might be adding a crypto-jazz instrumental as well. We’ll see. Anyway that’s probably enough for one side.

I always have a big backlog of partially written musical ideas that can be developed. I was surprised to discover I also have a pretty big backlog of potential lyrics. I thought it was mostly random fragments, but I went thru and with just a little organizing I found I have enough stuff for maybe ten or fifteen songs. Of course not all are equally good, most are incomplete, and none have a musical idea to go with them. So it’ll take some work, but it’s great to find this cache of material and It’ll alot of fun go thru it and see if I can get some songs happening.

BTW here’s a lyric I came up with at a recent Haven Street gig for Jay’s song Slope. I normally don’t care for vocalese (listen to pretty much anyone who’s not Ella Fitzgerald and you’ll know why) so I have no plans to ever record it, but it just came to me while we were playing and now it’s stuck in my head every time we do the song. Enjoy!

…

Slope

Just when you think that life’s looking up
And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around
And then you think that life’s looking down

Climbin’ up that slope
Slidin’ down that slope

Just when you think that life’s looking up
And then you think that life’s looking down

Slidin’ down that slope
Climbin’ up that slope

And you might drink from that flowing cup
Then comes the day when it all turns around

Holdin’ on to hope
Ridin’ on up and down that slope

– jfs 1/19

New Home Page

Hey everybody, go on over and check out the new home page to my website:
http://zingman.com

It’s now split into two main entry points, one for music and one for origami, with the rest of the stuff below. The current features are the Haven Street album for music, and the Origami Air and Space book for origami. This way I can update the features for the two front page elements independently. While I was at it I updated my origami publications page with the new book and some improved layout.

There are some updates in the offing. I figure I’ll want to finesse the styles on the home page. And I realized I never made a page on my site for G-Force. I also want to add some more media to the Haven Street page. And it’s getting time to put up some new photo galleries.

Just Like Heaven

I’ve been putting in a ton of effort recently for the Global Jukebox, for an upcoming push to live and a designing and spec’ing a subsequent new feature set for education that we’re planning to deliver this summer. I’ve also finally had the time circle back and properly learn the keyboard parts for a bunch of tunes that we’ve recently added to the rock band set list, and practicing vocals too.

But the main event for this post is that I just got back from Origami Heaven in Stonybrook Long Island. This is a regional origami convention that his been more fun and interesting for me every year. Unfortunately, it sounds like this will be the last year because it’s alot of work for the organizers. Thank you Shri and Rachel for putting on a great convention all this time.

I spent most of my time hanging out with Ryan Charpentier and Paul Frasco. Plus there was a group of people from L.A. and Pennsylvania who turned out to be interesting and alot of fun and coming from the ComiCon scene.

I taught two classes. One was my blimp. This time I took a two-hour session and it worked out well. The class was smallish and there were a few non-expert level folders, but I was able to give everyone enough instruction that they all ended up folding a nice model. The other model was my Platypus, which also went over well.

Saturday night a few of us were hanging out at the hotel bar, and the chef who was preparing the dinner came out and asked us to fold a couple models for him. One was a dinner plate, for which I came up with a new, nice design.

A few of us stayed up talking and folding well into the night. I created another new model, a Catamaran, inspired by our recent sailing adventures in the Caribbean.

An aside — by coincidence, the night before Jeannie and I and Jay from my jazz group wen to see T. S. Monk at a place called the Jazz Forum in Tarrytown. They’ve been open about a year and I’ve heard it’s a great place. Jay does a better job than I do of keeping up with what music acts are coming to town, so he often invites me to shows. The T. S. Monk band was great, and featured a lineup of three horns, a tenor and alto sax, and a trumpet, plus a rhythm section, and they brought out a vocalist who could scat like Ella. T. S. himself plays the drums, and they did alot of tunes by his father famed piano genius Thelonious Monk. The piano player in the band had a very unMonklike style, smooth and lyrical rather than angular and percussive. It fit the music very well.

Anyway on the way out of the venue we ran into my friend Bob who was waiting to get in for the late show. It turns out Bob, who is big into sailing, had just got back from a trip to the Caribbean too. He was sailing for two weeks on a 40′ Catamaran that he hired with several other couples. He described it as “an RV with sails”.

So I had sailing on my mind, and was vaguely toying with the idea of making an Origami Sun and Sea book to follow up my Origami Air and Space book. I’m very happy with the way this came out. I can be folded in less than ten minutes and works with all kinds of paper.

Michelle joined us Sunday morning and at lunchtime we walked around the Stonybrook campus, to the weird torus mandala sculpture. She had a robot competition Saturday, and her team qualified for the nation finals. They would need some kind of (probably corporate) sponsorship to get there, to pay for transportation and lodging. I think I’ll ask my boss if the company is interested.

Meanwhile the ComiCon people asked me if I was interested in design an origami model for the Funco Pop figures. I guess one of them works there. That might be interesting…

Island Time

Happy that we’re now into the second half of winter. Lots going on.

First off, Jeannie and I enjoyed a long-weekend getaway to the Bahamas last week. We stayed at a little resort right on Cable Beach in Nassau, right next to where they filmed the movie Help!. This the the third time we’ve been down there, and all three times it’s been when Jeannie’s birthday falls on a Monday. Interesting to see how the place changes over the years. The big new thing this time was a giant resort popped up right down the beach. Last time it was under construction; now it’s fully operational. Luckily our cozy, sleepy stretch of beachfront remains undisturbed.

The trip was lovely, a perfect and total break from everything to shake off the winter blues and relax in the sunshine, gain back some health and enjoy the food, drink, music, pool and hot tub, and the beach and the sea. The weather couldn’t have been better. The food was yummy and interesting, with everything having a local flavor. A good example was the jerked chicken sushi roll. Also lots of fish. And unlimited open bar the whole time, with lots of frozen rum concoctions and local beer.

We went out sailing, which was super fun. The resort lets you take out a small Hobie Cat and breeze around the bay. I haven’t operated a sailboat in years, probably since the last time we were at the resort. But I got the hang of it again soon enough, and it was fun and relaxing.

We also went on a boating expedition with diving and snorkeling. Got a drive-by of a handful of local islands and saw some dolphins. Then we swam around a reef and saw some coral and colorful tropical fishes. The colors were predominantly yellow, blue and purple, very different than an above-water palette. Very cool. The last stop was another reef on the edge of the bay, beyond which was deep water. For some reason sea turtles like to come up out of the deep and hang out at this spot, so we had close encounters with several of them. Super awesome!

…

The night before we left my jazz group Haven Street played a gig at a place called Silvana in Harlem. This was my first gig in Manhattan since the 90’s. Things haven’t changed, there’s still five bands on the bill and you only get to play for an hour. That said, it was a cool venue and the people dug the music. We played one condensed set of our best stuff, which we know inside and out. We have no jazz gigs lined up in the next few weeks, so I think we’ll be focusing on new material. I have a couple new songs to bring in.

We’ve also played another rock gig one we got back home, this one back at Victor’s. Pete is now getting more comfortable on drums, and we introduced three new songs. I like the fact that we add several new songs every gig. Continuing to get tighter and tighter, too, refining the arrangements.

Still more news to come, must save for another post.

Double Shot

Winter grinds on. We are in the midst of an epic cold snap. High today is 6 degrees F. Lizzy is back in Buffalo enjoying sub-zero temperatures and lake effect blizzards. More on all that later.

Last weekend we had two excellent gigs back to back, one with the jazz group and one with the rock group.

First, Friday night was the the jazz group Haven Street at the Bean Runner Cafe in Peekskill. This turned out to be a great venue. It had a very San Francisco vibe, with good food, coffee, beer and wine, and a sunny, unpretentious and casually put together decor. There a stage with a PA and the owner was also the sound man, made the band sound great. The room in front of the stage was set up like a night club, with two rows of tables going back, and waiter service so the people there were able to stay in their seats and listen to the music. We had a full crowd, and everyone seemed to dig it. My friend Joe from work and his wife Liz came out. Joe and I always talk about music.

I’m still touched at how an audience will applaud after every solo. And I’m kinda of amazed how, even with a really out-there song like King’s Hex, the audience is right there with us. The band’s playing was tight and solid, good grooves and tempos and dynamics. We all had several really good solos, free and spontaneous and musically happening. We played two sets, about two and half hours. By the end of the second set, after we’d played all our originals and were going out with a couple standards, I felt my energy and imagination flagging. I find when I play in front of an audience I’m a little less inclined to take risks, and sometimes end up falling back and wishing I had a larger vocabulary of canned patterns, but ah well. They don’t know about all the things I might have played. All in all a great gig, and they invited us back. The next jazz gig is this Friday at Silvana’s in Harlem at 6:00, happy hour.

Then Saturday night the rock band, G-Force had our debut gig with our new drummer Pete at Fogherty’s in Bronxville, right up the street from my house. Vinny came and helped load the gear before the gig, which was super helpful. When we got there the setup was a little weird cuz the stage is really small and three of us were out in front, but there was also heavy traffic from the waitstaff right there. The drummer was in a corner and couldn’t see half the band. But once we started playing everything was okay. Pete’s drumming lifts the whole band up a level and everything is much more solid and groovin’. He also sings, so we learned a few few songs for this gig including the Grand Funk Railroad classic Some Kind of Wonderful with Pete on lead. I can hardly wait to get him to harmonies on some other songs; having three voices really will take it to the next level. Onward and upward!

Shiny New Year

Ok so, the new year is off to a roaring start.

Two weeks ago we had just returned to work for new year. Coldness and darkness and all that. That weekend Jeannie was putting away the Christmas decorations in the closet under the stairs, a.k.a. the wizard room. Forgetting where she was, she stood up too fast and bumped her head pretty hard on the low ceiling. The next day Jeannie was driving to work and has a headache and started feeling dizzy. It turned out she had a concussion, which took the better part of a week to get over.

Right around that time the pain in my ankle went from kinda bad to really bad, and it was clear that I’d have to seriously and assiduously stay off my feet for a little while.

That same day we got the news Jeannie’s Aunt Mary died. She was 87 years old. A dear sweet lady. I still remember visiting her house in New Jersey way back when I first moved to NYC. I just saw her at Christmas and she seemed to being doing pretty well. The end was pretty fast.

So bang 1-2-3. At least Lizzy was home and was able to give us rides to the doctors and the funeral home. I was able to work from home until I started feeling better, and we got thru all that. I finally went into the office today. It was good to see everyone again.

We managed to get the Honda fixed somewhere in there. The dealer in White Plains where I bought the car was completely useless, lying to us about the scheduling and the work they intended to perform, recommending thousands of dollars in unnecessary repairs, and not addressing the issue we brought it in for in the first place. After multiple visits we had the give up on them. We took it another Honda dealer in Yonkers, and they were no better. We finally took it to the local garage near Jeannie’s work and they fixed it up for a reasonable price. Never got the firmware in the car’s computer updated, but it seems that was probably unnecessary anyway. Yeesh done with the dealers.

…

On a more upbeat note, the first gig of the new year was with my jazz group Haven Street at the Green Growler in Croton, and it went really well. We played two sets, 10 songs and then 6, with a total of 12 originals and 4 standards. Of the originals, 6 were on our record and 6 are new, destined for record #2. I think the newer songs are all really interesting and some of them really challenging to play, and all offer something new and different compositionally and tonally to solo on, so we’re not just repeating ourselves. The group is at a level where we pretty consistently get into a zone of really good listening/interactivity/spontaneity. A friend of the drummer sat in on trumpet on the standards, and he was quite good, tone phrasing riffs and chops.

Green Growler is a fun and cozy venue. It’s not exactly strictly a bar. They have hundreds of kinds of beer in cans and bottles that you can buy and carry out. It’s right by the Croton train station so there’s alot of walk-in traffic and the bar itself is like a counter. They also have a bunch of beers on tap and you can come in with a jug and have it filled. Then there’s a lounge area across from the bar, where the band plays, and in addition to some chairs and tables they have couches and board games, so it’s a pretty cool hang. They mostly have jazz and alternative music. It’s not very large but the room was full for the first set and still half full at the end, and the people really dug it. There was even dancing, and a guy drawing us the whole show. He showed me the drawings, pretty cool. Captured alot of the improvisational energy.

Our next gig is this Friday at the Bean Runner Cafe in Peekskill. Should be even better.

…

On the rock’n’roll front, we had to kick out our old drummer. We all felt really bad about it, but we had gone as far as we could with him. Andy was a really great guy, very dedicated and eager to help in every way. Unfortunately he was just not an experienced player. The rest of the group has several decades each of experience in working bands, and Andy had been playing about a year and was still getting the basics together.

So Gina had a friend Pete, who is a former wedding band drummer and has a great sense of time and groove. As soon as he entered it lifted the whole sound of the band. Pete sings too, so now we can do three-part harmonies.

We had a gig last weekend, which we had to cancel due to the threat of a snowstorm. Our guitarist Vinny works as a supervisor of a snowplow crew in the Bronx, so he got called in. As it turned out the storm was mostly just rain. Still it’s just as well. No one would’ve come out on a nasty stormy night. And having another week to get the set together with Pete is good thing. To top it off I wouldn’t’ve been able to hump the PA gear coming off and ankle injury.

So we have our debut gig with the new lineup this Saturday at P. J. Fogherty’s in Bronxville. Conveniently just five minutes from my house.

Face the Heat – 2018 Remaster

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!

Wonderful Christmastime

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.

Wind ‘Em Up

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.