New Song – A Plague of Frogs

The concept for my new song is a battle on the planet Mars between the humans and an alien invader from another solar system.  It’s sort of a mash up of By Tor and the Snow Dog by Rush and I.G.Y. by Donald Fagen.

I’ve been working on this one a while.  In fact I started it during the sessions for Elixr, two albums ago.  And the intro riff has its origins in a piece I did called Futbol Anthem, way back when I worked for an ad agency in the ’90s.

It’s very much an in-the-studio creation, and it takes advantage of ProTools’s ability to make arrangements you’d probably never do with a live group, with shifting meters, stacked synth and drum layers, etc.  Still, the goal is to make a song that’s enjoyable to listen to for the whole nine-plus minutes, an entertaining ride, sorta like a movie for the ears. 

My friend Dazza agreed to do the guitar solo.  In solo section in the middle, the sax represents the humans and the earth, while the guitar represents the aliens on Mars.  They battle it out, trading riffs and building intensity, something like a boss fight in a video game.  Then on to a big unison riff section.

But we’re still recording all that, so for now here are the lyrics.  Enjoy!

…

A Plague of Frogs (International Space Year)

Peace on Earth – war on Mars!
Epic conflict among the stars
Space invaders from afar
Challenge the humans to keep the red planet ours

Cosmic war – a plague of frogs!
Now descend the Tobes of Zog
Encroaching frozen dessert canyons
Entrenched so they evade our scanners
Vile scourge of the solar system
Even our best star lasers missed ’em
Space ranger battle scarred
Earth needs a new hero to win back dusty crimson Mars

(solo – sax vs. moog)

Peace on Mars – and love on Venus
Humanity at last victorious
Vanquished foes warp back to their home world
The frogs of Zog retreat with their tails curled
Our spaceships free for more peaceful uses
Our scientists can again court their muses
Peace on Earth and victory
But victory is temporary

Humanity in victory
But victory is temporary
Yeah victory is temporary
Oh victory is temporary yeah

– jfs

Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em

New York in June continues.  The weather remains amazing for the most part, as if California has come to us.  In fact, last week we experienced the effects of forest fires hundreds of miles away in Canada, as the wind blew the smoke high into the atmosphere above us.  The sky turned overcast and brownish and hazy, and the next day it got more intense, and everything had an orange tint and smelled like a campfire.  Luckily the day after that the wind changed and it blew away, and we were back to blue skies for the weekend.

The Origami USA convention is coming up in just a couple weeks.  It was my job to put together the class schedule.  We had almost 150 classes that had to be fit into three days, with many constraints on time, availability, class size, use of document cameras and projectors, etc.  So that kept me busy Monday night and Tuesday.  It went smoother than last year.  I’m using scheduling software that I’d purpose-built in the OUSA web site, and like so much one-off business software, is more clunky than one would hope.  However this year we’re starting to grasp the essence of the problem, and we’re refining it to make the workflows smoother and faster.  So the schedule got approved and published on time.  On to the next thing.

The Global Jukebox is submitting a grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities for part 2 of a multi-year project to create an interactive experience within the jukebox on The Roots of American Music.  In addition to new content and visualizations, it includes a brand-new mobile experience built on our existing web application framework.  So I was busy helping Kiki get some materials together for the grant application.

Meanwhile at the CR Innovation Lab, we’re getting to planning for an upcoming product launch, setting up a program for deploy pipelines, unit testing, e2e and integration testing, QA, and infrastructure availability and scaling.  We also have a bunch of new team members, so everything is a bit hectic these days.  I went into the city for a set of onsite meetings, however some of them got cancelled to due people calling in remotely because of the smoke condition.  Unfortunately, the conference room chairs there are singularly awful and triggered some fairly severe pain in my back and leg.  Ah well, I was back to normal after a couple days.

Friday night Jeannie and I went to see Kurt Elling at the Village Vanguard.  Before the show we went out a fantastic dinner at a Persian restaurant, with shish kabobs and fancy rice.  We walked around the city from midtown to Greenwich Village.  Great night for people watching and taking in the city.

Kurt Elling is one of my favorite jazz singers around today.  He has a great voice and sense of phrasing and style, and always picks really interesting material and treats it in a fresh and fascinating way.  The Village Vanguard is of course one of the classic jazz clubs in New York City.  What I didn’t know is the Vanguard has an in-house big band that was started back in the 1960’s by Mel Lewis and Thad Jones, and plays every Monday night.  So the show was Kurt backed by the Village Vanguard Orchestra, doing big band arrangements of his songs.  Wow, totally amazing.  (The Vanguard is a very small club, so the fact that the band fit on the stage was pretty amazing before they even played note one.)  

One thing Kurt likes to do is add lyrics over rarely covered jazz songs.  He did this for several tunes, including Continuum by Jaco Pastorius, and the second movement of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.  They’re great lyrics that add new depth to song, clever, thoughtful, playful and even profound, but because they’re so unexpected it can take you a minute to figure out what songs he’s doing.  Another highlight of the show was the sax solo during the Coltrane number.  The tenor play at the end of the sax section was a really old guy who looked like Mark Twain.  Half the set he was slumped in his chair and looked like he might fall asleep at a moment’s notice.  But when he stood up, he roared to life and delivered a high-intensity solo worthy of a Trane number.

Saturday morning I listened to two Joco albums: the first one that begins with Donna Lee, and The Birthday Concert which featured the Word of Mouth Big Band including Michael Brecker.  Great stuff.

Saturday afternoon we went out to a barbecue at Cousin Mary’s.  My two nieces Katie and Valerie both graduated from college.  On the car ride down, we listened to Kurt Elling’s latest album Super Blue, which is sorta jazz-adjacent soul funk fusion.  Totally blew me away.  Some of the songs sound like they could be Steely Dan.  And the album before that has the studio cut of Continuum, among others.

Sunday we went for another bike ride.  Jeannie got a new bike, a Trek mountain bike, very nice.  And she passed her old bike on to Michelle, so now everyone has a bike that fits them comfortably and they like to ride.  We went back to the Empire State Trail, this time starting in Elmsford and going up to Thornwood.  They both did ten miles, and I did fifteen, and new personal best for the season for everyone.  I was thinking of getting a new bike too, but my 26-year-old Trek 850 is still going strong.  It was a pretty high-end bike at the time, very light, with an aluminum frame, handlebars and rims, and 21 gears.  (I bought it from Palo Alto bicycles, because at the time Jeannie and I were sharing a car, and she had a longer commute than I did.  Above the bike shop was a small startup called Google, but that’s a story for another time…)

I finally completed the spring yardwork cycle but trimming the branches from the neighbor’s willow tree that hangs down into our yard.  Hopefully a week or two off from that, then the it starts over with weeding and edging.

As mentioned previously, the Origami USA convention is less than two weeks away, and doing origami has finally risen to the top of my todo list.  In fact, now is the time of year when I tend to stay up late folding like a madman.  In fact, I just destroyed a super complex model I’ve been working on since Bogota by trying to wetfold it!  Ah well, at least I have the pattern worked out now.

Yet the universe won’t leave me alone, and in addition to the predictable demands of work and all that, random tasks pop up at inconvenient times.  Jeannie borrowed my car the other day, and came home with a flat tire, so I had to get that fixed.  Then it was supposed to rain and cool off, but the weathermen lied!  So around five o’clock I put in the air conditioner.  It’s a new AC that’s supposed to be much quieter and more powerful than the old one, but it was a major pain to install.  Ah well, now it’s in and I’m enjoying the cool zone.

Junetastic

Moving into summer.  I can’t remember a more pleasant May for fine weather.  June brought the hot weather, up into the 90’s.  We thought of putting in the AC, but it only lasted two days.  Now we’re back to another long run of perfectly pleasant days in the mid-seventies.

Been busy doing our best version of living the suburban legend.  Last weekend was the Memorial Day holiday and a three-day weekend.  Saturday we went for a hike up Mt. Hook. Sunday I went for a bike ride thru Nature Study Woods, then we went to a barbecue on Long Island hosted by Nick and Lisa.

This weekend Jeannie and Michelle and I did another rail trail ride, this time 13 miles for me and 9 for them.  I got an app for my phone that tracks me distance, time and elevation change when I go for a ride, and shows it on a map.

I’ve been giving my old mustang some TLC.  Over the last few weekends I washed, waxed, and buffed the whole thing, something I hadn’t done since before the pandemic.  Then the weekend I cleaned the glass and interior, and polished everything up.  Now it just gleams!

Summer is the season for endless yard work.  Over the past couple weekends I trimmed our big hedge row, then the two giant forsythia shrubs and some of our evergreens.  Next weekend is trimming back the willow boughs hanging into our yard from our neighbor’s tree.  Then maybe we’ll have a break and can do just mowing and watering.  Or maybe something else will have grown in by then.

I bought a new oven in the springtime at an auction at my job.  It’s been sitting in my garage, but this weekend finally schlepped it up the stairs, hooked up the gas supply and hauled out the old one.  Glad that job is done with.  Michelle has already baked a batch of cookies and declared the new oven to be much more accurate and superior in every way.  Only problem is it doesn’t quite back up all the way to the wall because they’ve changed oven design over the years, and there’s no empty space in the back of the oven to accommodate the spot where the gas pipe comes up out of the floor.  So now we have to call a contractor to see if wee can get that taken care of. 

A bunch of things still in-progress.  I’ve been working on a summer playlist of 90’s songs.  Continuing in my home studio with my song A Plague of Frogs.  And, increasing in importance daily, the annual Origami USA convention is coming up at the end of June, so I’ve been folding new stuff, planning my exhibit, signing up to teach classes, and helping the convention committee with the class schedule.  More on all this as it unfolds.

Rack On

Our run of luck with the nice weather continues, interrupted only last Saturday when it rained all day.  I spent a good chunk of the day doing origami.  I completed the first successful single-sheet stellated icosahedron earlier in the week.  I made out of a 19″ sheet of elephant hide.  I unfolded and refolded the bottom and the lock several times, experimenting until I found an arrangement of the paper that worked best.  The finished model is a bit squished, so Saturday I spend a bunch of time folding a new one now that I know how it goes at the finish.  This one is out of 15″ mohawk skytone paper, given to me by my friend Madonna.  It’s a very nice paper, a bit thinner than elephant hide, but just as strong and crisp, and in a variety of nice soft colors.  This one is almost finished, just the final collapse to go.  With luck it will be an exhibit quality model, just in time for this year’s OUSA convention.

Michelle came home from college Saturday.  we immediately rebooted family game night.  We also finally also finished Muppets Mayhem.  Now Michelle is baking a cake.  Nice ot have her home.

I got three bike rides in last week during the week.  Then went for another bike ride with Jeannie Sunday morning, on the same pathway but this time starting in Yonkers.   This time Michelle came with us.  Jeannie thought her bike was too tall for her, so she tried riding Michelle’s.  She thought that was too small, although Michelle likes Jeannie’s bike. (Michelle is about six inches taller than Jeannie, although they were around the same height when I bought Michelle her bike.)  Anyway, Jeannie is now shopping for a new bike.

I went 12 miles although Jeannie and Michelle both turned around earlier.  Afterward I came home and did a bunch of yardwork, including washing the Mustang and putting armorall on the new tires.  Ah how it all gleamed, for one brief shining moment.  I left it out in the driveway for a few hours and by time it was already dusted in tree pollen.  Ah well.  I also trimmed my hedges, which involved going up and down a ladder and swinging around a trimmer over my head for a few hours.  By the end I was pretty tired.

In jazz land, Steve, the old drummer for my group Spacecats had to leave for health reasons. This was unfortunate because he was an excellent drummer, a great guy and a good friend.  Luckily, we got a new drummer a couple months ago, and he’s been working out well.  His name is Rick, and he’s a friend of our bassist Ken. He’s an excellent player, great chops, great groove, very responsive and energetic.  He also writes, and is into alot of the same kind of stuff we are, not just jazz but fusion, rock, prog, and jazz-adjacent funky jam bands, and likes experimenting with bringing those sounds into the group.  Last week our piano player Josh couldn’t make rehearsal, so we got together as a trio, sax bass and drums.   It was super fun exploring different sounds and ideas.  We did tune by Stone Alliance called Sweetie Pie for just such a set of instrumentation.  Also ran Some Skunk Funk a few times, getting it fast and tight.  I think it’s time to start looking for gigs.

Rack ‘n’ Roll

Beautiful spring weather continues, and we’ve been trying to spend time outside to take advantage.  I’ve been getting on my bike more.  I did four bike rides last week, the longest of which was about ten miles, partly along the Bronx River Pathway, which was very nice, and the rest getting there and back from my house, which involved some major hills.

I finished putting down the red mulch under the hedges and in the flowerbeds.  The only remaining task in the spring cycle is the trimming.  I also got the mustang into the shop for an oil change and inspection, and a new set of tires.  All that remains with that is to wash and wax it.  

On Friday night we discovered there’s a new show about the muppets called Mayhem, about the adventures of the Electric Mayhem Orchestra, still together and touring after all these years, as discover they owe their old record company an album.  Great fun.

Saturday we went upstate to visit Martin and his family.  Always a very good time but a long drive.  They’re all doing well.  Charlie is getting tall.  Went out to eat at a local restaurant that’s also a farmer’s market sometimes.  Good food, craft beer and cider.   Came back to Martins house and played Carcassonne with the boys.  Jeannie won with a risky but aggressive farming strategy.

About a month ago I bought a bike rack for my car, and Sunday Jeannie and I put it together and hooked it up for the first time, and took our bikes out the the New York State rail trail, and rode the segment from Elmsford up to Hawthorne or so, about a twelve mile round trip.  Jeannie doesn’t like to bike on the streets around here, and I can see her point.  The trail is so much nicer, smooth and relatively flat, and no cars or traffic, thru the woods, so much nicer.  So the bike rack is a big hit.  Now that it’s put together it only takes a minute to attach it to the car and load up the bikes.  We can go to all different trails around here and ride together.  Hope to get into the habit of doing it most every week until the weather gets too cold.

Sundown

After a pretty solid two weeks of rain, including heavy rains the whole weekend before, the weather finally turned nice this weekend.  That basically meant spending the whole weekend doing yardwork.  Friday I mowed the lawn for first time.  Unusually late and the grass had gotten quite tall.  Saturday it was weeding the edges of the driveway and putting vinegar on the cracks of the patio to kill the weeds.  Sunday it was weeding under the hedges and in the flowerbeds.  Meanwhile Jeannie wanted to start barbecue season, but or old grill was rusted, so we had to buy a new one.  She spent the better part of Sunday putting it together.

Our Nordic Track exercise machine broke one day last week, and it turns out they don’t make them anymore, but you can get replacement parts on the internet.  Meanwhile I relying on biking as my main form of cardio exercise, so it’s good that we have a spell of nice weather ahead this week.  I wanted to take a ride Sunday morning and test out our new bike rack, but Jeannie wimped out at the last minute.  I thought then I’d go for a ride on my own later in the day, but by the time I was done with the weeding I was pretty tired and my legs hurt, so it was just as well.  I did go for a ride today, and it was quite nice.  Hope to get a ride in every day this week.

Friday night often tends to be movie or TV night at our house, as we have time to relax but are often tired at the end of the work week and don’t always feel like going out, or maybe just go out to dinner then come home.  However, despite the plethora of streaming options there’s actually a dearth of good shows to watch.  The last few weeks I’ve been getting into Nova, the classic PBS show.  Lots of cool stuff about the James Web Space Telescope, saving Venice for sinking into the sea, renovating Notre Dame cathedral, and lots about fossils, ice age megafauna and dinosaurs, and how they can reconstruct stories of long-extinct creatures from bones in the dirt.  One in particular suggested they may have found a site where the fossilized creatures were killed the day the meteor hit the earth to end the Cretaceous, caught in a flood caused by the shockwave thousands of miles away.  They have episodes from past seasons, and I remember as a kid seeing the episode where the theory that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor impact was first advance.  I wonder if I can work my way back far enough to find it. 

But last Friday I decided to watch a documentary about recently pass folk singer Gordon Lightfoot, who to me is one of my all time despite not being the any of the genres I listen deeply to nowadays.  He seemed to be on the radio when I was a kid, and they played alot of his songs at the ice rink at hockey practice.  Somehow his songs had a big impact on me.  This led me to a bunch of other music documentaries including one about guitar shredder Randy Rhoads and another about the great vocalist Ronnie James Dio, another one of musical heroes.  So now I have this mashup of 70’s folk ballads and 80’s post Black Sabbath heavy metal stuck in my head.  Strangely, it’s not a bad combination.

New Song – All of the Above

I started this song a while back, when I was in a phase of writing singer-songwriter style things on guitar.  The original idea of this one was an uptempo boogie shuffle number in the mold of Can’t Get Enough by Bad Company.  As I developed it, it became slower and bluesier and a bit less glib, since I’m not so young anymore and my relationship goals aren’t that same as a teenager’s.  So it’s a bit more retrospective, looking back on young love from a distance.

Musically, it’s alot more pop than my last song, but still with some interesting twists.  The meter shifts from 4/4 to 6/4 throughout, but is more easily expressed as 2/4.  I had the basic arrangement of guitar, piano, bass and drums, with the bass kinda channeling Geddy Lee in the verse.  But I felt it needed something more.  To finish it off I added a horn section of tenor and bari sax, and an ’80’s style lead synthesizer.  It took a little while to get the tone and dynamics right on the synth.  Lastly I added some real cymbals, played with mallets, to the intro and outro to support the guitar and bring some warmth into supplement the midi sample drum kit.

I now have six complete songs for my new album, whose working title is Plutonium Dirigible. That’s about twenty-eight minutes of music.  I have another close-to-ten-minute epic about halfway tracked, and one more song to record after that.  Hope to have the record out by the end of year.

Here it is, enjoy!

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/bzvr/AllOfTheAbove33.mp3

…

All of the Above

I wasn’t lookin’ for a true love
I was just lookin’ for a new love
I wan’t lookin’ for a long love, strong love
Yeah yeah yeah no, none of the above

I seen you out dancing last Saturday
Monday you’re in my class in chemistry
Now I’m thinking ’bout you and me
Let’s get together for some history

If I invite you backstage tonight all right
We just might dance and party all night
Okay day by day into brave and new love

Now I ain’t waitin’ on no old love
An’ I ain’t wastin’ time on slow love
Tonight I’m wakin’ to some fresh love new love
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, all of the above

And maybe if the love grows who knows how it goes?
A few more shows electric glide power slide
Side by side into a tried and true love

So now I’m sowing seeds of strong love
Maybe grows into long love
It all started with a fast love new love
Yeah yeah yeah, all of the above

So tonight it’s fast love new love long love true love
Yeah yeah yeah yeah all of the above
Oh fast love new love long love true love
Yeah yeah yeah yeah all of the above
Hey fast love new love long love true love
Yeah yeah yeah yeah all of the above

– JFS 7/19

The Rain Rain Rain Came Down Down Down

First of all, it’s been incredibly rainy the last week.  It rained the entire weekend starting Friday afternoon thru Sunday night, alot of the time sustained heavy downpour.  The pond in the neighbor’s yard is in effect, and there’s still puddles everywhere.  I left a wheelbarrow outside over the weekend, and now it’s full of a good six inches of water.  Needless to say I didn’t get any yardwork done, and the lawn is getting desperate for it’s first mowing.

We went to a party on Long Island on Saturday; Jeannie’s cousin’s daughter’s first communion. It was great to see everyone on that side of the family, especially since we missed the family Christmas party this year due to having covid.  A bunch of us ended up hanging out in the party tent in the backyard long after things had begun winding down.  It took over an hour to say goodbye to everybody.

I’ve been reading alot lately.  First was a book on the Italian Renaissance, focusing on sculpture, architecture and painting, the whole historic and cultural context, and the threads of development among the various famous masters.  

Next was a book called The World in Six Songs by Dan Levitin, a famous music brain science writer.  I used to work with Dan back in the ’90’s at Interval Research, and has a story in his book about the psychic research going on there to make a point about how hard it can be to design as study to produce verifiable claims in the social sciences.  That was fun, I’d forgotten all about the psychics there, and it inspired my to dig out an old song I wrote from those days call Paul Allen’s Limo Driver.  Anyway the book was really interesting, all about the purpose of music in terms of its origins in human evolution, and the different roles it plays for individual people and human society.

Then it was a book about the famous John Coltrane album A Love Supreme.  Everything you could want to know about the record, its writing, recording, and various reissues.  Of course it had alot on John Coltrane himself and his various phases of musical exploration and development, his relationships with Miles and Monk, and the coming together of the classic quartet that was the group for the record.  This led me into a deep dive into listening to Coltrane, which is something I hadn’t done in a while.  After all this time, it’s still a challenge to grok his later stuff.  In addition to A Love Supreme, I listened to Crescent, Ascension, and Live at the Village Vanguard, and with one of my favorites The Gentle Side Of.  For all his high energy playing in all keys at once, he sure could shift gears and deliver a killer ballad.

There’s U.F.O.’s over New York

Springtime in New York deepens.  I participated in another origami event this weekend.  It was FoldFest, a 24-hour marathon online mini-convention, with folders and attendees from around the world.  I led a two-hour session of Saturday evening and taught my Astronaut followed by my Flying Saucer, both from my book Air and Space Origami.  These are good intermediate level models, and the class went quite well.  As always, good to connect with my origami friends.  Next big origami event is the OUSA convention in June.   Gotta bunch of new stuff to finish!

Also over the weekend I finished project dirt, 2023 edition.  You’ll recall the over the last couple I filled in alot of low spots in my yard with dirt my neighbor had excavated to create a swimming pool. It did an admirable job of filling in, but was rather clay-ish and stony, and not the best for growing grass.  It started off promising last spring, but when it got really hot in July and August the crabgrass kinda took over on these spots.  So this year I found a local nursery who delivered a cubic yard of organic topsoil and I did a thinner version of filling in, and topped it off with new grass seed.  The timing was perfect cuz we had a heavy rain Saturday night and everything is well soaked.  This was the major project this spring; all that remains is to put mulch under the hedges, and start mowing and trimming when the time is right.  Oh and I guess some weeding too, and Jeannie wants to plant some things in the garden.  Anyway, probably start mowing this coming weekend.  After that it’s get the mustang into the shop for some service, and we’re ready for summer.  Hope to get back to more biking and traveling.

The Return of Special Sessions

This weekend I participated in a favorite origami event, a Special Folding Session at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.  These used to happen on Sundays a few times a year, and it’s a good opportunity to learn some new folds and hang out with origami people, as well as see the museum.  But there hasn’t been one since before the pandemic, so it’s good that they brought it back.

I taught my Halloween Spider, which I invented and developed last fall at the CoCon and OrgamiMIT conventions, and contributed one of ’em to the Origami Holiday Tree at the museum this year as well.  The students in my class turned out to be middle-school-age kids, but already advanced folders.  Meanwhile the adults there all took simpler classes.

This was first time I taught it so I was eager to see how it came across.  When I designed it, my hope was to have an intermediate level model, but it turns out it’s pretty complex and technically demanding.  In particular, there’s the sink of doom, probably around step 30 if I diagrammed the model.  It’s the kind of fold where you just let the paper do it’s thing, and it usually just works out, but if you don’t see it in your mind it can be hard to understand.  The students all got thru it, and did a pretty nice job, but not to the point where they could do the final sculpting to make the model look the model look truly great, spooky and terrifying.  

I fell like if I spent some time unfolding the model and tweaking the proportions, and maybe adding a prefold or two, I could make the sink of doom much more intuitive and easier to execute.  I’ll try and work on that before the next time I teach it.

After my class was over Jeannie and did a tour of the museum.  I haven’t been to the AMNH in at least five years, so it was nice to be back.  In some sense it feels like my “home” museum, since OUSA is headquartered there and I’ve been to visit so many times over the years.  Alot of things haven’t changed.  The dinosaur and megafauna fossil collection remains world-class, and the halls of African Animals, North American Mammals, and Marine Life, with their evocative dioramas, remain must-see classics.  Even the overall Teddy-Roosevelt-era vibe and architecture feel warm and welcoming.

We saw a few new things.  One was the revamped and newly re-opened hall of rocks, minerals and gems, which was quite impressive.  Another was a show at the planetarium about the planets of the solar system.  This was preceded by a short film in the waiting area about the history of the planetarium itself.  The was also an excellent Imax film about the Serengeti in Africa, very informative and with great photography, but kid-friendly in that they didn’t actually show and zebras or wildebeests being slain and devoured by lions or crocodiles.