Hippity Hoppity

Spring continues. The days are getting longer faster, and the nice weather appears more often than not. More and more people I know have gotten the vaccine and getting hopeful about life returning to normal soon.

We didn’t have much of a spring break this year, but it was enjoyable. Busy with work and stuff. Jeannie and I both took a long weekend off from work, and Lizzy came home for the weekend. Hard to believe she’s graduating college in just a month or so. We had family game night Friday night, which was lots of fun. On Sunday we went down to Queens to visit Jeannie’s parents, and Lou and my neblings came over too. It was good to see everyone in person, even if it was pretty low key.

We normally try to go to a museum or day trip this time of year. We haven’t picked a place yet, but we’re looking at next weekend. Most places are running at limited capacity and you have to get tickets in advance. Michelle has asked that we go Washington D.C, this summer to visit a few more museums. That might happen. We might even get back to Ohio for the Centerfold origami convention, and swing my the National Air Force Museum while we’re out that way.

I finished diagramming my Platypus model, called Gladys the Platypus, for the Origami USA 2021 Convention Collection. This is my first new diagram in some time, and hopefully I’ll get back into the groove with that. I hadn’t been that motivated to do much origami during the pandemic, cuz all the conventions were cancelled, and I don’t enjoy the online ones that much. But I’ve been involved in planning and setting up the 2021 OUSA, that includes a virtual gallery, and there may even be some live, in-person conventions later this year. So I’m starting to get back into folding again.

Project dirt continues. I’m up to thirty wheelbarrows of dirt, and have gotten maybe two-thirds of the way around the yard. I filled in one really big low spot on the north side of my house that took four loads by itself. It’s good to spend some time outside, and it’ll be really nice when it’s finished. I made a pretty good dent in my neighbor’s dirt pile, but he has a whole swimming pool’s worth, so there’ll be plenty left.

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.

Fotoz 2020

It’s been a year of mainly sitting around the house waiting for the pandemic to end. As a consequence we didn’t take that many pictures, but at least we got out around the neighborhood a bit, and upstate a couple of times. As always, ping me if you need login creds. Enjoy!

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’.

I Got a Feeling the Bills Are Going to the Super Bowl

A brave new year is underway. So far the winter has been pretty mild, if not exactly warm. Even as the chaos of the world continues to writhe around us, one surprising good thing is the Buffalo Bills are back! It’s been twenty-five years or something since they won a playoff game, and now they’re gonna be in the AFC championship! As a fan back in the day of Jim Kelly and Bruce Smith, I gotta say this is pretty fun and exciting.

One thing I accomplished in 2020 was to work my way thru the entire book Patterns for Jazz by Jerry Coker et. al. on saxophone. It took me about three years to do it in high school, and I must say my facility has leveled up. I’m now starting to work thru to book on piano, and am immediately encountering little tricky things I never thought of before, like how to cross over fingerings when going up a half-step after every riff. Meanwhile in soxphoneland I rediscovered a book called The Bebop Bible by Les Wise. It’s an encyclopedia of jazz riffs for major, dominant, minor, ii-V-II, etc., organized by starting tone. Should keep me busy for a while.

I also went up in weights on my workout toward the end of last year. Winter is usually the hardest time of year for working out cuz the cold makes you sluggish and more susceptible to injury. But so far so good. The last few winters have been pretty rough, so here’s hoping I can ride it out thru to springtime.

Our Friday night D&D campaign had a particularly exciting night this week. Michelle got me the book Tales From the Yawning Portal for my birthday last summer. It’s collection of all-time great D&D modules from the game’s entire history, and includes classics like the Giants’ Saga and The Tomb of Horrors. Since the fall we’ve been playing the Forge of Fury, in which the party explores a once-abandoned Dwarven Mine, which is now overrun with orcs, troglodytes, evil Drow Dwarves, dwarvish and orcish undead, animated armor and other strange Dwarven craftwork, and other assorted nasties. The module has a great pacing to it as each level flows into the next and the level of danger and isolation increase. Also, Michelle got all her cousins new dice for Christmas, themed to their characters, and I bought a pack for myself, all sparkly and cool colors.

This week they reached the very bottom of the dungeon, where a young Black Dragon dwells in an cave with a subterranean lake. It was one of the best combats ever. It began with the dragon killing half the party in the first six seconds, first with a bite attack (natural 20!) on Phil’s character Philbert, a Druid doing advanced scouting underwater with a Cloak of the Manta Ray, and then a breath attack on everyone else. Michelle plays the Cleric Thea and luckily was able to heal everyone. A few rounds went by where the dragon swooped in close to bite and claw, and everyone unleashed everything they had for spells and weapons attack. Lou, playing the Dwarven fighter Luca, jumped onto the dragon, hacked it with his great axe, fell into the lake, swam to shore, scaled a cliff wall and jumped onto it again. He delivered the killing blow just as the dragon used its breath weapon a second time, killing everyone in the line of fire (actually acid). The dead dragon crashed into a cliff wall just past the party’s position, causing further mayhem. The only other surviving member was Phil, who was still in the water. He was able to climb up the bank and heal Thea, who then cast Mass Cure Wounds to restore the party. Epic fun! Next week they’ll try and get out the hoard of treasure out in the middle of the lake. Who knows what nasties they’ll encounter when they get there…

In addition to D&D, other gaming, watching LotR appendices and now football on TV, Michelle has been really getting into baking. She got a cookbook of deserts for Christmas and has been making coffee cake, pumpkin break, cookies and other yummies. Much as this interferes with my new year’s resolution to diet and lose some weight, I find it hard to object.

And finally, I started a new job a couple weeks ago. Suddenly I’m busy all the time and have to plan ahead to get around to minor random tasks. So far it seems good and the people seem pretty cool and and decent. It’s a small company, only six or so engineers and half of them are doing stuff like hardware and industrial design, which is fascinating and a whole ‘nuther area of expertise.

The company makes electronic musical instruments and they hired me to create a media hub which can connect to all the devices and their companion apps and people can share musical content. Right in my wheelhouse. Also the first time I’ve started a fully green-field, all new technology stack with completely free reign in many years. So right now it’s basic requirements gathering and system design.

They do seem to really like meetings, including agile and all the overhead that goes with it: daily progress reports, sprint planning, backlog grooming and all that. It occurs to me that I’ve gone fifteen months of working without having to go to a single meeting that wastes my time, as I don’t use agile in my other projects. I’m wondering if I can help them get better at this, to be lighter and not conflate the map with the territory so much. Of course projects need to be managed one way or another, and alot of it is good, helping me get to know the people and the situation faster than I would otherwise. This week I plan to spin up a web server and start prototyping.

Long December

Well 2021 is here, and there’s reason to believe maybe this year will be better than the last. Our holidays were pretty laid back, but we made the most of things. Michelle and Jeannie were both off the week of Christmas and were working/schooling from home the week before that. We went up to Buffalo to visit my parents. We went up a few days earlier than usual, because we’d been isolating, and spent Xmas day there. Lizzy came and joined us, and we all came back downstate together. I must say it’s great to still be able to visit my parents after all these years, and fantastic that they’re doing well. My Mum cooked up an amazing feast and my Dad was out shoveling a good foot of show two days in a row.

On the downside we didn’t get to see alot of people we usually see over the holidays, including Martin, Denis, Larry, Nick and their families. And we didn’t really go out or go anywhere. We did manage to have Mary and her Family, along with Jeannie’s parents, come up for an afternoon last week when it was reasonably warm. We hung out in the backyard and built a fire in our firepit.

That night we watched the Bills game. The Bills are pretty hot this year and Lizzy is a huge fan. For me their Super Bowl run from 30 years ago is etched upon my mind, so it’s nice to daydream of victory. We’ve also been playing alot of board games. Ticket to Ride has become a family favorite, and both Jeannie and Michelle have been playing against the computer to improve their strategy. We also got a new game Azul for Xmas.

Now we’re all back at work and school. I’m finishing off some last loose ends for the Jukebox in preparation for a push to live. It’s down to syncing the song metadata and doing a round of QA. We’ll see how things shape up for the new year.

My project to build a scheduling tool for Origami USA has been coming along. I’m pretty close to having a working prototype, or minimum viable product. I’ve been working closely with Robert Lang, who built and the web site, and (not to surprisingly I guess) is an expert software engineer in addition to being a world class origami artist. I’ve been pulled into the committees for the OUSA web site and convention planning. Mostly it’s a fun hang. There’s a good number of people who’ve been there a while and know how to run things, and a few newbies like myself. All pretty friendly but with enough different opinions to keep things lively. Robert is like Mycroft Holmes, running everything on the tech side behind the scenes and handling a million details.

I’ve also started a consulting gig for a company that makes fun (but but very sophisticated) electronic musical instruments, which they want to to connect up into a social media platform. So far they seem like really great people. This could really be alot of fun, right in my wheelhouse. More info as the situation unfolds.

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…