Category: Music

Good Day Sunshine

Early spring continues to get springier.  Last Friday I finished up raking the yard, filling up three more big bags of leaves and debris.  This morning the town came and picked it all up, so it’s on to the next task.

Sunday morning I took my ’67 Mustang out for the first drive of the season.  I’m happy to say it started right up, and sounded and felt good on the highway.  Woo-hoo!

Then Sunday afternoon Jeannie and I went for a bike ride.  Last summer we started doing bike rides on local trails around the area, but we only did a few.  This year, I figured since we had such a good ski season, I want to do something athletic the rest of the year too.  So we’re starting early in the spring (just two weeks ago we were still on our skis) and hope to get a regular pattern going.  This one was just over ten kilometers, in about an hour.  Nothing too huge, but not bad for the first time out. 

I also finished a longstanding software development project, adding some sort functionality to the class scheduling tool for conventions on the Origami USA web site.  This was a rather drawn out endeavor because it’s built in PHP on an old version of Drupal, and the whole dev environment is an enormous pain in the neck.   The overhead of keeping the site running locally is non trivial:  updates from the git repo, managing the dependencies, updating the scripts to sync the database and media assets, it’s all a major headache and time suck, and there are breaking changes from time to time.  All this is before one can even start writing code.  So I’m pretty happy it’s done with.  Well, maybe one more tiny change.  Robert Lang, who is OUSA’s web master and the only person who really understands how the site works, helped me drag it over the finish line, so thanks to him for that.

Meanwhile, my origami stellated icosahedron is coming along.  I’ve finished pre-creasing on the smaller one, and on the larger on I collapsed it halfway, then unfolded to reinforce the valance of all the existing creases to make it hold its shape better, and refolded it.  All that’s left is to fold the lock.  I’m thinking I’m going to wetfold this one when it’s done, since it’s folded from Elephant Hide and it will hold its shape amazingly after that.

In other news Nicolas Terry has started selling Elephant Hide paper in large sheets of previously unavailable colors on his web site, so I ordered a whole bunch.

Finally, my new song, In the Purple Circus is almost finished.  It’s basically a prog metal song, so naturally I added a tenor sax part.  It came out totally wailing, channeling some Michael Brecker energy, screeching and growling in the high altissimo rang, up to the fourth C#.  The next day I added a bari sax way down low to reinforce the tenor, and blend with the overtones of the subsonic bass synthesizer.  Now it’s pretty much down to the final mix, which I hope to share soon.

Mr. Gone

It is with a mix of sadness and admiration that I note the passing of Wayne Shorter, one of the great sax players of all time, a legendary improviser and innovator, one of the all-time great jazz composers, one of my musical heroes, and just a giant in the world of jazz.  His influence, legacy and spirit will long endure.

First There is a Mountain

We’re back home again and busy with work and other things.  Seems like everything is happening all at once.

First it’s finally ski season.  A week ago we went skiing again up at Catamount.  They have night skiing, which is perfect for us.  It starts at 3pm so you don’t have to get up super early to get there, instead we can get all our chores done Saturday morning and then go.  When we arrive alot of the day skiers are leaving, so it’s easy to get a good parking spot and the lifts and slope get less and less crowded the longer you stay.  You have a few hours of daylight to ski in – now the days are getting longer faster – then you can go in and take a break with a cup of cocoa and come out again for the night session.

A week ago the conditions were warm and icy, but we figured we might not get another shot so we went for it.  After a while found that Mountain View was a pretty good trail and we stayed on that.  We quit after ten runs and met our fried Seth for dinner.

This last weekend it started to snow Saturday morning, just a dusting, but it made us feel hopeful, so we figured we’d go up again and try our luck.  At first it was pretty icy, but snow started falling until there was fresh powder everywhere.  There was a magical moment where suddenly everything was beautiful and the skis felt great and you could really get a good groove going and the mountain was comin’ ’round.  So we stayed out there almost until they closed, a total of eighteen runs. Walter’s Way was the favorite run.

This was three times skiing this season, tying our record last year. We’re still hoping to do an overnight trip a bit further north in two weeks, with bigger mountains and more snow.

In other news, I’ve been working out some new origami ideas since I’ve gotten back from my trip.  I’ve never really explored the icosahedron geometry, even though I mentioned it in my talk.  It’s much easier than the dodecahedron; you can use a triangle grid in a hexagon sheet.  I have two variations I’m working on.  One is a dimpled icosahedron.  It looks kinda like a soccer ball with a pattern of hexagons and pentagons, but the pentagons are dented in.  The other is a stellated icosahedron, where each triangular face of the base shape is replaced with a pyramid.  I did a study of this pattern embedded on a dome back in Bogota, and the design approach causes a set of really cool looking sunken star shapes to emerged between the facets.  Now I’m expanding the pattern to a full sheet so I can close the bottom and the full solid shape.  I have the crease patterns all worked out.  Now it’s just a matter of practicing and perfecting the lock, and then finding some suitable sheets of paper for the final models.  

Next, the Global Jukebox project has sprung back to life.  Anna made a deal to license a bunch of Alan Lomax’s recordings, and now she has a budget again, which injects lots of new energy.  However, I now have a full time day job again, so I can only commit so much time.  I brought Martin in as a subcontractor/partner so we can share the workload.  So far it’s going great.  It’s fun having a collaborator, and new ideas and all.  For onboarding I had him go thru the test script and he spotted alot of minor issues in neglected corners.  We upgraded all our processes including document sharing, getting full-stack local dev environments spun up, and using branches and pull requests in git.  Now we’re all ramped up and the real meat of the work begins.  We have a full year’s roadmap ahead, so more on this as we publish new releases.

Lastly, I’ve gotten back to the home studio recording project the last few weeks.  I’m tracking the vocals for two songs, In the Purple Circus and A Plague of Frogs.  Both have rather challenging parts that use a large range, with big interval jumps, and have some tricky phrasing too, and need to be delivered with some gusto and drama.  I didn’t really think about how it would be to sing them when I wrote the lyrics and melodies.  So I have to work them up.  Also, right now I’m getting over a cold so my voice is not at its strongest. The high notes are a bit thin and scratchy and low notes note always in tune..  Ah well, it’s good to rehearse.  Each session I get a little surer and more expressive.

And … it’s snowing here tonight, and it looks like will be the first real snowfall of the season down here.  That means mo’ better snow up away from the coast.  If there’s no rain the next few days we’ll probably go back to Catamount again this weekend.

Going Down

Today is the fifth Monday of January, almost certainly no one’s favorite day of the year.  I’ve been trying to shake the doldrums of winter.  Lots of rainy and sunless days. Work has been busy and my increasing load of meetings and random tasks means less time to focus on writing software. Michelle went back up to school yesterday, so the nest is empty once again.

Guess what, I’m in a D&D campaign again!  Our last one ended over a year ago when Michelle went off to college.  Last week out of the blue my friend Mark H. up in the Adirondacks asked me if I wanted to join his group.  So I came up with a few ideas for characters, all of them different kinds of fighter/magic-user combinations.  One was Fingongolfinger, an elvish fighter/wizard, an attempt to re-create the classic elf type from the original D&D game.  Fights with a sword and longbow, and casts spells like fireball and lightning bolt.  But the party already had and elvish wizard.  The second was Hiro Ünliikli, a Dragonborn barbarian/sorcerer. This would’ve been pretty wild and weird, but the party already had Teifling, which was weird enough.

The one they liked the best was Grimli Son of Groin, a dwarvish cleric whose deity is Thor.  He fights with a magic warhammer and axe and shield, and has spells like spiritual weapon, and other spell to boost his and party’s fight ability, endurance, and resistance.  He started at level seven and the DM gave him a bunch of cool magic items.  I’m very stoked.

We had our first session last week, over zoom, and I met the party, Mark’s friends, and the whole thing was fun and easygoing. They’ve been playing long enough to have their own tone and rhythm and in-jokes.  I came at a time when they were choosing where to go for the next major adventure, so there was alot of roleplaying and backstory, but no actual combat.  

Only problem is the group meets on Wednesdays, which is the night of my rehearsal jazz group. As luck would have it that was cancelled last week and again this week.  I’ve been thinking of leaving anyway since the group isn’t all that good.  It’s more like going to the gym for sax playing and improvisation over real book tunes than anything else.  But I kinda wanna find a new and better group to replace it.  I’ve been thinking of signing up for a jazz workshop in the city to maybe meet some new and better players.

Happily Spacecats, which rehearses on Thursday, is still fun and creative and sounding better than ever.  My new song Los Gatos de Cosmos, is developing nicely.  But I feel like we need to find some gigs.

In other news, they finally got some snow upstate, so on Saturday we went skiing for the first time this season.  Good to spend time outside doing something physical and get away from staring at the computer screen.  If you recall I took seven years off from skiing, and started again two seasons ago.  At the time I bought new boots and demoed skis on the mountain.  Last year we went skiing three times, up from one the year before.  This year we’re hoping to beat that.

I demoed skis last year but didn’t like them that much.  They were a little short, and while they were very maneuverable, they weren’t so fast on the straightaways.  This year the skis I got are longer, they’re stiffer and lighter than my old skis, and very controllable on different conditions, ice, powder, etc.  But they’re actually close to the length of my old ones.  I’m thinking maybe 5cm shorter would be perfect.

Anyway it was a great day skiing, and we did sixteen runs, which is good amount more then our first trip last year, when we did ten runs.  Michelle is way faster then Jeannie and me now, and just zips right down the mountain. Jeannie and I are thinking of taking a weekend up to the Adirondacks of Vermont or something in a few weeks. 

Don’t Ask Me Why

It’s January.  The darkest darkness has passed, and days are getting longer again.  At five o’clock there’s still some daylight.  We’ve had alot of rainy and overcast days too since the new year.  Up in Buffalo all the snow from the big Christmas blizzard has melted.  It’s been colder here again recently, and we even had a snow flurry or two over the weekend, which puts me in the mind of skiing.

Of course with the holidays over it’s back to work.  Things are off to a good start with both my main gig and The Global Jukebox, moving to grand strategy to operational tactics to writing and and deploying code.

With Michelle home on winter break for another couple weeks, we’ve been playing lots of board games, and as is tradition, watched entire extended edition of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, about four lads from Liverpool, er, The Shire, who have come into possession of a ring they want to get rid of, while singing songs and being chased by bad guys all over the world, er, Middle Earth to the Bahamas, er, Mordor.

Lizzy came for a visit last weekend, since she didn’t make it home at Christmastime.  We all had a fun weekend which started with going to Billy Joel at the Garden Friday night.  He still puts on a great show, has a great band, and does a fantastic job of mixing up the set list and keeping things fresh.  This night his band did two songs by Jeff Beck, including a stirring rendition of People Get Ready and an impromptu jam of I’m Going Down after the last encore.

The next night we went out to Long Island to Mary and her family, since we didn’t see them at all over the holidays.  We went to Benihana for fancy cook-at-the-table hibachi seafood, which was most excellent.  Haven’t been to one of those in years.  Sunday we watched the Bills game.  They made the playoffs and one the first round.  Two more to go to get to the Super Bowl.

I printed out a bunch of lead sheets for some Billy Joel songs to practice on piano.  Surprisingly, these can take some time to prepare, since chords found on the internet are often not accurate, and the charts always need formatting.  I want the song to fit on one page from start to finish and be as clearly readable as possible.

Lots more going on with music, origami, and other creative and artistic endeavors, but it’s all a work in progress right now.  Will share when the time is right.

In the Purple Circus

It’s been a few weeks since my last post.  Been busy with work, trying to wrap things up for the end of year, mainly lots of meetings with partners and stakeholders, a few key software commits, and lots of planning and strategy to set up the coming year of projects for our new R&D lab.  Plus, it’s been cold and dark and my energy level has been low.  On top of that I fell Ill with the covid a couple weeks ago, and so did Jeannie. Totally on brand for this time of year.  We’re all better now, but we didn’t get much done beyond the bare minimum for a little while.  We did manage to do most of our holiday stuff.  We put up a lovely tree, and new holiday lights outside, and wrote our Christmas cards, and got a fair chunk of gifts.  Been reading alot, and we watched alot of movies.  Among the better ones was the new production of Dune, although it only covers the first half of the book.

I’ve also been working on a new song in this season of darkness, called ‘In the Purple Circus’.  I wrote the lyric a while back, and earlier this fall set down at the piano and came up with pretty much the entire song, the main riff, the chords, the overall structure and various sections, pretty much all in one sitting.  (Actually also I wrote a song ‘Los Gatos de la Cosmos’ for my jazz group Spacecats around the same time.  It’s a nice little samba based on the harmony of a minor-major-seventh chord, and nice atmospheric spacy jam section in the middle.  It started as an attempt to get inside the head of Jobim, but owes more to Nica’s Dream by Horace Silver, and ended up taking on a direction of its own. More on that once we get the tune together.)

In the Purple Circus is in E minor (from a certain point of view) and the vibe emerged as dark, proggy and heavy. The main riff is in 13/8 time with a couple extra beats on the end after four repetitions so the complete phrase fills seven bars of 4/4 time.  This made it much easier to sequence in ProTools.  The riff uses a downward harmony thing, starting on a Dorian minor, moving to the half-diminished, then the suspended 4th and landing on a #9 dominant 7 chord.  Lots of buzzy tritones and semitones rubbing against one another.  The verse and bridge continue the rhythmic and harmonic motifs.  The time goes to straight 4, but there’s an overlaid 3-against-4 feel, with the downward harmony moving around, and the phrases work out to seven bars throughout.  Then there’s a middle section which takes the main riff and breaks it down, brings it down to a whisper, and builds it back up into a monstrous sonic maelstrom. 

The piano track went down first, then midi drums.  It was starting to take shape with some real character.  Next was bass guitar, which features heavy use of chording on the top two strings while an open E rings out on the bottom.  That sounded pretty badass.  A low E is about 40 Hz.   Having seen Steve Hackett earlier this year, I was inspired by his prodigious use of Moog Taurus pedals to bring the really deep bass.  So I created a bass synth part, an octave below the bass guitar to really emphasize the E-ness on that 20hz tone.  This is right about at the lower limit of human hearing, to say nothing of the frequency response of one’s speakers.  Even on my high-quality but normal studio monitors it sounds pretty great.  I’d love to get a massive subwoofer and hook it into the system.

Next came the electric guitar.  For this record my goal is to put guitar on all the songs, and to develop an approach and guitar part for each song.  For this one the sound was a pretty full and distorted, and I worked out chord voicings both low and high in the range using open strings where I could, to bring out the dissonance and resonance.  I laid down the part and it was just overwhelming!  So now I’m rethinking both the guitar and bass parts to have a bit more space and interplay, to fit together as if they’re the left and right hand parts of some giant 10-string meta instrument.  And to practice the parts so I can lay them down tighter, with particular attention going to the jam/riff bits at the end of the phrases where it builds up over a B altered chord.

So the song is about halfway tracked, and I expect to finish it sometime in the new year, and it will be pretty killer.  Meanwhile, here are the lyrics.

…

In the Purple Circus
By John Szinger

Well I said, get that bidniz done by Christmas
But the Devil had his plan
So let’s get it thru here by the New Year
Can I talk to the weather man?

The purple circus is where the work is
Vanilla villain where you been?
Chances and changes, chases and cages
I don’t know where to begin

We traffic in majick
Grapple the facets
Conjure abjure and summon
Divination evocation
The mountain surely is a-comin’

She tells me you have the energy of a major enemy
Thick in the grip of crippling sickness n’all
So I vault into the firmament of the permanent tournament
Cuz after all we’re born to crawl

We’ll depart our hostess ‘ere the solstice
Alight beneath the new snow moon
We can check that box off by the equinox
But the lion in roars a day too soon

We traffic in majick
Package the tragic
Sensing seeing knowing
Equivocation declamation
The mountain surely is a-goin’

We traffic in majick, yeah traffic in majick
Yeah, can I talk to the weather man?
Chances and changes, chases and cages, woah
I don’t know where to begin
First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is
She’ll be comin’ round that mountain when she comes, yeah

Global Jukebox Plos One Article

Over at my other project as lead software developer on The Global Jukebox, I’m happy to announce our article in the peer reviewed journal Plos One has been published:

The Global Jukebox: A public database of performing arts and culture
Anna Wood, Patrick Savage, et. al.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0275469

Abstract
Standardized cross-cultural databases of the arts are critical to a balanced scientific understanding of the performing arts, and their role in other domains of human society. This paper introduces the Global Jukebox as a resource for comparative and cross-cultural study of the performing arts and culture. The Global Jukebox adds an extensive and detailed global database of the performing arts that enlarges our understanding of human cultural diversity. …

In the Spaceship, the Silver Spaceship the Lion Takes Control

It’s been a busy few weeks.  The weather has been alternating between mild and sunny and cold and rainy, so I’ve been getting in a few bike rides a week here and there.  Every time I do I think it might be the last nice day. It’s rainy again this week, and of course it’s getting dark earlier and earlier. A week ago Jeannie and I went for for a hike up a mountain called Anthony’s Nose, which looks down on the Bear Mountain Bridge from the summit.  That’s right folks, there are alot of great hikes in the area, but we picked the nose.

I transitioned in my job from consultant to full time lead staff engineer at the Innovation Lab. Last week was heavy on onboarding and strategic planning and roadmapping meetings, as well as tactical planning for the upcoming release of our mobile app in November.  Also got a new computer and been moving into that.  One night after work last week there was a dinner event hosted by one of our partners in the consortium, and I met some of their engineers and some of their customers, as well as an attorney named Havona who was “raised by hippies” and is now living in Spain so her daughters can train to be future tennis pros.  It’s the first time I’ve been to an event like this since before the pandemic, and it turned out to be alot of fun.

And, I’m looking to hire software engineers with a combination of full-stack and R&D prototyping skills.  Ping me if you fit the bill.

Been folding tons of origami for some upcoming exhibitions.  More on that as it, uh, unfolds.

Also Jeannie got me a lego spaceship recently and I’ve been trying to find the time to build it. More on that as it, uh, comes together.

Lastly, been working on music.  I have two I’m working writing/arranging/tracking: In the Purple Circus, and A Plague of Frogs. Additionally, I have six tracks basically done, but the guitar sounds were all over the place.  Last weekend I went back and worked on putting them into some kind of tonal shape.  The main issue is that there’s lots of low end noise muddying up the mix.  EQ helps but not enough.  When I put it thru an amp simulator it cleans up alot of that but also alters the tone pretty radically into the treble range.  I ended up creating a signal chain with 2 buses, one for the raw guitar mix and another for the amp, then mixing the two of them for the right balance. It made a huge differenceI and I applied this to five songs.  Further tweaking can occur but they’re all in the zone.  Hopefully by the end of this record I’ll have something like “my” guitar sound, or at least a sound I can control.

Sun and Rain and Jazz

It’s been cold and rainy the past few days.   I got in quite a few good bike rides in September, but now summer is definitely over.  Been busy with work, new origami, the Jukebox, setting up new computers, and the recording project.  One plus side, I saw two excellent concerts last week.  

The first was The Levin Brothers at the Jazz Arts Forum, a cool little jazz club in Tarrytown.  The Levin Brothers are Mark on piano and Tony on bass, along with a drummer and, for this tour flute player Ali Ryerson fronting the group.  We were seated right up front, so close to the bandstand that I had to move Tony’s music stand and some cords on the floor so I had room to sit down.  They played a combination of originals and jazz interpretations of pop and rock songs, including Steely Dan’s Aja and the traditional Scarborough Fair.  The tone was mostly laid back and tasty, occasionally reaching out into more abstract and experimental territory.  The flute was unusual choice for lead instrument, and fit perfectly.  She was an excellent player, great tone, phrasing and soloing, and gave the group a unique sound and brought it all up to another level.  

Tony Levin is of course a world famous bass player, and equally famous for pioneering the use of the Chapman Stick.  For this gig, however, there was no stick.  He stuck to an electric upright bass, some kind of Steinberger I think, and and old Gibson bass guitar with a star-spangled paintjob that might well date from 1976.  His tone and playing were much more restrained than with some other groups, but sounded great and tasteful.

After the show the band was hanging out at the bar and we got to meet them.  Jeannie had a picture on her phone from when we saw King Crimson last summer.  Tony liked that and said it’s good we were there, cuz that’s probably the last time Crimson will play North America.  I mentioned the first time I saw Tony was with Peter Gabriel back in the 1980s’.  He said Gabriel is gonna be doing a major tour next year, very exciting.  I said to ask Pete if he’d do Carpet Crawlers.

The other show was Sungazer at Gramercy Theater in the city.  The venue was pretty cool, smallish but not that small, maybe a former vaudeville or movie theater with an open floor in the front half and raised seating in the back, and a bar on each side in the middle.  There was an opening act that I’d never heard of, but who were really good, called Childish Jibes, fronted by an attractive, dark-haired singer with a great voice and a sort of Amy Winehouse or Adele vibe, complete with a beehive hairdo and boots so high she could barely dance.  The band were sort of a blend soul funk and rock and pop with a unique sound.  Excellent players, great songs and arrangements, really polished.  I hope they make it big.

Sungazer is sort of a jazz-adjacent jam band like Lettuce or Galactic, but less funky and way more proggy, with elements of metal, techno and jazz fusion.  They favor dense, complex arrangements with out meters and multilayered polyrhythms and subdivisions of time.  The drummer and leader of the group is a virtuoso of this kind of playing, and his solo was just mind blowing.  The synth player had his own devil’s mellotron with samples from videogames and cartoons and things.  The bassist and guitarist were prone to unison shredding, and the bassist augmented the low end with a sub-bass synth reminiscent of old Genesis.  The sax playing resembled something like Morphine or King Crimson more than what you’d typically recognize as jazz. 

All in all totally my kind of weird.  It’s funny, Jeannie and I were very likely the oldest people in the crowd.  I wonder how a band like that finds an audience in this day and age.