Music – 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!

Spacecats Gigs

Here’s announcing two upcoming shows for my jazz group Spacecats.

First is a return engagement to the Green Growler in Croton, NY, on Saturday, March 22 at 7pm. The group features John Szinger on saxophone, Josh Deutchman on piano and synthesizer, Ken Matthews on Bass and Rick Arecco on drums. We play a blend jazz and funk, originals, standards, and pop songs with our own unique twist.

The second is at Jazz on Main in Mt. Kisco, NY, on Wednesday, April 2 at 7pm. This one features special guest Robyn Ferracane on vocals. We’ve been working up a bunch of exciting new tunes for both shows. Come out and enjoy!

Announcing the Release of The Global Jukebox 3.2

The Global Jukebox 3.2 is now live at https://theglobaljukebox.org. This release features a new, revised schema for Cantometric Codings, and a pleasant style refresh focusing on simplifying the color palette. Also updates to the Analytics tools including a new for Profiles of the canto codings by taxonomic clade.

Spellbound

Winter continues with hopes of spring around the corner. Jeannie and I went skiing two weekends in a row up at Catamount, and the last time our friend Seth came out the ski with us, which was alot of fun. Conditions have been good, although the steep parts near the top of the hill tend to get icy. We skied Sidewinder a few times both trips, but they close it at night. Our favorite run these days is Mountain View, which is partially sheltered by trees, so the snow tends to stay good on it. Jeannie had her fitness app running last time we went, and we learned that the Sidewinder trail is two miles long, and Mountain View is just over a mile. I hope we can get one more ski trip in this season, but this week the weather is turning warm, up to 45 every day the next few days. On the plus side, I can start biking again.

But the main topic for this post is music. I’ve been working on a new record since I finished Plutonium Dirigible late last year. It’s called Spellbound: In the Dead of Winter. But where to begin explaining? Let’s rewind a bit.

Martin left behind six or eight albums worth of songs, many of them unrecorded or recorded only as demos. I decided to make my next album a tribute to Martin and celebrate his music by recoding new versions of a bunch of his songs. I wanted to be faithful to his versions, or at least understand them in detail. It turns out he never wrote much down, so the main thing I have to go on is his recordings.

I was drawn to his early material because that resonated with me the most. I learned a bunch of songs he wrote for Shade as he was writing them and we used to jam them, back when we were in college and still lived in my parent’s house. Usually he’d play guitar and I’d play piano. I had a Wurlitzer electric piano and Casio CZ-1000 synthesizer which I later upgraded to a Fender Rhodes and a Roland Alpha-Juno. We used to jam songs like Let It Roll by BTO, Cinnamon Girl, Ziggy Stardust, things like that. We even wrote a bunch of songs together before Shade came into being.

So I started learning the Shade songbook. First thing I did was go out and buy a new guitar. Most recently I’d been using a semihollowbody jazz guitar, which I like alot, and in fact used it for all the guitar parts on Plutonium Dirigible, but wasn’t right for his kind of music. I needed something solid. Martin had maybe a ten or so guitars, including several twelve-string electrics, which became his main instrument by the end. Also a very nice Fender Stratocaster, which was his axe for a long time before he switched to 12-string, and then was at my house for many years. I played a bunch of times but never was happy with the sound or the feel; it just didn’t work for me.

The guitar I ended up getting is a PRS with dual humbuckers, and a rich brown sunburst finish, very beautiful, something like a Les Paul setup but with a lighter, sleeker, better looking body. Excellent tone and feel and control over the sound. Finally the right electric guitar for me! I began practicing with an amplifier pretty much all the time, to get better at that aspect of it too. (With the hollowbody I could practice without and amp no problem and get just the sound of the guitar.) My amp is a Roland Jazz Chorus, one of the all-time classic sounds. I originally bought it to use as a keyboard amp on the stage for gigs.

Later, Kathleen asked me if I wanted any of Martin’s musical instruments, and I did bring home a couple of his guitars. One was the first guitar he ever bought, a used black Ibanez customized with the red and white racing stripes. I had no idea he’d kept it all these years. I remember I drove him down to buy it and got a speeding ticket on the way home. This must have been in the summer of 1988. I think the first song he ever learned on guitar was Your Love by The Outfield. The other guitar I took was his first electric twelve-string, a Carvin. That was also his main axe for a good long spell, when he lived in Pembroke. I’ve played it a few time and it’s very nice. I’m going to use it on the new recording before the end.

Anyway, I dove into the Shade songs. I remember Martin writing alot of those early songs. Some of them he and I used to jam together. I helped workshop a few, and some he just played my when he first came up with them to get my reaction. He always seemed to have a good idea of what he was after. In the end he recorded eighteen songs from that period. So far I’ve figured out twelve or so. I’ve really gotten a feel for his songwriting style and use of chords and voicings.

Martin had a way of doing patterns on the fretboard, coming up with variations on chords that used subtle movements and sound very cool. He’d lift a finger to create an open string as part of the voicing, and sometimes put it down on a different string on the same fret, or shift the whole shape a fret or two or up or down a string. He did this on a few songs including Making Miles on an A major, Frozen Ocean on an E minor, and The Story Lies using a slightly more complicated pattern. He showed me all these songs a long long time ago when I wasn’t very good at guitar. Now I’m trying to reconstruct these patterns.

All of the Shade songs were recorded with a rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass, drums, lead vocals and sometimes a second vocal track doing harmony. I focused mainly on the rhythm guitar parts and started planing how I would do a record.

But then something unexpected happened. I found a recording of a project we did together, even before Shade, that I’d forgotten all about. In January 1990 over winter break from college Martin and I made a little concept album. At this time I was mainly doing my jazz fusion group Event Horizon (and had just written Son of the Sun around the same time), but hadn’t written very many rock or pop songs with lyrics. Neither had Martin, but he wanted to try, and we dove right in. We called the project Spellbound: In the Dead of Winter. As with The Brothers Zing / Buzzy Tonic, we each contributed one name and never sorted out which was the name of the group and which was the name of the record.

The project had a definite wintertime vibe with lots of imagery of cold and darkness combined with youthful yearning for escape and adventure. The sound was very much influenced by bands like Pink Floyd, Camel, Supertramp, Styx, old Rush, Genesis and Yes, that kind of thing. I’m not sure why, we were listening to alot of different stuff, and both of our songwriting went in other directions after that, but I guess the prog thing struck a chord at the time, so to speak.

The recording is pretty rough because we wrote and performed the songs very quickly. I think we started planning and writing around Thanksgiving, and started rolling tape right after New Year. We were done just a few weeks later. We used using a borrowed cassette 4-track recorder. There’s no bass; I’m playing the bass lines with my left hand like The Doors. The drums were added last, using a single microphone. The mix is primitive, the sound quality isn’t great, and there are definitely a few clams cuz we had to do everything in whole takes with no punch-ins. Still there are some great moments and I think the song themselves hold up quite well.

So I’m making a new version of Spellbound: In the Dead of Winter, to record these songs properly. It’s another situation where I have no reference to original material and I have to figure out the chords and lyrics by ear. I don’t even know the names of all the songs!

Nevertheless, it’s coming along nicely. The original record was a bit short of a regular LP. We we had five songs, with the first being a two-part suite and the last a seventeen-minute multi-part prog epic, totaling about thirty-three minutes in all. I decided to add a couple more songs from around that time to round it out. One is an early Shade song that fits the theme, and the other is an unfinished piece I originally wrote for my prog rock band Infinigon, which had broken up shortly before.

Since I don’t have to do much writing for this record, things are coming along pretty quickly. I decided to the four shortest songs together in a batch. Then I’ll do the two longer songs, and finally the big epic. For the first batch I have the (midi) drums, bass guitar, keyboards and rhythm guitar parts done. For the synth parts I dusted off some of my old gear including my Roland Juno, which has such great and distinctive sounds, and my rarely used Moog. I have the vocals, lead guitar parts, and and a sax solo to go, plus mixing. Oh, and I’m going to use real drums too.

More on all of this as it progresses. Stay tuned to hear the first batch of songs in the weeks ahead.

And I Will Draw the Chart

Ok, lots to talk about here with music. Before I dive in, I’ll mention that the weather has gotten a bit warmer. It’s still down in the 20’s at night, but it’s creeping up above freezing for a couple hours in the daytime and last week’s snow is beginning to disappear. Still, I’m not going start biking again until the roads are clear and clean.

First off, my jazz group Spacecats has a show coming up on April 2nd at a place called Jazz on Main in Mount Kisco. We’re hoping to build on the momentum of our last gig, add a bunch of new material and sharpen up the songs already in our repertoire. More on this as the date draws closer.

One of the songs we’re working up these days is Son of the Sun. This is a fairly long and complicated song with lots of changes in meter and open jamming sections linked up with thru-composed parts. I feel really lucky and grateful that the Spacecats want to tackle such a challenging song, and in fact we’re gonna knock it out of the park. But I needed a better chart than my old hand-written one to get the music across to the group. My drummer Rick suggested I try an app called MuseScore, a notation package from the sam people who make Audible. In the past I’ve used Finale, which I found hugely slow and cumbersome although hugely feature-rich, as well as things like the built-in notation for midi in ProTools, which I found quick but not very good. MuseScore hits the sweet spot in the middle, rich and full featured enough for jazz charts, but pretty fast too. It’s not tied to a midi sequence or performance (although you can import a midi file); the focus is a hundred percent on the notation, and you can do things like add repeats, fermatas, a D.S, or coda, hash marks for soloing over, and chord symbols. This is a big step up from writing out charts by hand. Hopefully now I can write out and teach my band a bunch more songs that I’d been afraid might be too much to try and notate. So here I present to you my very first lead sheet made in MuseScore. Enjoy!

Oh What Fun to Ride and Sing a Slaying Song Tonight

We’re in the midst of a long and languid holiday break. I’ve been off work for a whole week and a day, and don’t go back until Thursday. I finished off work on a high note, having successfully merged my R&D branch of the codebase back into the main branch, deployed it and all. The project is turning the corner from R&D into productization, always a fun part of the curve. Also lots of planning meetings for big ambitious new features and new R&D threads in the coming year. After a long uphill slog into strong headwinds I now feel that the tide has turned, the wind is at our backs and filling our sail, and we’re gaining momentum as we cruise downhill.

Michelle came home from school a week before Christmas, and Lizzy a few days later along with Josh. We even got snow a couple times and it remained cold enough for the snow to stick around for a white Christmas. We did Jeannie’s family party the Saturday before Christmas, and went to Mary’s on Christmas day. In between was lots of food and drink, movies and games, music, wrapping presents, opening presents, hanging out and getting things done at a relaxed pace.

We’re shaping up for a new release of the Global Jukebox in the new year. Nick has come up to speed as my new second software engineer, which is great. I still miss Martin whenever I work on the jukebox. He wrote so much amazing code and did so much of the devops stuff too. I’m always inside his thoughts and mind when I read thru the code. Anyway, Nick is now filling that role and bringing his own approach and perspective. The major new feature we’ve been working on converting the existing Cantometric codings for all the songs to a new simplified schema, to make it easier to train new coders and to eliminate some ambiguities in the original system. Nick wrote the script to do the conversion, which required understanding alot of domain knowledge as well as the architecture of the web application. Meanwhile I created the spec for the new schema and did all the UI and UX work on the client side. Now it’s all on the staging server and we’re looking at finishing off some P2 features to get into the next release.

I bought a drum mic kit as a present to myself. It’s bundle of eight microphones for all the different drums plus overheads, along with stands and cables. I’ve decided I want to use more real drums on my next record (more on that soon) and so it’s essential to be able to mic it up. Next step is to get it all set up and learn how to use it. Oh, and I’m going to upgrade to a 16-input preamp/DAC unit as well.

Oh, and Jeannie got a Nintendo Switch, so I’m gonna get some games for that too!

We went up to Buffalo for a few days after Christmas. They had a ton of snow when we arrived, but while we were up there it got warm and started to melt. Kathleen and the kids came up too. It was a little sad because we all felt Martin’s absence, but we also felt his presence. There was coming together and healing energy, and it was good to see everyone. I’ve been trying to bond with the kids and get closer to them. I took them out for a long walk around the neighborhood one morning to the park and the lake and all the local playgrounds. Played some chess with Match and Abbie. We also had dinner with Larry and Jackie and place in Allentown called Mother’s which was really good. To top it all off, the Bills demolished the Jets on Sunday. Looking good for the playoffs.

I’ve started a D&D campaign with Martin’s kids as a fun way to try and be a presence in their lives. We’ve had three sessions so far over the last three weeks. The first week we rolled up characters, the second we did a warm-up wilderness encounter en route the the start of the main adventure, and this last weekend the party got the the base town, met some of the locals, stocked up on provisions and all that, and set out for the ruins of the Sunless Citadel, where the adventure begins in earnest. They climbed down into a ravine and are now at the front door of the main dungeon (where a trap awaits, unbeknownst to them). The party consists of the three oldest kids, Charlie, Matthew and Abbie, as well as their cousin Rylee, all aged 12 to 16. Also joining in are Michelle and Jeannie. It’s a good mix of races, classes and alignments. Rylee is and Elfin Fighter, and Charlie and Elfin Ranger. Match is a Dwarven Barbarian, and Abbie a Gnomish Bard who rides around on a giant rabbit. Michelle is playing a Halfling Cleric and Jeannie a human Sorceress. I’m DM’ing, which is something I really enjoy. Everyone is first level, and their alignments are centered on chaotic neutral, which fits with their general attitude.

We’re using a combination of software. It’s amazing how all this stuff has advanced since I first started playing D&D online twenty years ago with Nick. We’re using google meet for the video conference. This mostly works great by the call only lasts and hour, so I have to start a new meeting halfway thru. We’re using DND Beyond for the character sheets, stats, and related stuff like spells, weapons, bonuses, modifiers, and hit points. And we’re using Owlbear Rodeo for maps and combat. All free apps that run in the browser, very convenient.

So far it’s lots of fun, and good to be able to spend time with everyone in a casual, semi-structured way. They’re all definitely enjoying it. My plan is to keep it going thru the winter at least, and maybe longer if everyone remains into it.

Be of Good Cheer

Well this is my last week of work before a well-deserved break for the holidays. I’m trying to lean in to the spirit of the season this year, even though we haven’t gotten any snow down here. The most snow I’ve seen was at the Bills game a couple weeks back. Tons of fun.

We put up our tree a week ago, and started listening to lots of Christmas music. I’ve discovered all the great jazz singers like Ella Fitzgerald have Christmas music that’s much better than your typical pop radio fare. I guess the big problem with Christmas music is there’s only 50 or maybe 100 songs, so it gets repetitive fast. We watched the movie Elf, as well as The Hogfather, neither of which I’d seen before, but were recommend by Kathleen and her kids. Both fun and charming in completely opposite ways.

I should mention the Origami USA holiday tree at the American Museum of Natural History, since I contributed some Flying Fish models to it this year. Go check it out if you haven’t yet! https://origamiusa.org/holidaytree/2024

I also saw not one but two rock shows in Brooklyn over the last week, at a venue call the Kings Theatre, which I’d never been to before. It’s a big, beautiful, ornate, overwrought art-deco kind of place, similar to the Beacon in Manhattan. I guess it’s been completely restored recently and now they’re having cool acts play there. Predictably, drinks are way overpriced.

The first show was Beat, a King Crimson isotope featuring Adrian Belew and Tony Levin from the original lineup, along with Danny Carey from Tool on drums, and Steve Vai on guitar. They did 80’s Discipline-era Crimso, and in fact played most of the three classic albums that Belew and Levin made with Bill Bruford and Robert Fripp. The show was most excellent. The band was tight and energetic and really delivered new interpretations of the material. Probably the most interesting thing was how Steve Vai, legendary guitar shredder that he is, sort of pointed up the amazing complexity and difficulty of Fripp’s original parts. Vai covered some parts exactly, and interpreted others; he did alot of stuff tapping that Fripp originally did picking, and skipped some of Fripp’s parts entirely, such as the intro/bridge to Frame by Frame. On the other hand, Vai was able to impart a bit of a slinky greazy bluesy feel to Fripp’s very mechanical-sounding parts, and that lifted everything. His solo on Sheltering Sky was one of the high points of the night.

Less than a week later we were back to see Brooklyn’s own They Might Be Giants. Their music is also pretty complicated, but the vibe is complete opposite, being wacky humor rather than wacky seriousness. Needless to say the show was alot fun, with a horn section and lots of moments showcasing all the players. I realized the song Particle Man perfectly describes the graphic novel Watchmen, whether by coincidence or by design. Dr. Manhattan is Particle Man, Ozymandias is Triangle Man, and Rorschach is Person Man. Small world, go figure.

Next up: D&D

Autumn Leaves

We had a very nice Thanksgiving weekend. I was ready for some downtime, since it had been a pretty busy couple of weeks. The week before I hit a major milestone for my project at work, so now life got a bit easier just in time for the holiday season.

Biking season is over now because it’s too cold and too dark, but I did manage to get a few rides in the first few weeks of November. Looking forward to starting again next spring. Meanwhile we have ice skating and skiing to look forward too, and I’ve switched back to the Nordic Track on what used to be biking days. On the plus side, I can listen to tunes while I do that. Meanwhile, my shoulder has been hurting off and on the last few months, no doubt from using the computer too much. So I’ve been going up and down on the amount of weight I’ve been using on weightlifting days. This is the time of year when I usually start to feel generally tired and achy and low energy anyway, and I often go down in weight for the winter and back up again in the springtime. In any event, I seem to have stabilized at a level that’s close to my nominal maximum for everything but bench press, which is about 20 lbs. less. If I continue to feel okay, I’ll probably go up in a week or two.

November is the time of year for raking leaves, and we’ve been out and at it every weekend since we got home from our trip out west. Most of the leaves are down now, and this last time we filled up only two cans, compared with 6 or seven cans and bags a couple weeks ago when it was peaking. We also put up fresh new holiday lights outside. I like to keep them up over the winter, and last year I just never got around to taking them down, but they all burned out over time.

Lots of people in our neighborhood go in for big Hallowe’en and Christmas displays on their lawns. Some of them even do Thanksgiving, but compared the other holidays the choice of imagery is kind of thin. Pretty much you can have an inflatable turkey, and that’s about it. If I ever do a lawn display, I want something that will last the whole season. Start with a scary dragon, then give him a pilgrim hat, then a Santa hat. Something like that.

Michelle came home from school to visit for a whole week. The weekend before Thanksgiving we went up to Albany to visit Kathleen and the kids. Now Michelle and I are planning a D&D campaign with them as a fun way to get more regular face time with everyone. More on that as it develops. Michelle spent Monday and Tuesday baking up a storm – cookies, sós kifli, more cookies.

On Thanksgiving day we had a whole lot of family over: Mary’s family, Denis’s too, and Jeannie’s parents. She made a turkey and all the things – stuffing, potatoes, gravy, and our guests brought lasagna, sweet potatoes, Brussel sprouts, pie, lots of great stuff, and a really good time. Good to be around family.

The next day, which in our house we’ve dubbed Slack Friday, we normally stay home and strive to nothing at all. This year, however we went out to Long Island to visit Mary, since Denis was in town, as well as her cousin Carla. After that we went over to visit Nick and Lisa, who live just ten minutes away. The motivating excuse was to sync up with Nick on his progress on the Global Jukebox, but we ended up staying and enjoying Nick’s homemade bread and talking well into the night.

As for Nick’s progress on the Global Jukebox, that’s coming along nicely. He’s been ramping up and doing his first major chunk of feature work, so we had a code review and I was able to explain to him a bunch of things he wasn’t ready for before, but now that he’s in the problem space he can grok. He’ll make a good partner going forward.

Saturday was the Spacecats gig up at the Green Growler. It went amazingly well and was alot of fun. Thanksgiving weekend is a bit of a wildcard for playing in bars. Sometimes it’s dead because everyone is out of town or doing family things. Other times is packed because people are home visiting family and also want to go out and see their friends. This night the place was really packed, the most crowded I’d ever seen the place because it turned out thee was a group having an informal ten-year high school reunion. And everyone seemed to really dig the music. They’d come in, notice the band and start bobbing their heads or doing a little dance. We also had a good number of family and friends of the band, including a couple of the guys from my Wednesday group.

We did combination of straight-ahead jazz and more rock-funk oriented stuff, including eight songs off our record Los Gatos Del Cosmos, and a new song by Josh called Getaway Car. We also had our drummer’s wife Robyn sitting in on vocals. She’s sort of a theatre and show tunes type singer, but can do some standards and pop stuff. She’s really good. So we had her sit on on three songs each set, plus accompany the sax on the melody of Kamasi Washington’s Street Fighter Mas. Having a singer provided a different kind of energy that helped the overall package I’d say. We’ll probably ask her to sit in again.

The only downside is we were supposed didn’t have quite enough material to cover three hours. We ended up spending more time rehearsing with Robyn than I’d planned because we wanted her songs to sound good. We tried a good bunch of songs with her before we settled on the ones we chose, and there was just some getting to know one another musically and work out the arrangements. A few of her songs had rubato beginnings and endings and we had to get a feel for how to do that together as a group. This meant there were a few other new things that weren’t adequately rehearsed that we decided to skip. Ah well. We ended up closing the second set with an extended jam of John Coltrane’s Mr. P.C., which went over great, and did a short third set that included a couple repeats from the beginning of the night. No one in the audience seemed to mind, and the bar invited us back for another gig.

Sunday we finally had a day to sit at home and relax. The Bills game was on TV. The week before they defeated our arch-rivals the Kansas City Chiefs, which was great to see. This week they played the Forty-Niners, and it was a lake-effect snowstorm the whole game. Buffalo showed their cold weather prowess and won handily while SF totally fell apart, and the Bills clinched the AFC East championship. Woo-hoo!