Category: Music

Summer rolls on, the Fourth of July weekend is come and gone.  Time to rewind and catch up on things.

The last Friday in June my jazz group Spacecats played another gig at the Green Growler.  For this one we decided to play our originals as only half the songs, and the other half split between jazz standards and our renditions of rock and pop songs, on the theory that people who aren’t necessarily into jazz will like it if they hear something familiar.  It seems to have worked.  After the show various people told me they liked our versions of Black Hole Sun, Black Magic Woman, Mister Magic, Englishman in New York, and Josie.  Meanwhile we have enough original, with new ones every show, that we’re rotating them in and out of the set list each show.  Another new thing for this gig is I brought my bari sax and played it on a couple songs.  One was our original Where Has the Sun Gone, a slow, bluesy number with a low growly riff that seemed just perfect for it.  The other was Bemsha Swing by Thelonious Monk, with gave it a cool vibe.  Both went over well. Now it’s on to planning the next gig, and focusing once more on making a record.  Onward and upward!

Meanwhile in my D&D campaign, the party is in the middle of melee combat with the final boss.  The module is White Plume Mountain, which is an original AD&D module that I first DM’d back in high school in the 1980’s.  They’ve subsequently updated to 5th edition rules and published it in the Tales from the Yawning Portal compendium.  We’re playing 5E rules in this campaign so that worked out handily.  It’s fun to compare the two versions; the main difference is that the monsters are alot tougher nowadays.  The module’s ending is a bit abrupt.  The last encounter is a pair of Fire Elementals who show up to prevent the party from leaving the dungeon.  But the party never gets to meet and fight the real big bad, a powerful Lich.  There’s a note at the end, saying if the Efreet capture the party, they’ll be taken to an indoctrination center and made into mindless zombie-like servants of the Lich, and the DM should just improvise this.

Well, lo and behold, stuffed in the back of my original module is hand-drawn map of a dungeon “White Plume Mountain, Level 2”, plus some notes in my handwriting.  It turns out to be a good series of encounters including said indoctrination center, a bunch of guards, henchgnomes, and other minions, some prisoners to set free, a trap or two, and finally a well-guarded crypt with the fearsome Lich in real undead person!  It actually quite well done, so I’m in the process of converting it to 5E.  More on that as the situation unfolds.

Elsewhere, in The Global Jukebox I’ve been spending time updating the code for the routes to accommodate a bunch of new features.  The routes basically handle representing the state of the app as a unique url and resolving urls to app states.  It’s pretty deep and complex and has to handle lots of stuff.  Martin wrote the original version of it.  We don’t really use any frameworks for the Jukebox, but we do use plenty of design patterns, and the general approach is informed by Angular, since I was doing alot of Angular apps around the time I started the GJB.  I remember having long conversations with Martin about the design and the requirements of the routes feature; I was always able to communicate with him about software design like no one else, probably because we taught ourselves programming together as kids and understood alot of deep concepts in similar ways.  Anyway, I dusted off the code and started reading it, and I must say it’s a real a masterpiece.  So well thought out, so consistent and logical, a joy to work with.  I really felt Martin’s presence and missed him like I haven’t in a long time.

Which leads me to the next topic, my work-in-progress record Spellbound.  If you’ll recall, this is a new rendition of a record Martin and I wrote together a long time ago.  In the last few weeks I sang and mixed all the vocals for the epic eighteen-minute final track.  (There’s lots of instrumental jams in there, so it’s not as much work as it might sound like).  So I now have a basic arrangement of the first three-fourths of the song, and a sketch of the structure long extended jam at the end.  It’s sounding pretty good and holds together musically as an extended piece.  The next round of work will be to add more texture instruments such as organ and twelve-string guitars, then the solos, then fleshing out the ending jam.  Ought to be done sometime in the fall.

It’s been super hot here the past few weeks, and I’ve been going out early to get my bike rides in.  A few weeks ago I saw Diamond David Lee Roth at the Capital Theatre in Port Chester. And although he can’t really sing the high notes anymore, he still put on a great, energetic show, and smartly had a chorus of backup singers, which helped to point up the importance of the vocal arrangements in those original Van Halen songs. 

My only disappointment was he didn’t do any of his solo stuff, but I was inspired to listen to his first few solo albums Crazy from the Heat, Eat ‘Em and Smile, and Skyscraper, the latter two featuring Steve Vai and Billy Sheehan and guitar and bass.  I must say they hold up way better than I expected. The songs are great, Steve and Billy are out of this world monster musicians, Dave is in top form and branching out into a range of styles and sounds, and overall they have a great summertime party vibe and have entered heavy rotation in my house, especially Eat ‘Em and Smile.

I went up to Buffalo for July Fourth weekend to visit my folks.  It was super hot up there too, close to ninety the first two days.  But it was even hotter home in NYC, over one hundred degrees!  On the second we had dinner with Lizzy at a place on the lake in Hamburg, then went up to the Niagara Falls.  I hadn’t been up there in years, and it was good to go in the evening when it was cooler and less crowded.  And it turned out the were fireworks shows up by the visitor center, and after that down in the gorge.

The next day was even hotter.  Jeannie and Michelle went with Lizzy to shop for a wedding dress.  Apparently they found one that’s very nice.  Meanwhile I hid out in the air conditioning and build the class schedule for this year’s Origami USA convention.  As the special guest I’m teaching five classes this year, so one nice perk is I can choose the times and rooms I want for my classes first.  I’m starting to get excited about the convention now.  Only three weeks away, and lots to do!

On the evening of the third, Kathleen and the kids turned up, and we spent the evening hanging out.  The next day on the fourth, we basically spent the whole day sipping beers, barbecuing, and listening to tunes.  Jeannie made a whole playlist of America-themed songs (including songs about states, cities, and other places in America), partly because we can’t let the rightwing nutjobs take over the symbols of patriotism and the idea of loving our country.  I thought this was a great idea and offered a few suggestions.  Lizzy heard us working on it when she was home a few weeks ago and came up with a playlist of her own.

That evening we watched the fireworks, although this year they moved them to the lake in the park at the end of my parent’s block because there was construction at the school at the far end of the park and they couldn’t use the athletic field there like the normally do.

We got home yesterday and had the air conditioner running the whole time we were gone, but still it was pretty hot inside.  Finally last night the heat broke and it started to rain.  Today it was cold and rainy all day.  What a relief!