After two weeks back at work it’s nice to have a day off. Work seems to be going pretty well these days, despite a backdrop of uncertainty around the company as a whole. A few old projects finishing up, and some new ones finally gaining traction. I’m feeling quite good for the middle of winter compared to most years.
For the first week and a half or so of January the weather was mild and I even got out on my bike a half dozen times, braving withered crusts of iced-up snow on the streets. Then it turned colder a few days ago it turned cold and we got several decent snowfalls.
Our Spacecats gig went really well. The crowd was pretty good considering there was three or inches of snow the first half of the day and everyone had to shovel out. The the music continues to advance and evolve. We debuted six new songs, including several originals, and some of the more complicated songs we’ve done a few times continue to get tighter and more expressive.
Two of the new songs are compositions of mine. I wanted to have some all-new original material as we prepare to head into the studio. I looked thru my notebooks of ideas to see if anything sounded compelling enough to be worth working up, and a few of them leapt out.
One is a song I’ve titled Green Landings, which plays with the idea of a chord progression with inner voicings moving down by half steps while the bass stays on a pedal tone. To this I added some structure, a contrasting bridge, and on top of it all a jaunty melody.
The other one I’m calling Djinni’s Wish, and it’s based on a very old idea I had a long time ago. The form of the song is a bolero, which is a kind of dance rhythm in 6/4 or 18/8 that has characteristics of both a march and a waltz, although I only recently learned this. The melody is straightforward and fairly repetitive, and the harmony is in an exotic mode derived from the juxtaposition of the chords D major and G minor, and alot of the drama of the songs comes from the ebb and flow of the dynamics. All I had to begin with is the statement of the them, so I decided to see if we could improvise over it and make it into jazz. This was actually pretty successful, although it demands everyone playing and thinking in a different way. I’m really happy and grateful to have a group of musicians who are open enough to want to try my ideas and advanced enough to make them sound good.
So we have enough material for a new record and then some. Over the holidays I bought a new desktop to computer to eventually replace my venerable protools machine. This will take some time to move into and get set up, but I proved the new drum mics and audio interface can work with my laptop and capture a good sound, so it’s time to move forward.
And since it was a long weekend with fresh snow, we went skiing for the first time this season, up at Catamount. We went up for so-called night skiing, which actually begins in the afternoon. On the drive up we listened to Jazz for Hell by Frank Zappa and Song X by Ornette Coleman and Pat Metheny. The first few runs for me were not great since it was icy and it took a while for me get comfortable on my skis again. Meanwhile Michelle bought a whole new ski setup this year, but was having trouble with her boots. After a few runs I got back in the groove and Michelle got her thing sorted out. Then it started to gently snow so suddenly conditions on the mountain were great. I was happy to find that my legs are quite strong these days I can ski with confidence, control, speed, maneuverability and endurance. On the way home we stopped for dinner at Four Brothers in Amenia. Only problem is it snowed the whole way home, so it was slow and slippery, and at one point the road was closed (presumably because of an accident), so we had to detour on some country back roads.