November 2025 – Zing Blog 2

Rollin’ and Foldin’

The weather continues to get colder and darker and stormier. One it gets below forty-five degrees of so, biking gets more difficult, especially if it’s windy. So now I’m down to biking every other day or so, and when I go I gotta bundle up. A week ago I did my longest ride of the season, indeed my longest ride in quite a few years. Over twenty-eight miles in just a little over two hours. I’m hoping I’ll get another long ride or two in before winter arrives, but if that’s my longest this year I’m satisfied. The days are short and it’s dark alot, so next time I’ll go for speed to see how far I can go in ninety minutes.

Last Friday Jeannie and I went to see Branford Marsalis playing with his quartet at SUNY Purchase. They have a very nice concert hall there, although lots of little things about it are weird, including the entrance to the venue being in a tunnel, and the lack of a center aisle of doors in back means the entrance to the hall from the lobby is a little made of side hallways. Anyway the show was great. Branford is one of my favorite sax players around today. The piano player was Joey Calderazzo, who is amazing, and so were the rhythm section. The mainly band played an interoperation of the Keith Jarret album Belonging and to to some really great places.

Saturday we went up to Boston for the OrigaMIT convention. The special guest was my friend John Montroll, who had never attended an OrigaMIT convention before, so that was a fun surprise. I also met his sister and nephew, who is a professor of mathematics and computer science. John gave a talk on his approach to origami design, which was very cool. His style of delivery is pretty breezy and laid back, so if you’re not paying attention you’ll miss how deep what alot of what he has to say is.

I folded several new models for my exhibit. I taught my Platypus, so I did a new rendition of that out of purple tissue foil; it came out very nice. I also had a new version of my Lizard and Turtle, both folded out a sheet of beautiful hand-painted paper I bought in Venice, Italy when we were there a few years back. The other model I’ve been working on is a Dimpled Dodecahedron. I came up with a layout folded from a decagon that has polar symmetry. Back in July at the OUSA convention John helped me refine the layout to make the 3-D folding phase more tractable. It turns out to be a very difficult model to fold because as it accumulates layers inside that zigzag in strange ways and tend to push the model open like a budding flower. So most of the work I’ve been doing has been to manage the layers and make them organized and flat to mitigate that tendency. I got thru most of the southern hemisphere and am up to the lock at the south pole, where three tabs are supposed to go together in a pinwheel. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite have the worked out in time for the convention. I’m sort of in the Zeno’s paradox phase: every time I try, I get half the remaining distance to the finish line.

New Song: The Call of the Muse

Here’s a rough mix of the fifth song from the Spellbound project. As mentioned previously, this is a two-part song that was a collaboration between Martin and myself. This is reflected in the musical structure and instrumentation along with the lyric. The first part is built on a rhythm guitar pattern providing the backbone, with a swoopy synth solo floating on top and a synth bass underpinning it all. Martin’s original guitar track was a six-string electric with a flange effect. I tried to emulate that, and also double-tracked it on twelve-string guitar. When we wrote this song Martin only played six-string, but later on switched to twelve-string as his main sound. I have one of his old twelve-string guitars and have been looking for opportunities to use it to make the music sound more like him.

Martin originally sang the lead vocals on the first section, but on this recording I’m doing all the singing, so I added a bit of EQ to the vocal tracks, giving his parts a boost in the upper treble and mine a boost in the low treble to differentiate them a bit. This is kind of funny because back then I used to be able to sing really high, and was the guy in my rock group to sing the Rush and Yes songs.

In the second section the instrumentation switches to a keyboard sound. In the original I used my Roland Alpha Juno. For this recording I have a stack of electric piano, clavinet and the Polysynth sound from the Juno blended together. There’s also electric bass, which is an option not available to us in the original sessions. This section has a really nice dynamic flow, coming down and building back up in the chorus. There’s a synth solo and an electric guitar solo. I based my solo and guitar sound on Martin’s original, but back then it was just a couple Boss pedals, now it’s a whole universe of computerized effects to learn how to craft. After the guitar solo I introduced a new section I call the big build, with guitars and synths and everybody going nuts in a coordinated fashion, climaxing in a dramatic pause. There was a section in the original toward that I had considered cutting cuz it was kinda just there, but I filled it in with a bit more guitar and synth jamming and really brought it to a satisfying place.

The outro is a long synth solo with a slow build, using the pattern of the first section.

I must say this came out much better than I expected when I first started tracking it. At first I didn’t really think it was a super strong song, maybe kind of long and meandering, clocking in at over seven minutes. But the new arrangement has lots of instrumental layers and dynamics, and of course the performance and recording are much better. It really takes you on a journey! Here is it is, enjoy!

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/spellbound25/TheCallOfTheMuse31.mp3

Turn Turn Turn

Another season of cold and darkness arrives. Days growing shorter, nights growing colder. Hallowe’en has come and gone, but at least I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving and the holidays. Been trying to make the best of playing outside while there’s time. Sunday was sunny and at least warm-ish, and we got up early since they changed the clocks. I went for a 26 mile bike ride, the longest of the season so far, in two hours even. Still hoping to get a 30 mile ride in this fall. But I think ought to bring something to eat. By the end of the ride I was starting to slow down but noticed I was also getting pretty hungry.

Last weekend Jeannie and I went for a quick mini-vacation getaway up to the Catskill mountains. We rented a ski lodge cabin condo type place with a fireplace and a hot tub. On Monday we went for a big hike up Mt. Windham. 1700 feet vertical and eight-mile round trip, in about five and a half hours. Peaceful woody trail with fall colors on the trees. Nice view at the top of the Mohawk River valley. Ended up watching PBS travel channel at the end of the night. Lots of shows on the Alps and Italy. Now we want to go back. Also visited Kathleen and the kids, hung out and played a bunch of games.

Last Saturday, the night before we left, Spacecats played another gig at the Green Growler. This was our best on yet. The band continues to get tighter and more spontaneous. Good crowd too, everyone enjoyed it. We played sixteen originals and eight covers or standards. Highlights include two new songs from Rick, Underutilized and Where Has the Sun Gone?, as well as Son of the Sun continues to rise to new epic heights. Some of the new covers include Lithium, which has a really interesting quirky chord progression, and our closer Giant Steps played as a samba.

Now we’re bringing a bunch more new tunes. We’re planning to do a record this winter, and I have three or four partially written songs I’m trying to finish. I brought in the first of these last week. It’s working title is Cream of Confusion, which might or might not be better than it’s original title Downward Thing over Pedal.

Almost a year ago, last Thanksgiving, I needed to clear the dining room table of work-in-progress origami because we needed to use the dining room to have dinner. I brought a bunch of stuff downstairs to my studio, but it turned out I had run out of space to put things away. This lead to a huge project of turning out my closer and desk drawers and all the other storage space and throwing away alot of old useless things and organizing what was left. I ended up getting a set of slide-out shelves to put into my Ikea storage closet so I could inventory and organize all my origami paper. Well I finally got the project done, clearing the way for upgrading my recoding studio and plugging in the DAC for my drum mics so I can finally start recording with them. Woo-hoo!

Been making lots of great progress on the Spellbound songs too, but that’s a whole ‘nuther post.

Meanwhile at work I completed my first major project since joining the experimental engineering group in the springtime. I integrate cars brands knowledge base into AskCR, our AI chatbot for product recommendations and all things Consumer Reports. Along the way I learned the whole technology stack, which, despite so many huge and obvious problems with the whole LLM AI thing, is pretty fascinating. Up next I have several more integrations teed up including car videos and advocacy stuff.

And as for the Global Jukebox, the style refresh is nearing completion and looking really sharp. Along the way I cleaned up and refactored alot of the css and UI code, clarifying and simplifying things. This next release is going to be a big one, and we still have alot to do with new data sets and visualizations. Nick has been working to integrate new taxonomies for languages and people in addition to the current geography ones. He’s out having hip surgery right now, but hopefully he’ll be back in action soon.