Live, learn, leave
Fresh from our recent engagement at the Net, LEFT HOOK is back in playing form, and delivering some new funky soul material as well as all you’re favorites. Hope to see you there!
LEFT HOOK
Music with a punch!
Westchester’s classic rock Funk & soul party band
Saturday October 22
8:30 PM
Victors Bar & Grill
500 Commerce St. Hawthorne
The rock band basically took the month of August off, but now we’re back and rehearsing again. We’re still running our master plan to break into bigger and better gigs, but meanwhile we’re always down to play the local neighborhood bar Fisherman’s Net in Pelham, which has become something of our home base. Someday all’y’all’ll say that’s where it all began. We’re playing there on October 8, and it should be a great show, fresh off our break and with lots of new material.
While we were at it, I made a new image for our poster. This was from out gig at Burke’s last spring, where our friend Nick showed up with his camera and took a bunch of great shots. Only problem was there wasn’t a single one with all five of us, so I had to stitch two together. Michael doesn’t like it so much cuz he’s not singing in this shot, but at least you can see our drummer Gus.
Life continues as we turn the corner towards fall. Vacations are over and another school year has started.
We often go the beach at Ocean City MD over Labor Day weekend, but this year there was a hurricane barreling up the coast from Carolina, and the weather report was for heavy rains and gale-force winds, so we ended up cancelling the trip. Still we had a nice relaxing weekend, and went out to dinner on the water on Long Island Sound. Lizzy got to work a couple more days at the pool and ended the summer with some extra cash, and got to practice driving too. Michelle got to go the Renaissance Fair with her Aunt and cousins, and afterward we had them all over for one last barbecue.
I spent some of my found time dusting off Elixr, my long-neglected three-quarters completed third Buzzy Tonic album. Been tracking the bass part for what will probably be the last song, Leave the City Behind. I have other songs that I haven’t even begun to track, but I’ll probably save them for a future record. Hopefully I can finish this one by the end of the year. After that, seeing as I now have a working rock band and a real live jazz band too, I want to figure out a way to record some of my songs with real musicians.
But for now I’m going back and listening and mixing, adding the occasional part to round out an arrangement. I’ve been putting autotune on the vocals too. (Shhh, Don’t tell anyone!) Autotune has come a long way since the days of Believe, and the default mode makes it easy to manipulate while still sounding natural. It basically brings it about halfway to true pitch, so there’s still room for tremolo and tonal effects, everything sounds a bit more in tune, kinda like quantizing my midi piano parts for tighter phrasing. So far I have four new mixes out of the eight finished tunes. So watch this space for some new mixes soon.
Now the kids are back in school again. Lizzy is a Senior and Michelle 8th grade; both are really excited. Lizzy is driving to school now (!). I had been thinking of getting her an old jalopy of a car since her commute is so long by train. Then thru a lucky turn of events we got a much nicer car then we originally planned. Only problem with is was the bumper had had a close encounter with a garage door and repainted the wrong color. Today I sprayed it with the correct matching shade and now you can hardly even tell. Other random good news: Jeanne got promotion at work, and a raise big enough to cover the hike in our car insurance.
The last couple weeks at work have been pretty mellow for me. I took a couple Fridays off, and alot of people were gone a whole week, and then at the end of August our management was all out in Vegas for the year’s most important trade show. And as a former trade show exhibit designer, let me tell you we had a very cool booth! The software engineers had all been scrambling like mad to get a sufficiently stable and polished demo of the new UI out for the show. Apparently it’s a hit. Then last week we got to catch our breath, and do some refactoring, bug fixes, and planning.
Now we’re at the top of another big long run of work. The goal is to have a fully functional new UI by the end of the year. Google will no longer support Flex and Flash in chrome, so we need to retire our old one. When we were told this back at the beginning of the summer I thought it was well nigh impossible, but we’ve made alot of really good progress over the summer, and it looks pretty doable from here. Meanwhile we’re also rearchitecting the backend of our product to be modular, distributed and scalable, and to be able to handle a million computers in our system.
Announcing a Jazz Concert:
Mon July 25 6:30 PM
Henry Gourdine park at the Ossining waterfront
Featuring yours truly on tenor sax, Lucas Saur on bass,
Gabe Faden piano, Ed Bettinelli drums, and Ava Bradlow vocals
We got together last night to rehearse and sounded great. Doing some Miles, Wayne Shorter and a bunch of other stuff. Ed is a great drummer and young Lucas has a ton of ideas.
Should be a great time, hope you can come out and see it.
Meanwhile back in jazzland it’s summertime so being able to rehearse on Saturdays is becoming less reliable. Might have to move back to Wednesdays, which would mean clobbering the Wednesday band or somehow merging the two groups.
We recorded last week’s rehearsal, including takes of my compositions Dark Skies and Your Dancing Shoes. The came out quite good, and I think I can edit them up into a decent demo. Meanwhile you can listen to them here:
zingman.com/music/mp3/havenStFive/julyNineJam/
Oh and one more thing. It looks like I have a gig come up, some bandshell in the park kind of thing on Monday July 25, courtesy of Young Skywalker. I’ll let you know more details when I find out.
Another Origami USA convention has come and gone. A great time as usual folding and hanging with my origami friends. John, Brian, Beth, Paul, Sri, Jason, Robert, everyone was there. I also had a meeting with my publisher and finally have a contract in hand for my next book. Just gotta get a few fine points in the rider and we should be all squared away.
The venue for this year was St. John’s University in Queens, and it turned out to be a very nice place. Beautiful campus, and everything was in two buildings close together. Free parking too. There were a few good restaurants in the neighborhood, including a Mexican place that served a drink that was a margarita with an upside-down beer in it, attached to the rim of the glass by a special adapter.
One really nice thing was that the gallery this year was in a hall with great natural lighting, so everything looked much better than it used to at FIT.
I had a whole bunch of new models for my exhibit. The main thing was something I’m calling Flower Balls. The idea is to create a flower-like tessellation and then fold it into a polyhedron to create the effect that people like to do out of modulars, but with a single sheet of paper. I got inspired and started with it last summer in Ohio, and by MIT in the fall I had a Cube and Dodecahedron Flowerball, along with 4- and 5-petal flower tessellation units. In the last month or so I extended the approach to create 6- and 8-petal flowers, and combined them to form a bunch of Archimedean solids, namely a Truncated Tetrahedron, Cuboctahedron, Truncated Octahedron and Truncated Cube. Only downside is people don’t always get that it’s a single sheet.
I taught a couple classes. One was Airplanes and Spaceships II – intermediate level models from the upcoming book. Went over well, go thru five of them in a 105 minute class. The other was the Flowerballs, and this time I had crease patterns to use a guide while I laid out the concept and some examples. On Monday John Montroll did a rare class, on the topic of diagramming on the computer.
All in all a great, fun convention. I’m guessing OUSA will want to go back to St. John’s next year.
Here’s the third in my ongoing series of jazz demos. I’ve been enjoying doing these as a vehicle to present new songs to my jazz group. I haven’t had much time for recording lately, and the last two songs of my Buzzy Tonic album Elixr are sitting there half done. But it can take months to produce a rock song, while I can whip off one of these in just a few hours.
My previous songs Dark Skies and Your Dancing Shoes are now in regular rotation in our jazz group. One is a ballad and the other a funk/soul number. I figured it’s time for an uptempo swing number. We’ve been doing alot of hard bob in the group, Hank Mobley and Dexter Gordon and that kind of thing, and this song is in the zone. Well, maybe more Sonny Rollins or Cannonball Adderly. I’ve never written anything in cut time before, and this one is around 200 bpm. The main riff is something I’ve had in my bag for a long time, it was just a matter of giving it some structure. It’s funny how a good bridge can really make a song. It’s like a commentary on the A section. You have to decide what aspects to contrast or change up, what to keep as-is, and what to take further. In doing so you come to understand the essence of the song. The song begins and ends with a drum solo, since this kind of groove is right in our drummer Mike’s bag. I can hardly wait to get some recordings of the group performing these.
Hi everyone, okay our next gig is the first weekend of April. Hope to see you there. I don’t think we’ll be adding very many new tunes for this, but mainly tightening up what we got to take it to the next level.
If you google Victors you’ll see the first review says it’s an awful place, like some guy got in an altercation with one of the regulars and blamed it on the establishment. Who knows? I gotta tell you I’ve played gigs there before and it’s just fine. It’s a good size room with a great big bar and good veiws from most everywhere. They have live bands an open mics up there alot.
LEFT HOOK
Music with a punch!
Westchester’s classic rock Funk & soul party band
Saturday April 2, 9 pm
Victors Bar & Grill
500 Commerce St. Hawthorne
Here’s a new song of mine:
Work on the last couple tracks for the third Buzzy Tonic record, Elixr continues apace, with the epic and angular Plague of Frogs, the new and funky Leave the City Behind, and the poignant Ballad of Galadriel in the offing. But meanwhile I’ve taken on another recording project, albeit of a much lighter nature.
My Saturday jazz group, the Haven Street Quintet, is advanced enough that I figure it’s worth trying to do some originals. It’s kind of amazing to me how few musicians actually write, but to me it’s always been part of the deal, even if only aspiratiionally in the days before I figured out how. Alot if my earliest songs were jazz compositions, and in fact I wrote quite a few before I took on the added challenge of writing lyrics and singing.
In a way writing jazz song is much easier than writing a rock or pop song, because all you really need is a sketch: a melody, some chords, a feel, and maybe an overarching concept. Then you leave it to the musicians to fill in the details and bring it to life.
The first couple of songs I brought to the group we already fully composed, first played by my 80’s fusion group Event Horizon – (I Miss My) Baby in Bb and Solstice. And although the sounded pretty good, they weren’t really right for the direction of the group. Baby in Bb in particular is an uptempo funk, and doesn’t translate on an upright bass. Also I wrote it on alto sax, and it lays just terribly on the tenor. So we’d have to change the key as well as the groove to make it work. Solstice doesn’t have any of those problems, but it’s through-composed enough that learning the structure is non-trivial. Might as well move on!
I have about a half-dozen ideas I can use as the basis for songs for the HSQ. The first of these I’ve named Dark Skies. It’s based on a fragment I’ve had in my head for a long time, but always needed something to complete. I was humming it on the way home from jazz last Saturday and came up with a bridge that was perfect. Came home and banged it out on piano.
There’s no point in trying to track a jazz song on the computer, because the performance is where it’s at. So I had the idea to make a quick demo just to get across the sound. It came out quite well, and was a amazingly fast to record. I tracked the piano on MIDI, and then just repeated the head a second time to provide a backing for the first solo. The bass and drums are MIDI also, just an outline of the rhythm and harmony. The drums are little more than a click track with some pauses and accents. But then I put a sax track over it and that really brought the whole thing to life. I nailed it on the first take. The effects are all well-known presets I just dialed in, some reverb on the horn and some compression on the master out. It only took a couple hours from start to finish.
Hopefully we’ll do it at practice next week and it’ll light up with the band. If all goes well I’m gonna try to knock off a jazz demo every week or two while I finish the last couple tracks of my rock album, a sort of side project within a project. Best case scenario we’ll have some fun and unique new material for the group, and it’ll push us toward the next level. Worst case I’ll have a nice little collection of jazz demos.
The LEFT HOOK gig at Burke’s Saturday night was a pretty darn good time. It’s larger and nicer venue than we’ve been playing, and we had a good turnout, with a whole a bunch of people coming to help our drummer Gus celebrate his birthday, and a few of my friends, including Nick, who came all the way from Long Island and took a bunch of pictures of the band, which I’ll post sometime soon. Woo-hoo and thanks alot!
Gus is back to playing his regular drums, which helps the sound alot. Also, last week I finally got my Mark VII sax in for a final adjustment. It took Virgil only a few minutes of fiddling with the various bits of cork around the keys of the upper stack. Now it’s playing totally great. It literally has never sounded better! I have all the tone and growl that I really love, plus a great clarity in the low end, even playing very softly. So now I have two world-class tenor saxes in great working order, the beauty and the beast. I’ve been enjoying hanging out with Virgil, he’s got lots of stories and lots of knowledge on musical instruments. It almost makes me sad my horn is all fixed up now.
We added a bunch of new songs for this show, including The Letter by Joe Cocker, Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel, Beginnings by Chicago, and Cheap Sunglasses by ZZ Top. All went over really well. I think Beginnings in particular, which we used to end out first set, was a winner. We worked on that on for a while and made our own arrangement. I’m emulating a whole horn section on sax, and Mike and Gary are covering the vocal harmonies between them. We even have a percussion break toward the end.
The surprise hit was Cheap Sunglasses. This one was a bit of a late addition, after we’d tried out and discarded a bunch of other new songs for various reasons (vocals were to high, the groove too mellow, that kind of thing). We only rehearsed it twice. It’s a bit heavier than most of our material, but basically a boogie blues, and right in Gary’s zone on guitar. Ken and Gus and got a tight groove going on on the bass and drums. I sing lead on it, and it’s right in my zone vocally too, and I do an Abacab-like solo on the organ over the coda. Big crowd pleaser.
Since we’ve been working so much on new material, we only had a chance to run thru the whole set list once before the show. Overall it was still quite good, but there was the occasional tempo problem (mostly starting too fast) or missed or sloppy transition from one part to the next. Still, we know the songs well, and they’re great songs, and the energy and sound was always there. The vocals keep getting better and better too. I guess you can say the better we get the higher our standards get.
As usual, the second set was the tightest, had the best energy and the biggest crowd. There were a few time where Ken and Gus were really right together in the groove and it felt fantastic. One was Dance to the Music, which we really bombed in rehearsal. For the third set I used to joke that we should just do two or three long jam numbers like Dazed and Confused or Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. But now we finally have enough songs to have a full third set, and not just of the leftovers, but songs we know well. We even ended up doing a couple extra encores, including Foxy Lady, which someone shouted out as a request. Gary launched into it and Ken and Gus joined in, and sang. I think I remembered most of the lyrics. Good fun. And we even got paid more then we’ve been so far.