April 2025 – Zing Blog 2

Freewheelin’

April’s almost at an end. It’s been nice weather the last few weeks. All the trees and plants are flowering and filling in with leaves. Such a dramatic difference. Lovely yo be outside, and a great boost of energy.

Easter was about as late as it could be this year. We had Mary and the family over, and Jeannie made a rib roast. It was a nice time.

I’ve been doing plenty of biking, getting to know my new bike. We’ve been out on the Empire State Trailway twice now, the second time with my new bike. Both times I did sixteen miles, which has become my basic trip. I’m trying to get my time down to 64 minutes, which is fifteen miles an hour, or four minutes a mile. So far my best time is more like four minutes and five seconds a mile on average. This last trip, I made it to the end where I turn around in thirty-one minutes! But I got tired on the return trip, and in the end didn’t go much faster than my first time this season.

I’ve also taken my bike into the Nature Study Woods a few times now. It’s a woodsy place near my house with trails that are mostly pretty flat, but hilly and rocky in a few sections. I can pull up all the hills pretty handily on my new bike, which is good cuz I wasn’t able to test it out on that kind of terrain before I bought it. I’m exploring different, longer rides in my neighborhood. Last time I went all the way thru NSW up to Mill Road, then zigzagged my way back home thru New Rochelle, for a total of 10 miles, and about 500 foot elevation gain.

Jeannie’s bike is in the shop right now, so this weekend we did some hiking instead. Went up the Timp in Harriman State Park. Four and half miles, 1000 feet vertical.

I watched the new Bob Dylan movie a couple weeks ago. It was lots of fun, especially cuz my patron Alan Lomax, the visionary behind The Global Jukebox, was a character in it. One thing about it found funny was that I used to live in Greenwich Village, so to see it reconstructed thru combination of hHollywood backlot and AI-generated CG took a few minutes to get used to. It also made me miss smoking. Perhaps predictably, the story ended just after Dylan turned electric in 1965.

I also watched the new Led Zeppelin documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin. It was done by the guy who did American Epic, and in cooperation with the surviving members of the band. It features lots of interviews with Page, Plant and Jones, and archival interviews with John Bonham. It mostly focuses on how Jimmy Page put the group together out of the collapse of the Yardbirds, in the midst of British psychedelic heavy blues scene of the 60’s. Also a deep dive into Jimmy and Jonsey’s work as session players and that scene at the time. Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger was shown an example. There’s concert footage from early TV and concert appearances as The New Yardbirds, the as Led Zeppelin in America in 1969, culminating in the band’s triumphant return to England shortly after the release of their second album to play their first major shows on their home turf as Led Zeppelin. In a surprising twist, the story ends just before they turn acoustic in 1970.

The next night I had to watch Celebration Day, the Zeppelin reunion concert from 2007. It still holds up, great song selection and great performances. Musically and sonically is actually better than most of their concert footage from when they work together as a band. It makes me wonder how much they fixed up in the studio in postproduction.

Speaking of the studio, my recording project Spellbound is coming along. I’m up to tracking vocals on the first batch of four songs. One is really low in my range, one is really high, one is right in the middle and the last one’s an instrumental. The low and middle ones went down pretty easily, and now I’m tracking the high one, which is well within my range if I’m warmed up. It’s kind of a belter, a power ballad sort of thing. I’ve done a few takes and am getting comfortable and focusing on the phrasing, which is a good place to be.

I’m also continuing to cleanup and reorganize my studio. In the last couple weeks I got rid of a whole bunch of old computer and electronic equipment. The last thing is go thru boxes and boxes of origami models and cabinets of paper and consolidate all that. I hope to be finished will all this before Michelle moves home in a few weeks. Meanwhile I’ve also set up the mic stands and microphones around my drum kit. The final step is to plug everything in and start recording. BTW, I’ve decided to learn how to play The Crunge on drums.

One more thing, my jazz and funk group Spacecats has another gig coming up on Friday May 30th at the Green Growler in Croton, which is fast becoming one of our favorite places to play. The band is in a fun place now, playing at a very high level. I’ve been slowly making charts in software of my backlog of songs, and bringing them in to the group, so we have some new originals each gig.

The most recent of these is Mo’bilty, which I originally wrote for my pre-pandemic band with Gary and Jay and Rich, and subsequently recorded on my record Bluezebub. The recorded version was a sort of cartoon-jazz vibe in 7/4 meter. The band took to the odd time signature but came up with a pretty different feel, but also very hip and much more modern sounding. Should be fun to see how this one develops.

Meanwhile, watch this space for updates on the gig as the time draws closer.

Here be Dragons

It’s been another busy couple of weeks. When we last left our intrepid hero protagonist, he was on the eve of a jazz gig at a club in Mt. Kisco. Here’s how that went.

I hadn’t been to Mt. Kisco in a while, and it was a bit further than I remembered, out past Bedford almost to Katonah. The club itself was in this funny little pedestrian mall. Inside the place was nice, with a bar, a dozen or so tables, and a stage with a grand piano and drum kit, and a PA and mixing provided. The club owner was the bartender, sound engineer and host for the diners. He was a bit fussy about the setup, and insisted the bass go direct and not use his amp or effects. I guess he was afraid of the bass being too loud. However, we had trouble hearing the bass thru the monitors, which affected our performance.

Still overall it went well. The energy and playing were good. We had a decent crowd and they seemed to really dig us. Robyn sat in with the group, singing a bunch of standards. We had more of a chance to rehearse the arrangements since her last gig with us, and it felt more together. The show was a single long set, so we did about half songs with Robyn, and half our originals, and one or two standards. The food there was pretty good too, and the cocktails too.

That was Wednesday night. That Friday evening Jeannie and I drove up to Buffalo for a visit, leaving home right after work and arriving after midnight. The motivating event behind this trip is was wanted to have Charlie go on a tour of UB, his first college visit. We figured it’d be good to do while Michelle is still a student there. Saturday was rain out, and was a chill day without any plans, the first in a long time. I’d been thinking of buying a new bicycle, so we went to Burt’s Bikes, a big bike store up there. Our local bike store is small, and I need an extra tall sized frame and would rather test ride a bike than order one unseen. I looked a few bikes, but due to the rain wasn’t able to ride them outside. So they said come back the next day if the weather is better.

We also went to the Walden Galleria mall. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to any mall, and the last few trip the mall was always pathetic and mostly empty and on the verge of closing down. But this mall was really hopping, full of people and stores. There was a gaming store where I looked for a new D&D module and Jeannie bought some dice. There was an anime store, a Lego store, and Apple store, and even a Spencer’s. Wow, throwback to another era. That evening we took Lizzy and Josh and Michelle out to dinner at a nice place in Allentown. Before and after we hung out at Lizzy’s apartment. They have alot of legos in their place. Everyone is happy and doing well. Lizzy and Josh just got back from a min-vacation to Washington D.C. Michelle and Josh are both graduating in May.

Sunday morning I went back to bike shop and auditioned several bikes. In the end I bought a Trek Dual Sport, which is a hybrid trail and road bike. It has an aluminum frame and carbon fiber front fork, and disc brakes and a single ten-speed derailleur, as is the modern way. It also has more comfortable handlebars than my current bike, is more curvy looking and is a nice shade of blue. When I got it home I saw that the proportions and dimensions are almost identical to my old bike, a Mt Trek 850 I bought in the 1990’s when Google was just a small startup with their office above Palo Alto Bicycles and a handcrafted neon sign on the door. (I talked Jeannie out of applying for a job there, but that’s a whole ‘nuther story.) Sunday afternoon Kathleen and kids showed up. I took them for a walk out to the local playground. In the evening we played D&D.

The D&D campaign had reached the big climax of the adventure. By now all the characters are third level and are gaining some good fighting and spellcasting abilities, and the players are learning how to use their characters well. And the monsters and bad guys are getting tougher and more fun to run. The module we’re doing is called The Sunless Citadel, and the big boss is an evil druid doing unnatural experiments with growing plants underground without sunlight, aided by evil animated plants and a plant-zombiefied Paladin and his Cleric sister. In the middle of the cave is the tree of evil, so Charlie (playing Luna, and Elfin Ranger) decides to climb it to try and pick the white apple of pure evil, and finds a host of monsters up in its branches. At some point the rest of the party realize that if they destroy the tree it may break the spell of the zombified NPCs, so thay start hacking at it with their weapons. Charlie’s cousin Rylee (playing Nyx, and Elvish Fighter, rolls a natural 20, so I have Charlie roll a dexterity check to see if he falls out of the tree. He failed his save and so fell and took enough damage to reduce him to 0hp.

Charlie was revived, but was really upset and decided to attack Nxy with an unarmed strike for revenge. (All of these characters are neutral to chaotic, but I figured it would have been Matthew and Abbie to come to blows first.) I guess to his credit he used is second attack for this. Rylee retaliated by swing her sword at him, and Charlie was reduced to 0hp again!

All that was the week before. This last week they spent mopping up and making their way back out of the dungeon. I give them some magic beans of levitation, but they never figured out what they were and spent a good deal of time climbing up a shaftway and falling repeatedly. At last they made it out, only to be ambushed by a White Dragon Wyrmling they encountered earlier. It had escaped when Abbie tried to charm and befriend it while Matthew tried to kill it, and an altercation erupted between the two of them. This time the dragon incapacitated most of the party instantly, and soon the only ones left standing were Nyx and Luna. Nyx had climbed a cliff wall and jumped on the dragon’s back, and was attempting stab it in the neck but rolling low, when it dove out of the sky to lunge at Luna. Charlie delivered the killing blow, which caused the creature to crash into the earth rather than veer back skyward, and so Rylee had to roll a dexterity save or take massive damage from the fall. Fortunately for her, but much to Charlie’s chagrin, she made her save and took only half damage, and survived the ordeal with 2hp remaining.

Monday morning was the campus tour. Jeannie went with Charlie and Kathleen, since she’s an alum of the engineering school, which is where Charlie’s interest lies. I took Abbie, Mathew and Ellie on an informal tour of the campus of my own basically walking around. We went to Baird Point, where Abbie found a strangely crafted and polished stone block. She and Match developed a theory that there were five of them hidden around the campus, so she was on the lookout the rest of the morning (she’s a bit of a collector) but found only a random brick or chunk of wood or metal. We walked out to Ellicot complex and across the terrace and ended up at Goose Poop Island. There was sort of circle in the ground like a giant seal, probably where people did tai-chi on the weekend. The kids surmised that if you brought the five stones together in that spot and stacked them in the shape of an Inukshuk, it would grow to enormous proportions and re-arrange Ellicot into the shape of a normal, rectangular building! Meanwhile Charlie enjoyed the tour and both he and Kathleen found it informative.

Wow, I’ve been going a while. Gonna hafta call it a night here. Next up: the new stuff at work, progress on the Spellbound recording project, and defragging the studio part II.

Windin’ Up the Main Spring

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Our band had our gig at the Green Growler a week ago Saturday. It went great! The band is playing at a really high level, together and free at the same time. We debuted two new originals. One was What You Bring to the Table by Rick, which has undergone considerable evolution since he brought it to the group. The other was mine, Son of the Sun, replete with meter and key changes, and borrowing from the prog idiom. I’m impressed the group wanted to learn it, and stuck with it until we got it together. Of course it evolved alot too as this group made it our own. We rounded out the set with a mixture of originals, jazz standards, and funk and rock covers. We had a good crowd, including Michelle who was home for spring break, and Nick and Giovanni came up from Long Island. Giovanni was fascinated by playing mainly improvised music and how it works, asking me what I had written down on my charts and that sort of thing.

And hey everybody – we have another show coming up two days at Jazz on Main in Mt. Kisco. This one features special guest Robyn Ferracane on vocals, so we’ve been learning a whole ‘nuther repertoire for that one. The band songs are mainly our originals since we have alot of them now, while the vocal songs lean heavily into standards and vocalese. Lots arrangements with dramatic beginnings and endings. Should be an excellent show.

And right on the heels of that my team at work had an onsite in the Manhattan the better part of the week. Lots of people came in from out of town. I took the train in to Grand Central, and each day walked one way down to or back from Union Square. It was an excellent week to be in the city, with the beginnings of spring stirring. We had a few meetings in the park or just waking around the neighborhood. I the middle of that I met Jeannie after work on evening to see Kurt Elling at Birdland, doing a tribute to Weather Report. Kurt remains one of my favorite jazz singers, and has such a great voice and phrasing and a unique take on things, and rock-star level cha-rasma.

The Innovation Lab as grown to twelve people, and we have alot more confidence to think big this year. We also have a new CEO, who met with us for an extended roundtable discussion and asked us what resources we need, and what new ideas we have cooking. Nobody really knew what he’d be like until he arrived; it turns out he’s friendly and bright and sees his charter as turn-this-ship-around, and signaled he’s willing to to put some resources into it. My VP used the phrase tip of the spear to describe our role this coming year. I’m in sort of transitional phase right now because the two main projects I’ve been working on the last three years have successfully transitioned from R&D to production, and the challenges with them are to make them scale up and be cost effective. Indeed three of our new hires this year are involved in that endeavor. So I successfully lobbied to be a sort or researcher-at-large for a while. My boss said I should look around and think about what I want to work on next. I haven’t had that luxury since the 1990’s. And, on the train ride home the last day, I thought of an idea that looks promising. It cut across several things we have going on, and would move our agent AI work forward to enable productization at a multi-dimensional level. But first, to understand some critical technical systems. So this week I’m starting to talk to the other engineers and managers about what it would take to pull it off. Wish me luck!

And then this last Saturday, spring arrived in earnest, if only for a half day. It got up to seventy-five degrees. Jeannie and took our bikes out in the morning to the local trail. I’ve been biking most of the winter when the weather permits, but mostly short rides (five miles or so) on the streets near my house. This is the first time I’ve gone a long distance straight and flat. I did sixteen miles in a little over an hour. Not bad for the first real outing of the season. Last year it took me until May or June to reach that distance. Last year my longest ride was thirty miles. This year I hope to reach forty or even fifty.

Also over the last two weekends I started the spring yardwork cycle, clearing out nine cans and bags worth of leaves and trimmings and other debris, plus a big bundle of sticks and branches. And, I took the Mustang out for the fist time of the season. It started right up and ran just fine. Woo-hoo! Of course by the time we were on the way home I was anxious to beat the gathering rainclouds.

Next up: the D&D adventure comes to the final boss!