Category: Music

I Love New York In June

Well it’s summertime and the living is easy. The last few weeks the weather has been really pleasant. Since I expanded my patio last fall I’ve started working outside for an hour or so in the afternoons to work on my tan at the same time. I made a shade screen out of cardstock for my laptop that slides onto the edges of the lid. Practical origami skills. I usually go out after I’m done working out (which is usually lunchtime), and I’ve found it’s usually the best part of my workday for deep concentration. I’ve had a run of increasing good workouts since the springtime, and have gone up in weight and distance on my various exercises. Been getting out on my bike too. This week, however, it’s turned brutally hot (96 degrees today) so getting a walk in the early morning, and going outside to move the sprinkler from time to time is enough.

Work has been pretty interesting lately. We’re gearing up for a big new product launch at the end of the summer, a new electronic musical instrument with wifi network capabilities. The project involves hardware and software. As the cloud architect, I’ve been reaching across into our client codebase to work stuff like analytics integration and authentication. Our backend is in Firebase, which works well if your client is a mobile app or web site. And indeed all my end-to-end prototypes so far have run on that stack.

But our clients also include embedded hardware devices and also desktop applications. I’ve been learning our application tech stack built in C++ and JUCE. It’s set up to compile to Mac OS, Windows, iOS or Android. Only problem is, there’s only Firebase SDK for the mobile platforms, even in C++. Of course the Firebase SDK ultimately sends http requests over a REST API, which is documented. So we’ve put some REST libraries into our JUCE app, and got things working that way. Now I’m taking the building blocks and assembling them into reusable components for use in any future app.

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In music world, I bought a new synthesizer from Josh, the piano player in my jazz group. It’s a Nord Stage 3, their current flagship product. It’s pretty cool because it combines a digital stage piano, a dedicated organ simulator, and a synthesizer/sampler unit. All the controls are laid out in a gigantic spread, but it’s very readable, and because each knob or button has a single purpose, there’s no menus to scroll thru, and it’s very friendly to live performance. And it has great sounds and a great-feeling weighted keyboard. Plus it’s red!

I have the the 76-key model, and Josh sold it to me because he’s moving up to the 88-key version. Of course that’s a good deal more expensive, and I’m happy with the deal we worked out. In any event the 76-key version is more portable, in case I ever start gigging again. I did my full piano practice on it the other day to put it thru it’s paces. It’s funny, I only missed the really high and low keys on a couple songs, and they’re all written by piano players: Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Donald Fagen. There’s one Keith Emerson song – Karn Evil 9, 2nd Impression – that literally uses every single key. Luckily, it’s not to hard to adjust the voicings to fit in the available range. And hey, it’s still three keys more than I have on my Fender Rhodes.

Now I have an old keyboard I want to get rid of. It’s a nice enough keyboard, a Privia PX-5S, with great sounds and layering, and its own performance-oriented array of knobs and sliders. It’s just that the new board is a serious upgrade. While I’m at it I have an old soprano sax I want to unload as well. I hope I can sell them, or at least give them to a good home.

The new jazz group as been coming along, lots of fun, good chemistry. We do a mix of jazz standards, jazz interpretations of pop and rock tunes, some funk/fusion stuff, and a bunch of my originals. Now that the pandemic is pretty much over, I’m thinking it’s time to get some gigs.

In my recording studio, I was kind of stuck for a while on my song Lift Off. It’s basically a bebop number with some twisting melodies and chord progressions. This being a computer jazz record, I sequenced the drums in midi, but for some reason the groove wasn’t really happening. I worked on different ways to embellish the arrangement with synths and things, but as they say, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing…

So I bought a couple books on jazz drumming, and began to work thru them. One is The Art of Bop Drumming by John Riley. In addition to writing out alot of patterns, it gives some good theory about how to play, how to swing, what to listen for when you practice, and how to balance and control the sound. So I adjusted my midi drum pattern following the advice in the book as best I could, lots of subtle changes to the patterns and accents, adding some hi-hat behind the ride cymbal on the backbeat. And it made a huge difference! I mean it still sounds like a sequencer, but it grooves now! It still remains to flesh out the arrangement with accents in the comps, and this includes the other instruments too. But now it’s a matter of closing the distance to get the sound I want.

I was telling Steve, my drummer about all this, and he was giving me advice on things like how to mic a drum kit, and offered to lay down a human drum track to my song. That would change everything, but he’s a really good drummer and he’s set up for recording in his home, so I figured let’s go for it and see how it turns out.

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Last topic for this post: this weekend was the Origami USA 2021 Convention. I was a member of the OUSA web and convention committees this year, on account of me having built a new scheduling tool for classes that integrates with our web application, replacing an old offline tool. I built the convention class schedule with the new tool too. So it’s satisfying to be able to say all my hard work has paid off, and everyone else’s too. I must say, before I got involved, I had no idea how much work went into one of these conventions.

This year’s convention was completely virtual and online. Classes were via zoom. We had something like 140 classes being taught in eleven parallel tracks. There was also a virtual hospitality space provided by an app called Gather, and an online exhibition. Of course it’s not as satisfying as the real thing, but I did get the sense of being able to hang with my origami friends, talk about origami and do some folding together.

I taught two classes, which is my favorite part. To run the zooms, there is a tech manager, a host and a Q&A manager (all OUSA volunteers) in addition to class teacher. Jeannie is tech volunteer, doing three five-hour teaching blocks.

I had my phone on a tripod over my shoulder with the camera pointing down at the paper as it’s folded, and my laptop facing me, to speak into. I taught my Martian and Flying Saucer from my recent Air and Space kit book, and Gladys the Platypus, a previously undiagrammed model that I submitted to this year’s annual collection. Both classes went quite well, although for the Platypus we just barely finished in time.

Because I spent so much time writing software and attending committee meetings, I didn’t do as much actual folding this year as I would have liked, so I had very little new stuff to put into the exhibition. I spent a good deal of time this spring work on a single model, but it’s really complex I never quite got it finished. It’s a single-sheet polyhedron, a half-sunken cuboctahedron with an embedded hydrangea tessellation on each square face. Making the grid of hydrangeas was large effort by itself, but the collapsing the model into its 3-D form was something else again. The issue was that there’s just a ton of layers that need to be managed, and they all tend to make the model want to spring apart.

I kept at it, facet by facet, working out the inner hidden geometry. Saturday morning of the convention I finally got it to close. But I wasn’t fully satisfied, so I unfolded it and cut off two corners from the sheet, making the square into a hexagon. This substantially reduced the inner bulk, and made the final close much nicer. Unfortunately, by this time the paper had gotten pretty worn from handling, so it’s not the tightest lock ever. Nothing a bit of tape or glue (gasp!) can’t take care of. Still, it works, and so we can declare victory! It looks great as long as you don’t turn it over.

And now I feel I’ve gotten my origami energy active again to get back into folding. I have several half-finished books, and lots of designs in my head waiting to be worked out. A few people told me they love my work and would really digging seeing a book on this or that theme. That’s pretty motivating.

Rainy Days and Saturdays

It’s June! We just got done with a three-day weekend which was very nice and relaxing. It actually rained most of the weekend. It started 3 or 4 in the afternoon on Friday and didn’t stop until Monday morning. It also got cold. We had to turn on the heat one morning, after unexpectedly having to install our air conditioners the weekend before. Michelle has a job this summer working at our local beach, but her first two days of work were cancelled. Ah well, she’s making great progress on her video game.

After a week’s worth of tweaking and adjustment, I think we’re pretty much there with the OUSA convention schedule. Now it’s time so try and fold a few new models. Just over three weeks to go.

Martin came down for a visit this weekend. I haven’s seen him since we made a brief visit to his house last summer, and that was the only time since the start of the pandemic. It was good to catch up. Martin lost his job a couple months ago, after his employer of ten years went under. As luck would have it, my company was hiring around that time, so he interviewed there. It’s a pretty cool company and I’m enjoying being there more than any place in the last seven or so years (excepting The Global Jukebox). We make electronic musical instruments and apps. I’m leading our internet and cloud group with the vision of creating an ecosystem of networked instruments and shared songs. The corporate overlords seemed to like Martin well enough, but unfortunately took a long time to extend him an offer, and then it was a lowball bid. Meanwhile Martin had interviewed at a different place that makes videogames and toy racing cars, and he accepted an offer from them.

We also spent alot of time just jamming, which was alot of fun. Over the course of the pandemic I put together a binder of charts from the last ten years’ worth of rock bands, and we just browsed thru that. It was great fun; it’s been a long time since I did that sort of thing. I also played him a the last two of my work-in-progress songs to complete my computer jazz album. One of them is still in the writing and tracking phase, but the other, Lift Off, is largely done, although I felt the sound wasn’t really happening. After I played it for Martin and got his impressions, I got some ideas for how to finish it and make it shine. Mostly it involves layering and pumping up the sounds of the backing instruments to make it fuller, and abandoning the classic bebop sounds I was originally going for in favor of something more electric and aggressive. It still swings hard though. And I ordered some books on jazz drumming to try a get some ideas to spiff up the drum part.

Monday the sun came out and I was able to do some yardwork. Trimming the hedges was the last remaining task on the spring cycle. And we even had a barbecue Monday evening. Only thing we didn’t have a chance to do is take the Mustang out for a ride. A well, hopefully this week.

Hello City

Spring continues to warm and grow. All the trees around here are budding and flowering. Lots of lovely sunny weather, and some heavy rainy days as well. Project dirt is nearing completion. I’m up to fifty-four wheelbarrow loads, getting to final low spots in the front yard. There’s grass coming already in on the areas I filled in earlier on.

I’ve been into Manhattan not once but twice last week. The first was a trip to the MoMA, keeping with our tradition of spring break museum outings. I haven’t been to the MoMA in years. Parts of the joint are kinda funky these days, with the main floor being filled with stacked up furniture taken from around the museum as a pandemic precaution, in lieu of an actual exhibit, and the nearby galleries filled with things of dubious artistic merit, such as jars of bodily fluids. The upper floors were better, with lots of impressionist, early modernist, and classic modern art. I seem to recall there used to be an extensive industrial design collection, but it appears that it’s been scaled back a good amount. The famous Ferrari was not on display. Still, most of what there was to see was pretty cool, and it was an enjoyable day out of the house, and stepping back into a hopefully soon-to-be post-pandemic world.

My other trip was for a lunch with the Association for Cultural Equity gang, to celebrate the recent launch of the Global Jukebox 2.1, as well as the new Alan Lomax Digital Archive. This was most excellent. It was great to see Anna and Kiki face to face again, and meet her current grad fellows and some ACE board members. It was a beautiful day in Greenwich Village and they picked a place with great food and drinks, and breezily open to the outside. Afterwards I walked around my old neighborhood for a while, seeing how things had changed. Driving into the city on a weekday in daytime remains a strange and epic adventure, not to be repeated too often.

Now that my song Mo’bility is in the can, I’ve turned my attention back to Lift Off. I’ve come to the conclusion that on the computer it’s never going to sound the way it does in my head, which is alot like classic bebop recorded live by great players full of extroverted virtuosity and expressive spontaneity. So it’s time to get a bit more creative about the sound and the arrangement. First thing is to see if I can put together a really smokin’ sax part from the takes I did, or if I need to keep on woodshedding. Meanwhile I’ve begun working on the last song for the record Bluezebub (The Devil You Don’t Know). It’s a sort of Crimso Mahavishnu Mancini supernatural spy jazz vibe, in 5/4 time, with an uptempo middle section and unison riff break in there somewhere too.

In the spirit of new awakenings, I’ve started to get back into doing origami again. A little over a year ago I took an awesome trip to Spain for CFC2, the second Conference for Creators in origami. I folded a bunch of new stuff for the exhibition, and met alot of great folders from Europe, and good number of old friends too. When I got home I was really fired up to do some new stuff. But then the pandemic happened, and all the conventions were cancelled, and anyway I was busy writing software for OUSA. I sort of lost my creative fire and didn’t really fold anything for a year.

Then a week ago was Fold Fest, sponsored by Origami USA. It was an online event, and the first one I attended since OUSA’s Un-Convention last June. I attended a few classes and connected wit some friends and had a good time. And a bunch of ideas I’ve been working on in the back of my head for a while came to the fore. So I’ve been folding like a madman in my spare time the last week or so. Hopefully I’ll have something to show soon. For now let’s just say I’m combining flowers, tessellations and single-sheet polyhedra. Meanwhile, it makes the time go by faster when you’re stuck in boring meetings.

New Song: Mo’bility

My new song Mo’bility is ready. You can listen at:

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/Mobility29.mp3


This sure changed alot since I wrote it. It was originally more of a Hank Mobley vibe. As mentioned before, now it’s sort of a hallowe’en cartoon-jazz jump stride swing thing, featuring the Hungarian minor mode and 7/8 meter. The arrangement is for soprano and tenor saxes, with some midi trumpet and vibraphone rounding out the melody instruments line. The rhythm section consists of piano, bass and drums, with bass being more-or-less double tracked fender electric bass and midi synth bass. Additionally there’s some mellotron strings in there for extra sweetness/spookiness. Finally, I wanted a gong sound but didn’t have a good sample, so I recorded hitting the cymbals of my drum kit with mallets and letting them ring. It turned out to sound great, and perfect for the part. Enjoy!

Also updated mixes of some previous songs.
https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/HeavyWater37b.mp3
https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/AutumnEyes32.mp3

Spring Into Action

It looks like winter is finally at an end and spring has emerged. It took a while but all the snow on the ground finally melted and we started having some nice days. A week ago on the weekend I started spending time outside to work on the yard, beginning with scraping up all the leaves and debris from the flowerbeds. Also, we finally admitted ski season is over and we wouldn’t get a second day skiing in this year, so we went for a hike instead. We went up to the Palisades in New Jersey, overlooking the Hudson River across from Hastings and Yonkers.

This last weekend on Saturday I took the Mustang out for a drive for the first time. Happy to say the engine turned over right away and everything seems in great shape. On Sunday I went for the first bike ride of the year, up to my local Nature Study Woods. Since I was tuning up my bike, Jeannie asked me if I’d get hers ready to ride too. It’s been a couple seasons since she did any biking, but she wants to get back into it. I’d like to get my rollerblades on sometime soon too, but the snowplows tore up our street so badly this winter I’ll have to find another place to go skate.

The yard work continued as well. Last fall after I expanded my patio, I had some leftover dirt that I used to fill in a few low spots in my yard. Once I got into it I realized there were quite a few lumpy areas and wouldn’t it be nice to have some more dirt. Well last fall my neighbor across the street put in a new swimming pool, and now he has a great big pile of dirt, that until recently looked like a sledding hill. He invited me to come over and take away as much as I wanted. So far I’ve take eight wheelbarrow loads, about a cubic yard. I’m probably about twenty percent done. So more next weekend. I’d like to get it down and covered with grass seed in time for things to really start growing.

In other news, I demoed the scheduling tool that I wrote for scheduling classes for conventions to the Origami USA convention committee today. It went over well. Still a few details before we can take it live, but it’s basically there. Thanks to Robert Lang for all his help.

Now I’m starting to think about designing and folding some new models for the convention in June. I have some ideas, but haven’t really been folding much since the pandemic began.

I’ve found some new and interesting stuff to practice on piano. One source was from out continuing movie nights on Saturdays. We recently watched a few classic scifi films including Start Trek IV and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I haven’t seen either in many years and 2001 was particularly inspiring. Among the composers whose works Kubric lifted when he put together the soundtrack, beyond the famous Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss and Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss, was Atmosphères, Lux Aeterna, and Requiem by the Hungarian modernist Gyögy Ligeti.

The Ligeti stuff was some intense, crazy music, and so I decided to check out more of it. This eventually led my to his Musica Ricercata, a series of pieces for piano that are mostly not crazy but express a variety of moods and styles and are notable for progressively building from simple to complex. The first one uses just one note. His approach to modernism reminds me a bit of how Monk approaches jazz, often unexpectedly humorous in the way it plays with conventions of form and genre, while remaining very self-consistent.

Another series of piano pieces in a similar vein is Mikrokosmos Béla Bartók, which starts with both hands doubling the same figure using the pentatonic scale and a limited range, and progresses to the complex and bizarre.

The third piece of sheet music came from my trying to find a chart for one of my songs I’m introducing to my jazz group. On the way I came across a cache of old sheet music someone gave me once that I didn’t even know I had. In there was a book of Art Tatum transcriptions. Art Tatum is one of my all-time favorite piano players with a unique and virtuosic stride-based swinging style that influence Keith Emerson and Eddie Van Halen, as well as countless jazz carts. I doubt I’ll be able to play these pieces at speed any time soon, but they’re worth studying for his approach to voicings and rhythm, particularly in the left hand, as well as where and how he inserts embellishments while maintaining the flow of the tune.

Smarch Smadness

We’re coming up on a year under the pandemic. Last year on February 28 was my last live gig with a band. At least the first hopeful stirrings of spring are afoot. A week ago I was a-shoveling snow, and it seemed endless. Then we had a few days of warm weather and rain, and vast quantities melted away. Now only the rump ends of the biggest snow piles remain. Only downside is we didn’t go skiing this weekend as planned. Ah well, it’s supposed to turn cold and snow tonight. In fact it’s storming out right now. Hopefully we’ll get back on the slopes one more time next weekend.

I’ve been working on my Computer Jazz record this whole winter. I’ve been mainly focused on Lift Off, but it’s taking a long time because it’s a difficult song and I’m trying to capture some subtlety in the arrangement. I got the organ part done, including the solo, and made some changes to the piano part to make them fit together better. Also been working on the drum solo and the overall form. Even laid down a first take of the sax part, which was not too bad. But it was starting to feel like hard work. So I took a break from that to focus on Mo’bility instead.

I wrote Mo’bility for my last jazz group and it always went over really well live, with it’s danceable gypsy-jump vibe. For the studio it was shaping up okay, but didn’t really have the tone and character I wanted. It needed a bit of Raymond Scott cartoon vibe. The other night at rehearsal we working on a different original of mine, and somehow the the feel shifted to 3/4 time. It was pretty interesting, and got me thinking about different ideas for the meter and groove for Mo’bility. I changed it to 7/8, and it was just the thing the song needed. The arrangement fell together pretty quickly, and is very satisfying, just a little unbalanced. I quickly got up to the point where it was time to record the live instruments, soprano and tenor sax, and bass guitar. Unfortunately it’s much harder to solo on and groove on now, so I have to practice it a bit. Still this song should be in the can pretty soon.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s been a long pandemic. We’ve been watching alot of movies on the weekends, and seem to have fallen into a zone that includes a good amount action-adventure-scifi-fantasy. In addition to a number of family all-time favorites, there are lots of great movies that Michelle has never seen and I haven’t seen in along time, and lots of great movies out there that I’ve never seen. So we’ve started making lists of movies we want to watch.

I tried to make a list of my 100 favorite movies. It ended up more like 70 or 80 all-time favorites plus an equal number that might or might not make the cut. Still there are some definite trends. The oldest movie is from 1940 (Fantasia) and the newest from 2017 (Thor Ragnorok). By decade so far there’s 8 from the 1960s, 12 from the ’70s, 30 from the ’80s, 8 from the 90’s, 21 from the ’00s and 5 from the ’10s. The most movies in any single year is 5, for 2003 (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Kill Bill Vol. 1, Big Fish, Underworld). Favorite directors (appearing more than twice) include Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Peter Jackson, Terry Gilliam, Chris Nolan, James Cameron, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Zemeckis. For directors I counted multiple movies in the same franchise if I like them (e.g. all the LotR movies but none of the Hobbit ones). For actors I didn’t count them again if they reprised the same role in a sequel, even if both movies are favorites. Favorite actors (in 3 or more movies) predictably include guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, and Samuel L. Jackson. Perhaps more surprisingly it also includes Billy Crudup (Princess Mononoke, Almost Famous, Big Fish, Watchmen), Keith David (The Thing, They Live, Princess Mononoke), Frank Oz (Star Wars, The Muppet Movie, The Blues Brothers), and Ian Holm (Alien, Brazil, Lord of the Rings).

Our newest hobby these days it to re-imagine a favorite movie as done by the Muppets, and try and and fill out the cast. Go ahead and try it. it’s lots of fun! Like I said it’s been long pandemic.

The Global Jukebox 2.1 is Live

I’m happy to announce that The Global Jukebox 2.1 is now live. Go ahead and check it out at:

https://theglobaljukebox.org/

This rev culminates many months of work, and contains quite a new features including an all-new Wheel View, an updated world culture and song taxonomy, and numerous enhancements to the content and functionality.

The Association for Cultural Equity, the organization behind The Global Jukebox is a non-profit foundation. Our funding is way down this year due to the worldwide pandemic. If you care about world folk music and its legacy, please consider making a donation so we can keep adding new content, features and improvements.

Romantic Warriors

Well the big news this weekend is that we went downhill skiing. It’s been seven years since the last time we went, for a variety of reasons. This year the stars aligned: I have no band and no gigs, Michelle had no robotics competitions, everyone is feeling healthy, and most of all, we had three or four good snowfalls in the last few weeks; it’s the first traditional winter we’ve had in a long time.

We all need some new kit. My old ski boots no long fit, so I got some new boots. They’re lighter and more comfortable too. As it turns out my skis are so old that the ski shop refused to service the bindings and set them up for my new boots. I didn’t know that was a thing.

Meanwhile Jeannie sent her ski pants, gloves and goggles up to Lizzy, who told us she was going skiing before we started to make our own plans, and asked if we had any equipment she could borrow. So Jeannie got new ski pants, gloves and goggles, and while she was at it, she decided to get a helmet. Luckily her boots still fit and her skis are in good shape. Last time Michelle went skiing she was maybe fifth grade, so she needed a new ski jacket, pants and gloves and goggles too. We decided to rent skis and boots for her on the mountain.

We went up to Catamount in the Berkshires, a mountain about two hours from here that we know well. Our friend Seth, who has a house nearby met us there. We decided to go night skiing cuz the tickets were much cheaper and we didn’t really know how it would go or how long we’d last. Plus we didn’t want to have to get up early and drive. It turned out to be the right call. We got there in time to get the first two or three runs in in daylight. We were all kinda wobbly and unsure but soon found our stride and gained some confidence. The conditions were great and by nightfall there were virtually no lines at the lifts.

I decided to demo skis at the mountain. It turns out skis have evolved in the time we were away. I still think of my old skis as my new skis, even though they’re at least fifteen years old. They’re parabolic, from when that was in fashion, and replaced a pair of much longer and straighter skis from the late 1980’s or early 1990’s. Modern skis are still kinda parabolic, but wider in the middle and wider overall, with rounder tips. The skis are almost like two narrow snowboards. I’m told they’re designed for stability and I must say I was really impressed with how they handled. Once I got used to them I found I was able to carve and hold my turns with less effort and energy than my old skis; I could just lean and let them do the work. Also they’re much more consistent in how they handle across moving from deep snow to the occasional icy patch. So yeah, looking at getting new skis now.

We ended up skiing 12 runs and stayed on the mountain for over four hours. Alot of these were spent a nice wide gentle run where we could practice and gain confidence. After a few of these I was basically pointing my skis straight down the mountain and going for it. We ended the last run going all the way up top and coming down some blue runs.

Couldn’t’ve asked for a better time. And now that we got all new kit we’re hoping to go again before the end of the season. Lizzy went skiing the same night as us, up at Holiday Valley. The package Jeannie sent arrived today.

…

On the drive up and home, we listened to a bunch of records by Return to Forever, the seminal jazz fusion group led by Chick Corea, the groundbreaking jazz piano and keyboard player who passed away last week. Chick is one of my big influences, and I’ve seen him live a few times, including with his Electrik Band, doing a Mahavishnu crossover with John McLaughlin, and in acoustic trio setting. He has over 100 albums across all styles of jazz from the 1960’s to last year, and has tons of stuff I’ve never heard. Of course he has lots of stuff I know really well. I decided to focus on Return to Forever cuz I only own one of his albums, although I used to have a few on cassette as well. I haven’t listened to it in a long time. It’s great stuff, really holds up. Lots of mind-blowing synthesizers, and the other players, Stanley Clarke, Lenny White and Al Di Meola are total monsters. They’re capable of a wide variety of expressive styles individually, and as a group come together as a singular force. At times it’s more prog rock than jazz, but without lyrics.

Bring on the Night

Winter continues. Cold and dark, but at least we made it thru January. Too bad the Bills did not win the AFC championship game, but KC and Mahomes were just really so good. We did enjoy watching a few games with wings and nachos and beers. Josh Allen is young and the Bills are up-and-coming, and at least they’ll avoid renewing the Super Bowl curse.

Meanwhile, we had an epic snowstorm the last two days. A good eighteen inches, maybe two feet, the biggest snow in probably five years. I went out yesterday around noon to shovel and there was already a good foot on the ground, but light and fluffy. By the time I was done another inch had fallen. Today the snow stopped and we went out to shovel again, and it was all wet and heavy. Ah well, it’s done.

In preparation for the storm we watched the classic 1982 John Carpenter movie The Thing. Still a great movie after all this time. Great soundtrack too.

We’ve reformulated our Thursday jazz group with a new piano player Josh. He used to be in a group with Ken and the old drummer from Haven Street, Dan. He fits in quite well in terms of playing, vibe and temperament. In addition to standards we’re doing jazz adaptations of rock and pop songs. So far we’ve hit You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want), by Joe Jackson, which is a favorite that we used to do in a couple rock bands. Also Walking on the The Moon, which works great and turns into something dreamy and ethereal, and Peg by Steely Dan, which also works great, bouncy and bluesy. Next week we’re gonna try Some Skunk Funk by the Brecker Brothers. I went back and listened to the record Heavy Metal Bebop, which I haven’t put on in quite some time, and it just blew my mind, just how far ahead of its time it was. I also forgot that the drummer was Terry Bozio, before he joined Zappa.

In home studio land, I finished my guitar-driven rock song, Why Not Zed, back around Xmastime, and started recording another, All of the Above. I also hashed out the first few minutes, from the intro thru the verse and chorus and into the solo section, of the prog epic Plague of Frogs. But I put these all aside for a while to work on another jazz number. Lift Off was a song I wrote for Haven Street, inspired by John Coltrane’s Countdown, and featuring lots of half-step modulation inside ii-V’s superimposed on a harmonic structure borrowing tonal ideas from the standards Have You Met Miss Jones? and A Foggy Day. Gary brought his Wes Montgomery mojo, which fit the song perfectly and helped sharpen the arrangement.

For the studio version I’m recasting it for tenor sax and organ, with a typical rhythm section of piano, bass and drums. For bass I used an 80’s-sounding synth bass, just as scratch part, but then I like the sound of it and may very well end up keeping it. The tempo of the song is 210 bpm and I don’t know if I can walk that fast on the fender bass anyway. I’ve been experimenting with two bass parts (synth and bass guitar) for alot of this record, so I’ll come up with something else to do on the fender: counterpoint, accents and embellishments. Meanwhile I put down the piano track, which I really played. There’s an arrangement behind the head, then many choruses of comping, and a solo. I laid down the solo last night, and it came out well. even playing at the real tempo. Next comes the organ, which is key to the arrangement. I might end up swapping some parts between the piano and organ; we’ll see how it sounds. Then there’ll be a pass tweaking the bass and drums to give them more dynamics. There’s a drum solo in there too, trading fours with the sax and then just horn and drums for a chorus. Might add in a layer of live drums. Lastly, I’m really psyched to lay down the sax part. I feel like my playing has gotten alot better over the last year and I can really slay an uptempo bebop number.

At my new job I’ve been learning the Google Firebase platform. This is a so-called “serverless” suite of infrastructure components to run the backend of web and mobile applications. It seems to be just the thing we need, and includes services for hosting, auth, file storage, database, backend logic, and analytics. Saves us from having to spin up our own servers and databases and build it all ourselves. So far it all seems to be pretty good. There’s lots of admin controls and vast documentation; not surprisingly there’s alot to know to come up to speed. Still, after less than two weeks starting from zero I have a site with auth and file storage working end to end, and I hope to be talking to the DB tomorrow. Hopefully next week I’ll turn the corner into actual application development and figuring out how my piece fits in with our other products. I guess if there’s one thing Google is good at, it’s writing software. Nevertheless, it feels a bit like a deal with the devil you don’t know. They have their tentacles in so many pies, and the days of “don’t be evil” are long gone. Just this week I read about how they wiped out something like 100,000 negative reviews of the Robinhood app after it locked its users out from buying shares of some stocks, in order to protect some greedy hedge fund guys who way overreached. Interesting times, one thing for sure is they keep on a-changin’.

New Song: Heavy Water

The second of three new songs is nearly done. Listen at:

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bziv/HeavyWater36.mp3


Heavy Water was originally envisioned as a funk-fusion thing a la the Headhunters, built on a riff played on the fender rhodes and clavinet, but it took on a more videogame vibe. Structurally it began with an idea of writing a song with four chords in a loop. This turned into two contrasting four chord loops alternating in an AABA pattern, with a middle section in a BBAB pattern, and then iterating in a fractal sequence. Layered on that are different levels of space and intensity to the groove.

Keeping with the whole computer jazz concept, the music explores the interplay between the human and the machine. There’s both a sequenced synthesizer bass and a fender electric bass played live. Similarly, there’s a synth in melody ensemble along with the saxophones.

I had a pretty specific idea of how I wanted two saxophones to weave in and out with the synthesizers. The middle part of the song features fugue-ish noodling in lieu of a more traditional solo section. It builds from being mainly tenor sax, to tenor and soprano together, and then all three. A breakdown and build before the final recapitulation of the head gives the return more momentum.

One great source of inspiration for the interplay of the two saxes came from a record called Two of Mind by Jerry Mulligan and Paul Desmond. I came across this record last year while listening to different versions of All the Things You Are. The way these two guys interact is just fantastic, a real joy to listen to, a forgotten gem of the cool jazz era. It turns of this is actually the second record they made together, and the first one is just as good, with a great version of Body and Soul.

Lastly I mixed in some machine noise. This was sort of a happy accident. I was down in my studio when Michelle fired up Jeannie’s 3-D printer to make something (a dice jail, I think). It made a really fascinating noise, kinda rhythmic but also melodic, kinda repetitive but also not predictable, in short very jazz-like. So I had to record it. It got me thinking about how one might print our specific shapes to make the printer play a melody. But that’s a whole ‘nuther project…