People – Zing Blog 2

Jazz and the Mountains

Just got back from a nice vacation to the Montreal Jazz Festival and the Adirondack mountains. I feel like I’ve been in one long run of deep focus between work and music and other things, so it was a welcome break.

Jeannie and I drove up to Montreal on Monday, which also happened to be Canada day. We arrived mid-afternoon and our hotel was right downtown where the jazz fest was, so we just walked out into the street to enjoy things. The festival is centered around their big performing arts center call Place des Arts, which is on the level of Lincoln Center here in New York. The streets around it are closed to cars and become a big public party space with several outdoor concert stages, and lots of vendors for food, libations and merch. Several other clubs, bars, theaters and other venues host concerts as well. We found a Canadian Asian fusion place for dinner in view of one of the stages. I had a Bloody Ceaser with dinner because, when in Rome …

The main act that night was Robert Glasper, who is sort of a jazz-soul-hiphop crossover guy, somewhat comparable to Kamasi, except he sings and plays keyboards, and his band consists of him, a bass, drums and a DJ. The music was generally groovy and soulful, with some songs featuring modern and minimalist ideas juxtaposed against the main groove. The band were excellent improvisors, individual and collectively, going beyond just taking solos to build moods and structures and atmospheres. It was cool to see the DJ as an integral part of the sound too.

The next day we lounged around the hotel in the morning and got breakfast, then went for a big walk in the scenic downtown dominated by old stone buildings, and finally out to the waterfront. The weather was beautiful, sunny and not too hot. We checked out a science museum on a pier with lots of interactive hands-on exhibit. We got lunch at a cafe nearby: poutine, shrimp and avocado salad, and some Molsons. We bought some souvenirs including a stone sculpture of an Inukshuk in the shape of a human figure. If it can be carved from a single stone, it seems like it might also be a good subject for an origami model too.

That evening the big musical attraction was Joshua Redmond with a new group in one of the theaters in the Place des Arts. The band were excellent and featured a vocalist in addition to the rhythm section. She and Joshua on sax did really cool tight harmony sections together a few times. The theme of the new record they were touring for had to do with the concept place so most of the songs had the name of a place in the title, including some standards like a mashup of John Coltrane’s Alabama with Stars Fell on Alabama, and a surprising way-out jazz version of Hotel California. I’ve seen Joshua a few times at clubs in New York, but this performance was a whole ‘nuther level. There was also a really excellent light show in the theater, which enhanced the sound and mood alot.

After that we took more acts on the outdoor stages, including the Low Down Brass Band, whom we heard on our first trip to Montreal six years ago. Wow, how the time flies!

Next morning we took another walk around the city, looking for baked good to bring back to the States for our friends Mark and Kelly in the Adirondacks. I also picked up a nice-looking (and, it turned out, lovely-tasting) bottle of whiskey at the duty free shop. We arrived in the high peaks area mid-afternoon, and when for a hike at a place called High Falls Gorge on the Ausable River near Mount Whiteface.

The next day was the Fourth of July. Out main adventure in the morning was a bike ride up a rail trail from Saranac Lake to Lake Placid. It was twenty-two miles round trip, my best distance so far of the season, although we took a fairly leisurely pace, and stopped for a while at the turnaround point. This was Jeannie’s fifth or sixth big bike ride of the year. In the evening we went to a party hosted by Mark’s friend Cory, at a very nice summer cottage on a nearby lake. Cory happens to be a passionate cocktail mixologist, and has the best home-bar I’ve ever seen made in a former woodshed. He was very into mixing drinks for everyone using a whole array of bespoke elixirs, infusions, spirits and spices. Like a master chef for drinks. Huzzah!

Mark and I talked at length about improvisational music and the challenges of breaking out of genre boxes and other expectations to explore new frontiers. In addition to his main group Crackin’ Foxy, Mark has been exploring the world of looper jams using pedal and an electric guitar. He played me lots of interesting loop-based stuff from the classical world, including stuff featuring cello and clarinet.

After the party we headed back into to town to try and catch the fireworks show, but we were too late. We ended up at a local bar called the Watering Hole, which I hadn’t been to in many years, and used to be kinda run down but is now very nice indeed. They had a live band doing funk soul party music featuring a trombone player. Alot of fun.

Friday we went for a canoe ride on some nearby lakes. Not quite as epic as some canoe rides of seasons past, but we were out on the water for over two hours. That evening we drove out to a concert venue near Lake Champlain to see Nate Wood doing a project called Four. Nate is a one-man band and quite astounding. He plays drum with one hand and both feet, and also guitar or bass with his other hand (using mainly tap technique), all augmented with some keyboards played in interstitial free moments. The amazing thing is not just that he can do all this at once, but that it actually sounds musical and cool! The songs are basically structured improv jams with a sort of prog-rock-meets-jazz-fusion sound. My kind of weird!

Saturday we drove to a weekend of catching up on chores and things including doing yardwork in the ninety-degree heat. Jeannie and I did another bike ride Sunday morning. I did sixteen miles with an average pace of 14mph, a personal best for speed this season so far. Today Jeannie took off for an IT Admin conference in Pennsylvania; she’ll be back Friday.

Summertime Grooves

First off, I’m happy to announce the Spacecats record is complete and submitted to all the streaming services. The release date is July 1. I’ve also sent off the order to print a small quantity of CDs, just because I feel like it’s important to have a physical artifact to really make the project complete. More announcement around this as the links go live.

For the first time we’re also looking at doing a vinyl record. It turns out you can get 100 vinyl records made for a thousand bucks. Not a bad deal when you think about it, even compared to CDs at two dollars apiece. However, you can only fit a little over twenty minutes of music on a side, and our record is over fifty long, so we’d need to cut two songs for the vinyl addition. On top of that, we don’t know anyone who has experience mastering a record for vinyl, and it’s really it’s own thing compared to digital.

We’ve had continued nice weather until just a few days ago, and then it turned hot toward the end of last week. Lots of barbecuing, and got the mustang out last weekend. Did a big round of trimming the willow tree growing into our back yard, and now the cycle starts over again with the weeding.

I’ve been doing lots of biking. In fact, I’ve been biking seven of the last nine days. I’ve reversed my route thru New Rochelle, so it starts downhill, then the middle is mainly uphill, then a big downhill at the end.

I finally got on the Empire State rail trail with Jeannie and Michelle on Father’s day. Found a new place to park off Tuckahoe Road. I got a flat tire, 6 miles out, which was a bit of a drag. So I took it to the shop, all better, but now I’m thinking of getting a new bike.

On Juneteenth Jeannie and I both had the day off, so we took our bikes down to Robert Moses State Park on Long Island, and took the bike trail out to the little towns on Fire Island. There’s no cars allowed there so it’s really cute and fun to bike around, kind of like Hobbiton but full of rich people’s beach houses. Ended up with a nice hang on the beach and a swim in the ocean. A perfect day for it.

By Friday the weather turned hot — ninety-five degrees, so I actually got out early and did my ride before work.

Saturday Nick and Lisa came over for a visit and Martin came down from Albany too. We did a big ol’ barbecue and built a fire and played games, it was a great hang. For the party I made a new playlist, as is becoming tradition. This summer the theme is 76 Favorite Saxophone Songs. I’ll post a link to it soon, so stay tuned.

Martin stayed over and Sunday morning joined Jeannie and me for another bike ride. We went fourteen miles, the longest of the season so far.

He also brought his guitar so we jammed a while. I’ve been re-organizing my big book of rock songs. I used to have it alphabetical by artist, but then as I moved thru it I’d spend a couple weeks doing only Steely Dan or Billy Joel for example. Now I have it alphabetical by song title. I’m in the letter B and recently added a bunch of B songs, including Bad Sneakers, Bloody Well Right, Break On Thru, and others. Martin brought his book of rock songs too, so we basically took turns calling the tune. We tend to know alot of the same songs, but if not there was a chart. I learned Everybody Wants to Rule the World, which I’ll now have to put into my book.

A couple other things: The OUSA convention would normally be this weekend, but this year it’s in July instead. Feels more relaxed. I’ve ramping up my folding the last week or two. Right now I’m refolding a bunch of models I have out of good paper to exhibit and photograph, including my Platypus and a new and improved version of my Space Cat. Next it’s on to new models, including some more single-sheet polyhedra ideas combined with tessellated flowers, and some animals and insects.

Lastly, at my day job in the Consumer Reports Innovation Lab, my MVP prototype integration the Data Rights Protocol into the Permission Slip application is on the cusp of completion. I’m sort of in the Zeno’s paradox phase, where every day brings me half the distance closer. I’m nominally code complete, and have moved on to integration testing which involves two separate apps, and am encountering pesky deploy roadblocks, cross-domain permission issues, and that sort of things. Ah well, hopefully I’ll be able to declare victory soon.

Another Sunny June

Summer has arrived in earnest. I’m still busy with work and projects, but have been making time for some low-key relaxation and enjoyment. This is important because I feel like I’ve been working since February on the same set of things, and while I’ve been making progress and getting things done, I’ve also been getting weary of the grind.

Michelle is home from school for the summer. Today she started her new summer job, an internship for her study in civil engineering. She’s very excited. The work is mainly inspecting, reporting on and supporting repairs on train bridges in The Bronx. It’s the kind of work where she needs safety boots and a laptop computer with AutoCad. Apparently steel-toed boots in women’s sizes are hard to find at shoe stores around here so she had to order them over the internet. The company provides the computer and software. Rock on!

Meanwhile, Lizzy has enrolled in grad school to get her Master’s degree in Business. This is a mainly online program she can do while continuing at her day job. A year ago she told me she had no interest in grad school. I think she changed her mind because her boyfriend is pursuing a medical degree, but she says it’s to open up her carreer options going forward. Either way, rock on!

In my own little scene, things are grinding along as I’ve said. Things are getting done, but everything is harder and taking longer than one would hope. My day job has entered an unusually chaotic phase, and I was temped to write in my weekly status update today “EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE!!!” but instead wrote “repeated build failures; we are working with the enterprise team to resolve the issue,” which is really just the tip of the iceberg. We’ve hired a new in-house engineer who will start in July, which should help things going forward. Meanwhile the MVP for my more R&D-ish project moves ahead one obstacle at a time, when I have to time to work on it.

The Global Jukebox is approaching the release of version 3.1.0. We’re in the final testing and bug fixing phase. So stay tuned to this channel for future announcements.

The new album by my jazz group Spacecats has been mixed and mastered and ready to publish for a few weeks now. All that remains is the album cover. I put together a cover featuring images of the band members taken from video stills. We all agreed the quality was not the best, so at rehearsal a week ago we took a bunch of new pics of the group as a whole, both playing music and posed at various spots around the studio. I’ve gone thru the images and narrowed it down to a handful of semifinalists. The next step is to drop them into to composition, see how they look, and play around with them until I get somewhere cool.

The OUSA convention is drawing near. I’ve dusted off my list of ideas for models and begun folding, starting with creating exhibit-quality versions of models I’ve already done, then moving on to explore new territory. This year the convention isn’t until late July, so I have a whole extra month to get it together. I also need to decide what I’m going to teach. Probably one of them will be my Spacecat, a variation on another cat, Sophie. I’ve recently refined the Spacecat, changing the proportions and folding sequence, and the final model looks better. Trying to work thru the final sculpting now and looking for the right paper.

I’ve been working out and biking alot, but it’s been a bit uneven as my energy level hasn’t always been the best I’m working thru so weird random pain in my shoulder. I seem to be mainly over it and back up to full weights on everything the last week or two. I still haven’t taken a ride with Jeannie on our local rail trail, but hope to this weekend. I’ve been doing the local loop of my neighborhood (about 4 miles with hills and traffic) about three times a week, and have done the Nature Study woods (longer, no cars, some bumpy trail-ish hills) twice now. We’ve only done one two hikes this spring too. Need to get our into nature more.

We did do some fun things the last few weeks, and at least the major spring yardwork cycle got done, although next weekend starts a new round. Memorial Day weekend I went to a Mets game with Jeannie and Michelle and Mary and Lou and their kids. I don’t care that much about baseball but it was a fun hang, and our seats were in the shade. Amazingly, the Mets rallied in the bottom of the ninth for a come-from-behind victory! We’ve also been doing a bunch of barbecues and hanging out by the firepit in the backyard, listening to playlists from summers past.

Last weekend Jeannie and took a mini-vacation to wild and exotic Connecticut. We went to Mystic, where they have the Seaport Museum featuring tall ships and lots of stuff related to ships and shipbuilding in the Age of Sail, including things like a blacksmith, cooper, printer and other 19th century shops, crafts and industries. They’re also actively restoring several historic sailing ships. There’s also an aquarium there, with penguins, sea lions, beluga whales, and all kinds of fish and even octopus. After that we went out to sushi for lunch. There’a cute little downtown a bunch or restaurants and shops, including a great seafood place. There’s also an 80-foot sailboat parked right there, a three-masted schooner, so we did a two-hour sunset cruise of the sound out beyond the river. The harbor is actually up the river a little bit, so first we had to navigate the channel out to sea. We crossed past a swinging train bridge that seems like the perfect focal point for an action set piece in some adventure film. There’s a train coming and there’s a tall ship coming, and the hero and the villain are fighting up in the control room, trying to gain control of the switch to swing the bridge open or closed.

May Happenings

Spring continues in fits of rain and storms amidst a nice day here and there. I’ve been trying to shake off a cold for the last week. It feels strange having a cold when it’s eighty-five degrees outside. Now it seems I’m finally mostly better. I had a good workout today and hope to get back on my bike tomorrow, and get caught up on the yardwork over the next few days.

Still been doing stuff. Last weekend Jeannie and I took a fun day to go into the city. We started with a stroll thru Central Park, and it was a lovely day for it, sunny if a bit brisk and breezy. The main attraction of the afternoon was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I haven’t been to since before the pandemic. Spent most of our time in the Ancient Greek and Roman collections, as well as the Middle East and Asia, the modern wing, and of course the musical instruments and arms and armor galleries. Afterwards we crossed thru the park again and had dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant, in part to celebrate Jeannie’s recent promotion at her job!

That evening we saw Kamasi Washington at the Beacon Theater. He put on a great show. His sound continues to evolve, now incorporating a DJ and some dancers into his large, sci-fi band. It’s a great sound with two drummers, a standup bass with effects, piano and synth, trombone, vocalist, and Kamasi’s tenor sax over everything. Lots of big extended-jam pieces with great rises in energy. Lots of fun.

Then I was back in the city Thursday and Friday for an onsite for my job, with a bunch of people coming in from out of town including my friend Annmarie from Chicago and Sukhi from D.C.. Thursday night we all went out to dinner and afterwards ended up at the rooftop bar of the Harvard Club (my boss Ginny is an alum) until closing time. Lots of fun, much more open and enjoyable than your typical work social function. Sincerely good people. Or maybe it’s just that since we all mainly work remote, it just feels like a special occasion when we get together. In any event Friday I gave a demo of my current R&D project, which integrating the Data Rights Protocol into Permission Slip, our privacy app. Been making good progress and this is a key milestone for wider adoption of the protocol among industry partners.

Friday Lizzy came home for a visit with her boyfriend Josh. They came up from Philly, where they did a little trip see a ball game and some museums and the zoo. Saturday her grandparents came up for a visit and we had the first barbecue of the season. Again it was a bit chilly our, so I made a fire in our firepit, which was very nice.

The mixing of the Spacecats record is nearly complete, and I must say it sounds quite good. Gavin came by for a mixing session a couple weeks ago, so I got the benefits of his ears and skills. Now I’m basically up to final mastering. The next step is to come up with an album cover, and then I can get CD’s made and get it place on the streaming services. The band wants to try and do a group picture, but unfortunately some of our our out of town the next few weeks, so it may be a while before we can get that together. Ah well, I can work on an illustration and rest of the text and graphics in the meantime.

Weekend Warrior

Spring continues to arrive. Everything is turning green, sprouting and blooming. Today we had our first actually hot day. And it’s about time. Did a ton of yardwork over the weekend. Mowed the lawn for the first time, plus weeding and edging to get everything looking nice for hanging out outside. Next step is put down the mulch under the hedges and trim a couple trees.

Been getting on my bike the last couple of weeks, five or six times now. Nice to get back into that. I still have yet to do a big long ride on the rail trail near my house, but that will come soon enough.

The big fun this weekend was I went into the city to see my old friend Jim Wynne from Buffalo, playing bass with the band Tripi and the Mother Truckers, who are touring around the northeast these days. Tony Tripi is a singer-songwriter with songs that are fun and earnest, and the group is a power trio with a backup singer for high harmony. Great sound and energy.

I haven’t seen Jim in many years, so it was great to catch up. It brought back a bunch of memories. We were in a bunch of bands together back in the day, including Automatic Man and The Purple Connection, and he was the bassist for the last incarnation of my jazz fusion group Event Horizon. Jim is a phenomenal talent on bass, with an imaginative and adventurous technique that he developed after someone lent him a chapman stick for a few months, but then he had to give it back, equally at home in jazz, rock, funk or dance music. I’d compare him to Les Claypool, Billy Sheehan, or Tony Levin, with a bit of Joco thrown in, but he really has his own thing going.

Automatic Man used to play every Monday night at Broadway Joe’s for a year or two, except when the Bills were on Monday night football. The group featured Jim on bass, Pete D. on guitar, Pat O. on drums and me on sax. We did alot of Jeff Beck and Mike Stern, and adaptation of rock songs. We used to end the set with the Beatle’s Abbey Road medley, with Pete and I playing most of the vocal parts on our instruments and Jim covering pretty much everything else in the arrangement on bass. It was a great crowd pleaser, and people used to sing along to Carry that Weight and The End.

The Purple Connection also featured Jim and Pat and myself, and Craig H. on guitar. We had a Sunday afternoon gig at a place called The Inn on the River, a bar where people would pull up to a dock in their boats. The set leaned more toward smooth jazz, with things like George Benson and Steely in our repertoire.

Around that time I was in a different group making an album and the studio we used had a summer picnic with a raffle, and Jeannie won 10 hours of studio time. I thought I could make a record in ten hours, so re-formed my group Event Horizon, with Jim on bass, and we went in and recorded an hour of music – four songs – after just one rehearsal.

So like I said, I haven’t seen my friend in many years. Amazing props that he’s been making his living doing music this whole time and found success at it. He told me I inspired him to get into digital audio production, and he also teaches now, and even tunes pianos! His style of playing has evolved too. A little less flamboyant but better integrated. Jim now has a seven-string bass guitar, believe it or not, with a really broad neck and lots of room for higher and denser chord voicings and bigger excursions into the treble range. And he plays it like a mother trucker!

Fire and Rain

We went for a camping trip this weekend up in Mongaup Pond in the Catskills, with Martin and his family. We haven’t really done a camping trip since before the pandemic, so it felt really good to be back. We went up on Friday. The whole packing and loading in went smoothly, except that we forgot to pack lawn chairs, so we stopped at a Target on the way. And traffic was really heavy. What’s normally a two-hour trip took almost four hours. Anyway we got there and got set up and the weather was fine. Grilled some meat and drinks some beers and stayed up talking around the fire into the night.

Martin’s kids are at and age where they’re lots of fun to hang out with. They were into pulling a prank where they’d jump out of the woods and attempt to scare you and tell you you’re being mugged. First time they tried it, Alley and Matthew set it up with a story about how the woods were full of robbers and muggers, and we were walking on the sketchy trail. I was confused, but when they sprung the trap it was hilarious. The second time they actually got me, and I hollered out in shock and surprise. They’re also pretty helpful and can build a campfire and keep it going.

In the morning we hung out and had coffee and Martin and I played guitars. Surprisingly, we don’t know that many of the same songs, so mostly we were showing each other different tunes. Today I put more time and focus into my guitar practice than I usually do. In the afternoon we went down to the pond and the kids swam, and later went for some walks or maybe light hikes. We felt a drop of rain in the afternoon and so set up the shelter just in case.

In the evening, when were just about the start making supper, the skies turned dark and ominous, the thunder began to rumble. Soon it began to rain. Right at the start, I made a good fire, put on alot of wood, and Jeannie put tinfoil on the grate to keep it dry. It poured for a good hour, and we sat under the shelter and played an epic game of Fluxx. The rain finally subsided, and we started thinking about cooking again, and that it would be getting dark soon. But the respite didn’t last and soon it was pouring once more. We had heard from the park rangers it was going to continue rain much of the night. Kathleen and Martin decided it would be better to break camp, and Jeannie agreed. We did our best to stay dry as we packed down, but finally we had to take down the tent and the shelter, and it became futile. Ah well, at least the car was fairly organized with the wet stuff all being in one place. And we could run the heat together with the air conditioning on the drive home to dry out.

Amazingly, the fire was still burning strong as we finally pulled out of the campsite. It was probably the worst rains storm I can remember on a camping trip, which was a bit funny, because before we left the forecast was for a thirty percent chance of scattered thundershowers. When we got out of the park and had cel phone service, we learned there was a tornado warning for the sight that night, so it’s just as well we didn’t try and ride it out. It rained most of the way home too. We got home Saturday night and Michelle was surprised to see us and that we threw in the towel. “I wasn’t even aware it was an option,” she said.

We got what we wanted out of the trip. It was a great time despite the rain. It would have been nice if it lasted longer, but we would’ve just gotten up Sunday morning and packed in the rain then. Sunday we put all the wet stuff out in the driveway, the shelter, the tent and the tarps. Also we didn’t cook alot of the food we brought so we had steak yesterday for dinner and we’ll have burgers tomorrow.

Summer Time

And the livin’ is easy. Moving right on from the OUSA convention to the next adventure, with barely time to put down our bags. We just got back from a trip up to Buffalo to visit family and friends. Drank some beer, grilled some steaks and dogs and burgers, took some walks in the park, watched some fireworks. Very languid, very relaxing. I feel like it’s been one continuous spell of focus and getting things done since the new year, so it was a welcome stretching out of time.

On the trip up we stopped by Watkins Glen and hiked the trail up the canyon overlooking the river and rapids and waterfalls. Very scenic, very impressive. The next day we got together for a fancy dinner at a restaurant downtown with Lizzy, and with Larry and Jackie and three of their kids and Timothy’s girlfriend. A great time, lots of catching up and storytelling. After dinner we went to the bar around the corner where Lizzy plays trivia, and continued, and after that even lingered in the parking lot as everyone tried to get in one last story about camping and bears. On the third Martin and his family came down and stayed for the fourth. Beers, birthday cake, hanging out, rollerblading, fireworks. Did I mention it was languid and relaxing?

On the way up there my car started having problems with the air conditioner. This seemed to fix itself, but then there was a leak in the power steering. On top of this, the car seems to have mysteriously acquired some scratches sometime in the last few weeks. Ah well, I guess it’s getting to be kind of old.

Saturday we went to the Pleasantville Music Festival, a local outdoor rock show a few towns up from us. We’ve been meaning to go and check it out for years. It was a fun time, and the venue was very well run. The festival featured a beer tent and food and a bunch of pretty good if rather low-imagination pop-punk bands on the secondary stage. On the main stage we saw the Allman-Betts band, an Allman Brothers tribute band by two of the sons of members of the original group. They played about half originals and half Allman Brothers classics, all very good. There were some old guys in the band on Hammond organ and slide guitar, that were probably the glue holding the thing together.

The headliner was They Might Be Giants. I haven’t seen them live in probably twenty years, last time being at a bandshell in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. They put on a great show, having fun and mixing it up. Their new songs sound great, and there’s always a twist on their classic hits. The current touring lineup has a horn section of a trombone, tenor sax and trumpet, all also doubling on other horns such as the euphonium, bari sax and pocket trumpet. Each of the them had an excellent featured solo. The trumpet player in particular was amazing, and used to be part of Conon O’Brien’s TV show band.

Also this weekend we got back to doing bike rides. Sunday I went for sixteen miles, and the girls for ten along the local trail. On the return half of the ride, suddenly the sky opened up and we got drenched in the pouring rain. Nothing for it but to keep on riding. By the end of the trip the sun was coming out again. We got home, only a ten-minute car ride away, and it hadn’t rained here at all.

While I was upstate, I came up with an album cover for my upcoming record Plutonium Dirigible, and a new web page to go with it, with the latest links to all the songs, as well as the lyrics and stories about writing and recording the various songs. This led to an update of my whole music site, which will be finished soon. Enjoy.

Bunny Hop

We just got back from a fun trip upstate, a mini vacation to visit friends and family for Easter. Our first stop was in Watkins Glen to do some hiking. We drove up the night before and stayed right on the lake. I’d never been there before, and it was a cool hike and a gorgeous gorge full of waterfalls. Unfortunately, the trial that goes right up the bottom of the gorge was not yet open for the season; I guess they have to make sure it’s in good repair after the snow melts and there’s no danger of falling rocks. So we stayed on the rim trails, which still provided plenty of views and scenic overlooks, a few bridges and the occasional side path down into the gorge. Still we want to go back in season when the gorge trail is open cuz it’s pretty spectacular.

When we were done our hike we drove the rest of the way up to Buffalo. We stayed with my mum and dad, and Lizzy and Michelle came down for dinner and to hang out. Played some board games, drank some wine, did some story telling. Next day we went to see the Sabres play. I hadn’t been to a hockey game in many years, and it was alot of fun. Our friends Larry and Jackie met us as the arena, and just by coincidence their son and some of his friends had seats in the row behind us. It was a good game, fast and exciting, and the Sabres won by one goal. Now they’re hanging on to playoff hopes if they win more than two or their last few games. Afterwards we went out to dinner at a local craft brewery, which was alot of fun. I hadn’t been walking around that part of downtown Buffalo in a long time, and it’s good to see it all cleaned up and full of restaurants and other businesses.

Sunday was Easter. Jeannie and I went for a long walk around my parent’s neighborhood in the morning. We ran into Lizzy, who is training to run a half marathon and came over early to do a run around the ‘hood as well. My uncle Ron and aunt Emöke came over for Easter dinner. I hadn’t seen them since my dad’s ninetieth birthday party before the pandemic, so that was really nice. Lots more storytelling and wine, and finding out what all my numerous relations are up to.

Now we’re home and the weather here is just gorgeous. Even got out on my bike today for a short ride. Hoping to have a chance to do some yardwork before the weekend.

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.

She’s Leaving Home

We just got back from another road trip. This one was up to Buffalo to drop Michelle off at college. Yep, she’s a freshman at SUNY at Buffalo, majoring in aerospace engineering. Jeannie and I are officially empty nesters.

The week before was a hectic one, full of Michelle packing and getting organized, and getting ready mentally for a big change in her life. She was mostly looking forward to it, but a little bit nervous too. Lizzy, on the other hand, was psyched to have her sister coming to town. Last Saturday and Sunday it rained all day, so we didn’t have a change to pre-load the car. Monday morning we got up early and the rain stopped just as we started to load in, so it all went pretty smoothly and everything fit.

Monday night Lizzy invited us to join her and her friends for trivia night at a local bar where they have a regular team, because I know all kinds of useless facts. I used to wonder about whether we’re turning into our parents, but she’s already turning into us. I recently asked her what new music I should listen to, and she said she’s listening to alot of classic rock these day cuz it’s always a topic for trivia. Anyway, it was a fun night and downtown Buffalo continues to be hip and trendy. We came in 3rd place, which is much better than they usually do, because I knew things like Alice Cooper’s real name, who the programming language PASCAL was named after, and the height of Mount Everest. We would have done better if they’d listened to Michelle when she correctly identified the Australian flag, instead of guessing New Zealand.

Tuesday we moved Michelle in. It went smoothly enough, except it was unusually hot the whole week we were up there, and her dorm does not have air conditioning. Her rooms is on the third floor, so it was alot of trips up and down the stairs. As we were moving in we met Michelle’s roommate and her family, who are from Long Island, and like Jeannie and me are UB graduates. After we unloaded everything we took Michelle shopping for all the stuff that we didn’t bring up with us. After that we went up to North Tonawanda to meet Lizzy at her work because Michelle was inheriting the fridge we bought for Lizzy when she lived in the dorms. Later that evening we all went out for dinner a burger place on Maple Road.

Wednesday Jeannie and I mostly hung around my parents’ house. We went for an epic walk in the morning, but by the time we returned it was already pretty hot. We had BLT sandwiches for lunch, with fresh tomatoes from their garden. It’s tomato and peaches season right now, and they’re having a bumper crop this year, so we ate lots of both every day. Brought some home too. Yum!

It seems like every time I go on vacation it aligns with a mini-crisis on the Global Jukebox, and this trip was no exception. There was a deadline with lots of last-minute design changes, so I ended up working that day and evening and doing a push to the live site the next morning. I had a chance to practice guitar too, and learned the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home, which Jeannie found very annoying for some reason.

Thursday I went rollerblading in the morning. My parents’ neighborhood is nice and flat, with smooth streets and very little traffic, so it’s perfect. I did two whole laps of the neighborhood, and found one street that was unusually smooth, so I went back and forth on it three times. In the afternoon we visited the Buffalo Museum of Science, which I had not been to for at least thirty years, and had been heavily remodeled. It made a big impression on me as a kid, and I was happy that my three favorite artifacts were still around: the skeletons of a triceratops and and allosaurus, and a giant globe with the ocean floors shown in relief, although they’d all been moved to different halls. There was also a hall of taxidemified animals and anthological stuff, like a mini version of the New York Museum of Natural History. Some of the upper floors were filled with newer, interactive learning exhibits, but it’s really the artifacts that interest me. Oh, and a Mastodon skeleton that I’d forgotten all about. Western New York is one of the world’s premiere sites for mastodon fossils, and, unlike Wooly Mammoths, they’ve never found a preserved specimen with its skin, so they don’t know if it was furry like a mammoth or bare like an elephant. They also had a pretty cool exhibit about the history of guitars, with lots of historic examples including centuries-old proto-guitars of various kinds, and lots of modern acoustic and electric examples.

That evening Jeannie and I took my parents, Lizzy, and Michelle to the Buffalo Hofbrau Haus, a big new biergarten right downtown, brought to you by the Munich Hofbrau brewing company. Lizzy had been there a few times before and thought my parents might enjoy it, since they were members of the local German club for years before it closed. Michelle was beginning to settle into her new situation, doing orientation stuff, making friends and all, although the weather was still unusually hot. The Hofbrau Haus was a good time, and pretty authentic, with live music featuring accordion, clarinet, cowbells, and lots of polkas. The food was Wiener schnitzel and bratwurst, and of course beer. It was alot of fun. Apparently the place gets pretty packed and raucous on the weekends.

Friday we had lunch with Larry and Jackie at a pub in Hamburg, and just talked for hours. What’s going on with all the kids, camping and bear stories, drumming, music, everything. Everyone is encouraging me to move back to Buffalo now, but Larry says the jazz scene is pretty small and there aren’t alot of really good players. It got me thinking about my old musician friends from the area, if any of them are still around and into prog rock.

Friday night was the King Crimson concert, the reason we stuck around a couple extra days. They’d played SPAC in Saratoga near Albany on Monday. Martin saw them there, and so did Mark from the Adirondacks. They played Bethel Woods near Yasgur’s farm on Wednesday, but at the time we were planning our trip we expected Wednesday to be move-in day for Michelle, so that wouldn’t have worked either. Anyway it turned out be a the right move. The venue was Artpark, which is semi-open theatre with lawn seating behind it, right on the shores of the Niagara River, between the Falls and Lake Ontario. I think the last show I saw there was Monsters of Jazz featuring Herbie Hancock, Pat Metheny, Jack DeJohnnette and (I think) Dave Holland in 1991 or so.

Unbeknownst to us until the day of the show, they’d closed the theater for the pandemic and built a new, smaller, all-outdoor venue on a hillside next to it, so we had to borrow some lawn chairs from my parents. It turned out to be a beautiful scene, a perfect summer evening with a view of the river, and idyllic ambient music of gamalan-like chimes and tones and the sweet smell of reefer wafting in the air as the venue filled up. We found a spot and Jeannie mentioned that there may well be someone we know was at the concert. A minute or so later I heard someone calling my name out of the blue.

It was my old friend Joe Q. At first I didn’t recognize him; it’s been twenty-nine years since I’d last seen Joe and he doesn’t look the same. But then I heard his laugh and it all came back to me. Joe was the bass player in the Cheshire Cat, probably the best band back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, when there was an incredible amount of talent on the local music scene. I fist met Joe when I was in tenth or eleventh grade, as part of the combined Kenmore East and West High Schools marching band, formed for the purpose of playing Buffalo Bills halftime shows, where we were both in the sax section. After high school, Joe and I were in a couple of bands together including Tafari, a mostly-reggae-with-some-Steely-Dan band with a horn section. I played the solo for Home at Last on the EWI. That band had half of Kenmore in it. Amazingly Joe is still playing music for a living. Rock on!

A few other people from Kenmore were three too. One was Mike M., the guitarist from Cheshire Cat. Apparently he got a bunch of free tickets because he and the drummer from the opening band were friends from Berklee School of Music. Another was Pete D., who was guitarist for the Automatic Man. Automatic Man were a jazz fusion band with Mike, Pat O. on drums, Jim W. on bass and myself on sax. We played every Monday night at Broadway Joe’s for about two years, unless there was a Bills game, and this group begat The Purple Connection which played every Sunday at the Inn on the River in North Tonawanda in the summertime. We did alot Mike Stern and Jeff Beck type stuff, plus the entire second side of the Abbey Road as an instrumental, although often the crowd would sing along to Carry That Weight.

Anyway, Pete was an excellent guitarist, one of the best in Buffalo. About halfway thru our stint he left the band and moved to New York City to try and make it on the music scene here. I moved to to NYC less than a year after that, and tried to find him but never connected. He told me he eventually returned to Bflo and hasn’t played guitar in many years. I thought that was too bad, since he was so good, so I told him about how I took a bunch of years of playing when my kids were little, but I’m really glad I returned to music. Then the show started, so our conversation was cut short.

The opening act was The Zappa Band. I’m not sure what connection they have to FZ, but they were at the least a flawless tribute band, possibly with some alumni from his groups. I thought I knew alot of Zappa songs, but I only recognized about a third of what they played.

King Crimson themselves were amazing. It’s the seven-headed monster lineup with three drummers in the front line, and back row consisting of Mel Collins on saxes, Tony Levin on bass and stick, Jacko on vocals and guitar, and Fripp on guitar and mellotron. It was pretty much the same act as four of five years ago when I last saw them: three songs off the first album, three off of Red, and smattering of songs from all the records in between, plus some later stuff too, and some epic drum solos. All very well done of course, often going well beyond what was on the original record, especially the stuff from the interregnum period. There were moments when the complexity of the various interlocking polyrhythms was just staggering. And I think the best Tony Levin is when he’s channeling Greg Lake.

Afterwards we went up the falls and walked around. Now we’re back home, making plans in our empty nest, hoping Michelle is doing well.