Weekend Warrior

Spring continues to arrive.  Everything is turning green, sprouting and blooming.  Today we had our first actually hot day.  And it’s about time.  Did a ton of yardwork over the weekend.  Mowed the lawn for the first time, plus weeding and edging to get everything looking nice for hanging out outside.  Next step is put down the mulch under the hedges and trim a couple trees.

Been getting on my bike the last couple of weeks, five or six times now.  Nice to get back into that.  I still have yet to do a big long ride on the rail trail near my house, but that will come soon enough.

The big fun this weekend was I went into the city to see my old friend Jim Wynne from Buffalo, playing bass with the band Tripi and the Mother Truckers, who are touring around the northeast these days. Tony Tripi is a singer-songwriter with songs that are fun and earnest, and the group is a power trio with a backup singer for high harmony. Great sound and energy.

I haven’t seen Jim in many years, so it was great to catch up.  It brought back a bunch of memories.  We were in a bunch of bands together back in the day, including Automatic Man and The Purple Connection, and he was the bassist for the last incarnation of my jazz fusion group Event Horizon. Jim is a phenomenal talent on bass, with an imaginative and adventurous technique that he developed after someone lent him a chapman stick for a few months, but then he had to give it back, equally at home in jazz, rock, funk or dance music.  I’d compare him to Les Claypool, Billy Sheehan, or Tony Levin, with a bit of Joco thrown in, but he really has his own thing going.

Automatic Man used to play every Monday night at Broadway Joe’s for a year or two, except when the Bills were on Monday night football.  The group featured Jim on bass, Pete D. on guitar, Pat O. on drums and me on sax.  We did alot of Jeff Beck and Mike Stern, and adaptation of rock songs.  We used to end the set with the Beatle’s Abbey Road medley, with Pete and I playing most of the vocal parts on our instruments and Jim covering pretty much everything else in the arrangement on bass.  It was a great crowd pleaser, and people used to sing along to Carry that Weight and The End.

The Purple Connection also featured Jim and Pat and myself, and Craig H. on guitar.  We had a Sunday afternoon gig at a place called The Inn on the River, a bar where people would pull up to a dock in their boats.  The set leaned more toward smooth jazz, with things like George Benson and Steely in our repertoire.

Around that time I was in a different group making an album and the studio we used had a summer picnic with a raffle, and Jeannie won 10 hours of studio time.  I thought I could make a record in ten hours, so re-formed my group Event Horizon, with Jim on bass, and we went in and recorded an hour of music – four songs – after just one rehearsal.

So like I said, I haven’t seen my friend in many years.  Amazing props that he’s been making his living doing music this whole time and found success at it.  He told me I inspired him to get into digital audio production, and he also teaches now, and even tunes pianos!  His style of playing has evolved too.  A little less flamboyant but better integrated.  Jim now has a seven-string bass guitar, believe it or not, with a really broad neck and lots of room for higher and denser chord voicings and bigger excursions into the treble range.  And he plays it like a mother trucker!

Spacecats – The Recording Session

I’ve been pretty busy the last month or so, but it’s finally time to tell you about the new album my band Spacecats is making.  It’s far enough along now that you can listen to some rough mixes:

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/spacecats/recording_session_240316/edit_mixes_2

We recording the whole thing, ten songs, in a single day back in March.  The project grew out of a desire to have some samples of our music to use to try and get gigs.  We had been taping our rehearsals, but using just a portable audio recorder with a built-in stereo mic to capture the live sound of the room.  It sounded pretty good, but nothing like a professional record.  The inability to separate the instruments or control their tone and dynamics was limiting.

Our friend Gavin, who sets up our rehearsal space, heard us talking about this, and mentioned that he is trained as an audio engineer and we could use our rehearsal space as a recording studio.  A plan was hatched.

Meanwhile, we’d all be writing songs, and at some point last fall our drummer Rick started bring in more and more material.  Soon we realized we probably had enough songs for a full-length album of original material, if we focused on getting the songs tight.  This took a little time, because once we started, there was alot of work on the details of the arrangements.  Also, the guys in the band kept bringing in new tunes that upped the overall level of the project, so we added them in and dropped some others.  In particular Rick brought in a song that was replete with meter changes following a really interesting but complex pattern.  My kind of weird.

We had originally thought we might be ready to record right after then new year.  But between wanting to get the material tight, people in the group having to take a week off at various times, and the availability of the studio, we couldn’t book a date until mid-March.

Although the rehearsal space, the big room downstairs at Lagond, is not a professional studio in the sense that it lacks a control room, we like it because it’s big and has good acoustics, and most of all it has a really nice grand piano.  It also has a mixer and PA for doing live events, which can be hooked up to a computer easily enough.  The studio also has a deep bench of high-quality microphones.  So we really had everything we need.

Gavin came in early that morning to set everything up.  We decided to do it like a traditional jazz record, everything live in the studio.  The instruments were close-mic’d but not completely isolated, which meant limited options for overdubs later because there’s be some bleed-thru.  So what you hear is the real thing!

The setup was: six mics on the drum (kick, snare, rack tom, floor tom, and left and right overheads for the cymbals and hihat); two mics in the piano for left and right, plus a third just outside for ambiance; direct inject plus a mic on the amp for the bass; and two different mics on the sax, one a large diaphragm condenser and the other a ribbon mic, to capture different tones.  That’s thirteen channels total.  

The session went smoothly.  Everyone was relaxed and playing well, and Gavin was able to capture a good sound without difficulty. Once we got set up and soundchecked, we started running down the set list.  The goal was to get two complete takes of each song.  Sometimes we had a false start or broke down in the middle, so we ended up with some partial takes, or even three complete takes sometimes.  After five songs in about three hours we were getting tired so we took a break for lunch.  We front-loaded the more difficult songs, so after lunch we jammed thru the rest in about two hours.  All in all it couldn’t have gone better.

I brought the tracks home and imported them into protools, and set up a project for each song.  I put each instrument on its own bus since we had multiple channels for all of them, then did a basic setup with some light compression, EQ, reverb and dynamic compression on the master out.

The next step was to go thru and listen closely to everything and decide which takes to use, in some cases editing together the song from several different takes.  Also in this phase I tightened up the timing where it was needed, and pasted over the occasional clam.  I must say overall the group has a really good sense of time and the tempos were very consistent between takes and within a song.  For one song, I dropped in a minute-and-a-half sax solo from another take and did not have to adjust the time at all.  I discovered we sometimes to a slight ritard at the end of someone’s solo or anther turning point in the tune for dramatic effect.

Now I’m at the point where I’m listening again for the mix, to try and get that as good as can be.  In particular I’m paying attention to how the bass sits in the mix, and how to make it present but not to overbearing. 

Here’s the list of songs in the order we recorded them, which is probably not the order they’ll appear on the record.

Kamala – written by Rick our drummer, features a 4-against-6 latin groove that breaks into swing in the bridge, and a thru-composed structure with a break after the piano solo that I call the Zappa section.  I play soprano sax on this one (and tenor on most of the others).

There’s Snow Tomorrow – written by Josh our piano player, a light mid-tempo number in a minor key, with a sort of wistful feel.  When we were coming up with the arrangement, I thought it would be cool to have the sax in a supporting role and the piano mainly carry the melody, since Josh has such a great feel for it and we don’t have any other tunes that do that.

Los Gatos del Cosmos – one of mine.  An uptempo samba in the Hungarian minor mode.  Starts with an atmospheric section inspired by the Police, which reprises in the middle as the foundation for a drum feature section.  Lots of fun to play, lots of dynamic ups and downs.

Paris on the Hudson – written by Rick, this is the one that features lots of shifting time signatures, and a tricky melody and chord progression to match.  I guess you’d call it a swing feel, sometimes waltzing, sometimes in four, sometimes in double time.

Lift Off – another by me, this is an uptempo swing number inspired by John Coltrane’s Countdown, and features a tricky 2-5-lift-inside-a-2-5 as the main motivic idea for both the harmony and the melody.  Also has a drum solo.

Lance’s Guitar – a power ballad by Rick with a beautiful melody and a striking chord progression. 

Pour Me a Fifth – another light mid-tempo number by Josh, this one is 3/4 time and has a minor-key chord progression that moves around the cycle of 5ths alot, and a melody that reinforces that idea.  Ken’s bass playing gets really abstract and melodic on this.  I play soprano.

Autumn Eyes – a ballad of mine, very open and atmospheric sounding.  Features a bass solo.  I play soprano. We later did the one and only overdub on this song, some piano comping behind the bass solo. It’s amazing how well my synthesizer piano patch matched the sound of the grand piano from the studio.

Dr. Pluto – a funk jam, my composition.  We had a few funk and R&B kind of numbers we were rehearsing (indeed our tagline was Jazz and Funk, or maybe it was Jank and Fuzz), but this was the only one that made into the set for the session.  I wrote it with the bass having the melody line, and the sax doing a response.  The title comes from a cool-looking sparkly bass Ken brought to rehearsal once. It said Di Pinto on the headstock, but from a distance I misread it.  Josh plays electric piano on this one.

At a Laundromat in Pamplona – Josh’s composition, basically a samba jam.  This is one of our looser songs, with the whole middle section being just two chords.  Toward the end I do this rising thing that Ken calls the Kamasi section.  Josh plays electric piano on this one too.  A perfect way to end the set.

Everything Under the Sun is in Tune

Been busy.  Spring is finally coming.  We had a few nice days in a row.  The grass is starting to grow and the trees are turning green and other colors with fuzz.  Over the weekend I got my Mustang out on the road, finished off some much-needed yard cleanup from a recent bout of storms, and best of all, got on my bike and went for a ride, ending that awkward time of year between the end of ski season and the start of biking season.

The weekend before we went upstate for the big solar eclipse.  I’d never seen one in totality before.  Jeannie and I drove up to Buffalo on Saturday, and noticed the traffic was fairly heavy one we got on the country roads the last hour of the trip.  Excitement was in the air.  Saturday night we hung out Lizzy and Michelle and Lizzy’s boyfriend Josh, and Larry and Jackie joined us later at the bar.  The place had a tap wall with like a dozen different beers.  Lots of fun.  The waitress commented that it was unusually crowded because of people coming into town for the eclipse.  

Larry and Jackie had driven down to Tennessee for the last eclipse, and Larry told me it was a life-changing experience.  He didn’t seem that different to me, so I asked how it had changed him.  He told me he it made him really want to see another eclipse.  And indeed they drove out to Ohio for this one to try and get out from under the clouds.

Sunday Jeannie and Michelle and I decided to go to Chestnut Ridge Park, which is near my parent’s house, to see the famous Eternal Flame, something we had never done despite my parents having lived there for the last thirty years.  It was still stick and mud season up in Buffalo, no sign on anything turning green yet.  I think every other person coming into town for the weekend had the same idea, and the trail was pretty crowded, to the point where we had to queue up to climb over rocks in the last part.  Still it was pretty cool to see, a jet of natural gas burning in a little cave behind a waterfall.  Weird.

Sunday afternoon Martin and Kathleen arrived with the kids and their dog.  My mum made a big family dinner for everyone, and my dad brought out the wine.  Very lovely evening.  Monday I slept in.  I’d been feeling tired the end of the last week and it was good to catch up on my rest.  I spent to whole morning hanging out and talking with Martin.  After lunch we all went for a long walk in the park near my parents’ house.  It felt like a low-key fourth of July.  People had brought lawn chairs and drinks and even some telescopes to watch the big event.  We got back to my parents’ house as the skies were darkening, and watched the totality from their lawn.

It had been mainly sunny in the morning, and grew increasingly cloudy as the totality got closer.  Still there were enough breaks in the cloud for good viewing, if not very sustained.  We had some obsidian discs from Mexico that were meant for viewing the sun, and they somehow made the sun visible behind the clouds.  I think it actually only liked like it was getting cloudier; as the eclipse progressed the sky was getting darker because of that.

When the moment of totality arrived, it suddenly became nighttime.  It was like somebody pulled the house lights down on the whole world.  The temperature dropped, birds and dogs made lots of noise, and there was a ring of pink near the horizon.  We even saw a few stars.  Looking at the sun, there are a few moments when the clouds parted and you could see the corona, all dancing shimmering silver gold tendrils.  Amazing.  Life altering, even.  Then a few minutes later the diamond ring appeared and just as abruptly as is descended, the night vanished.  It was back to tepid daylight, which returned to full strength over the next hour or so.  And wouldn’t you know it, it was bright sunshine the rest of the day, not a cloud in sight.

We dove home Tuesday, and again there was heavy traffic, particularly at the rest stops on the way.  I’m happy to say we found some good places for lunch on the trip.  For many years the only really quick and convenient option McDonalds.  Their food was never that great but seems to have steadily declined in quality over the years.  on the way up we discovered a new place, the Old Bat Factory in Hancock.  They had a deli with sandwiches and wraps, very yummy.  On the way back home there’s a seasonal roadside barbecue stand in Appalachin.  Pulled pork and all that.

And, back in the music studio, I’ve edited together mixes of nine out of ten of the songs for the new Spacecats record.  I know I said I’d tell you all about it, but I think I’ll save the story for next time, when I have some tracks ready to share.

Fotoz 2023, Part 4

Well this project has dragged on a while, but is finally done.  The last batch includes our trip California last fall, including the SF Bay Area, the Lake Tahoe and Yosemite, and the PCOC Origami Conference.  All in it was twenty galleries, by far the most for a single year.  Ah well this year will probably be less traveling.  Can’t wait to get back to doing other things tomorrow.  Enjoy!

https://zingman.com/fotooz/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2023/2023-16/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2023/2023-17/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2023/2023-18/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2023/2023-19/
https://zingman.com/fotooz/2023/2023-20/