Slope began life as a jazz song with my pre-pandemic group Haven Street, written by our bass player Jay, and appeared on our record. I wrote a lyric for it, but we didn’t do vocals in that group, and I’ve never been much of a fan of vocalese anyway, unless it’s Ella Fitzgerald. So for this record I changed it from a jazz style into an old-timey blues, with a drop-tuned guitar now carrying the main riff rather than a standup bass.
The arrangement is fairly sparse, with just a single vocal, guitar, bass and drum. To finish it off I added a bit of Fender Rhodes, and of course a smokey bluesy sax. I also added real drums doing brushes on the snare, since I have no way to create that using midi and samples.
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
Just 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
Just then you think that life’s looking down
Scamblin’ up that slope
Tumblin’ down 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
I even got a batch of CD’s printed up, although at this point that’s mostly just for fun and promotional purposes.
It’s kinda pathetic the state of album distribution these days. Big tech is making harder for artist than ever. There are no record stores any more for physical media, not even online. CD Baby seems to have gotten out of that business. iTunes charges on 99 cents for a song, regardless of length. Even though there are only six songs, it’s a full length album and should be priced accordingly. But those basterds make the rules, not me. And Spotify pays virtually nil as well, unless millions of you turn on to it. Ah well, at least y’all can stream or it download it into your music library, and listen again and again. Hope these become some of your favorite songs.
I’ve pretty much finished mixing and mastering my new jazz record. Which is to say, I’ve been listening back on different sound systems and making ever-smaller adjustments to the mix until I think everything is balanced in terms of tone, dynamics and energy, it’s as good as I can make. And I must say it sounds pretty darn good.
I’m going with Buzzy Tonic as the name of the artist/group, as with my previous studio records, even though the sound of this one is different than the ones before. I’m going with the title Bluezebub [Pandimensional Jazz Tesseract]. Even though the cover image of a Stellated Dodecahedron, it’s a related to a Tesseract as a Pentagram is related to a cube. That would be alot to explain, but I like the word Tesseract and it’s evocative of a higher dimensions even if the precise meaning isn’t clear to everyone.
Next is finish the album artwork and get it up on iTunes and Spotify. Then it’s back to my rock record, which has three songs pretty much done and two more in-progress, enough for a side and then some.
This sure changed alot since I wrote it. It was originally more of a Hank Mobley vibe. As mentioned before, now it’s sort of a hallowe’en cartoon-jazz jump stride swing thing, featuring the Hungarian minor mode and 7/8 meter. The arrangement is for soprano and tenor saxes, with some midi trumpet and vibraphone rounding out the melody instruments line. The rhythm section consists of piano, bass and drums, with bass being more-or-less double tracked fender electric bass and midi synth bass. Additionally there’s some mellotron strings in there for extra sweetness/spookiness. Finally, I wanted a gong sound but didn’t have a good sample, so I recorded hitting the cymbals of my drum kit with mallets and letting them ring. It turned out to sound great, and perfect for the part. Enjoy!
I realize my web site is long overdue fro some updates, so hopefully I’ll be getting around to some of that soon. For now, it’s one new page.
I even created a stand-in for album cover by taking a couple photos of my origami (a Stellated Dodecahedron, a.k.a a 3-D star, and an Astronaut) are ran them thru some photoshop filters. It’s a nice image and seems to go well with the tone of the album so for.
I have three completed songs: The Story Lies, Who Speaks on Your Behalf, andSun of the Son. Together they’re just about twenty minutes, or an album side. Halfway there. I must say this is a very good rate for me, twenty minutes of produced music in a year.
I’ve finally gotten to work on the long-waited and much hyped Plague of Frogs, although I’ll be changing the name because nobody wants to hear a song about the plague these day. Probably something like It’s Raining Frogs, or Battle of the Snow Frogs, or Frogs of War. As mentioned before it’s a 10-minute sci-fi epic. It’ll take a while to complete.
The rest of the album was going to be three to five other half written songs I have, but I might save them for a potential new rock group in the offing. This might get off the ground sooner than expected. Lagond, my main rehearsal studio, just sent out an email today that they’re opening back up soon.
Meanwhile, Sun of the Son came out so well I’m now thinking of making a whole record of digital studio jazz-like music. Get deeper into the aesthetic, bring in influences like Material, 80’s Miles, Kamasi, King Crimson, and who knows what else. I have three songs I wrote for Haven Street that are good for adaptation: Lift Off, Mobility and Winter Wolf Whisper, which I many change the name of to something like Autumn Eyes or Dolphin Eyes. After that I have two more, half-written jazz jams, currently called Heavy Water and Bluzoid. I might even tack on my version with lyrics of Jay’s balled Slope.
That’s alot of music to work on. The key is break it down into manageable tasks. I can play all these songs on sax, and I’m re-learning them on piano. I’m also trying them out on bass and even guitar so when it’s time to start recording I’ll know what I’m doing. Before I can get too far I’ll have to decide how to approach the drums. It’s going to be some combination of midi, loops and layers. I realize I don’t know precisely what Eric was doing on the drums, so I have to go back and listen. We never cut a record with this songs, so I have to go back thru the recordings I made of our gigs. With luck I’ll find some takes that are good enough to put on our web site, so watch this space.
I thought I was done with this song last fall, but after listening to my new mixes I thought I could make it better. The main thing I did was to tone down the effects on the snare drum because it was kinda overpowering in a couple sections. While I was in there I cleaned up the phrasing on the horn a bit, and added some percussion to the jam section to give it more of a Kamasi vibe. Hopefully this one is now finished, and it’s on to some new songs.
Well the exciting thing that happened this week was that Lizzy came home for a visit. We haven’t seen her since the start of her semester back in January.
In music news, my other new song, The Story Lies, is done, and you can hear it here:
As mentioned before, the song was originally written by my brother Martin. I’m quite happy with the way it came out. It’s very much a groove song compared to WSOYB, and my version is much funkier and jazzier than the original. Instrumentally it’s a blend of bass and drums, keys and guitar, with a sax jamming out over everything. It’s got a great chord progression that lends itself to the John Coltrane sheets of sound approach, so I managed to work a little of that in. The lead vocal is a single track with no harmonies, and like the vocal delivery. On the original version there were some backing vocals, so I ended up adding a synth part on the chorus to take up that space.
At last! We finally left the house one day last week. Jeannie was bored being pent up at home, so we took a day trip out to Montauk at the very end of Long Island. It was a lovely day for a ride, and when we got there it was a great time just hiking around the beaches and cliffs and rocks for a few hours. There were some other people there but the parking lot was mostly empty and it was easy to keep one’s distance. And believe it or not, passing thru Queens at rush hour on a Wednesday, there was virtually no traffic.
But the main point of this post is music. I started in on what will hopefully become the fourth Buzzy Tonic album at the beginning of the year. I’m close to done on two new tracks in my home studio. One is Who Speaks on Your Behalf, which is pretty much there, just the mastering to go. The other is The Story Lies, which is close behind, so I’ll talk about that one next post.
Who Speaks on Your Behalf was originally written by The Cheshire Cat, the best band to come out of Buffalo in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Maybe even better better than my own group jazz fusion group Event Horizon. There really was a lot of great music at that time and place.
The Cat consisted of John Massé on vocals and keys, Joe Q on vocals and bass, Ryan Boyle on vocals and drums, and Mike McLaughlin on guitar. They had alot of talent, with three strong singers at both lead and backing, with different style voices and great harmonies. They were all excellent musicians, and everyone in the group wrote. Their sound was sort of pop-prog, a blend of synthesizers and guitars, often heavy, sometimes funky or atmospheric, with influences of Rush, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, Faith No More, Grand Funk Railroad, King’s X and the Chili Peppers, to name a few.
They had a bunch of great songs, but Who Speaks on Your Behalf was my favorite. It has a lot going on musically, and moves from mood to mood, heavy to sunny and back, with a big build section. Structurally, motivically, lyrically and harmonically everything is tightly related. Almost a pocket symphony on the level of Strawberry Fields Forever or Good Vibrations. Plus it has a great lyric and a great vocal delivery.
I figured the song out on piano many years ago when the Cat were playing it live regularly. For this version I went back and listened to the record to make sure I had the form and the chords right. I ended up spending most of the time on the track programming the drums and practicing the opening riff on bass. Everything else went down pretty quickly. I was happily surprised at how easy it was to get a great teak on my vocals.
My lead guitar skills are pretty limited so I didn’t even attempt the guitar part. Instead I put on some synthesizers and a horn section consisting of a soprano and a tenor sax. I think it came out well. The sound of my version is somewhere in the neighborhood of Steely Dan, 80’s Sting with a dash of Pepperland. The guys in Cheshire Cat liked it too, and seem really flattered that someone remembers their song and cares enough to do a new interpretation after all this time. It was worth it, it’s a great song.
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.
At this point the mixing and mastering is done, except for maybe a tiny tweak or two. I no longer really have a separate mastering phase, even though I use a mastering suite that gives me alot of control. In practice I just use it for observing, cuz if I spot something I want to adjust it’s almost easier to go back the mix and do it on the dynamic compressor on the main out.
The major thing left to do is put some album cover art on it and package it up for sale on iTunes, Spotify, etc. Way back in the day when Event Horizon did the original version of this song, we put it out as a track on the album Son of the Sun. It was only available on cassette! I was hoping to maybe do something with the cover art for that, to update and recontextualize it. The cover featured an image of dragon, which I drew on the computer using Corel Draw. Very advanced for the day but probably doesn’t look too impressive now.
But alas, I can’t find it! It wasn’t in a drawer where I keep artwork from old projects of that kind. It wasn’t in a old box of cassettes either. The box only had tapes from bands whose names begin with G – Z. I don’t know where A – F are, but I’d imagine they must be in another box.
Anyway, I cut four renditions. The first is the full song, close to ten minutes longs. Then I edited into parts 1 and 2, each around five minutes long, inspired in part by the classic Isley Brothers song Shout! or maybe ELP’s Karn Evil 9, 1st Impression Parts I & II. When I was mixing I did it in sections, and each half seemed kinda compelling in it’s own way, with a sort of drama to the fade-out and back in again. The split is just at the start of the sax solo, so the two halves have a pretty different character, with the second half featuring the percussion solo and the “Big Rise” and “Big Riff” sections. Finally I did a “radio edit” of the first two and half minutes or so, thru the main theme and into the start of the solos.
