Tag: Spacecats

Spacecats at the Green Growler

Here’s announcing the next upcoming show for my jazz group Spacecats, a triumphant three-peat return engagement to the Green Growler in Croton, NY, on Friday, May 30 at 7pm. The Growler is one of our favorite places to play, with a relaxed and comfortable vibe, and always a good crowd.  The group features John Szinger on saxophone, Josh Deutchman on piano and synthesizer, Ken Matthews on bass and Rick Arecco on drums. We play a blend jazz and funk, originals, standards, and pop songs with our own unique twist.  We’ve been jamming some fun stuff lately and will probable debut two or three new originals, as well as changing up the mix of standards and covers.  Should be a great time, so come on down!

Spacecats – Jazz and Funk
Friday, May 30, 7 to 10 pm
at
The Green Growler
Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520

Freewheelin’

April’s almost at an end.  It’s been nice weather the last few weeks.  All the trees and plants are flowering and filling in with leaves.  Such a dramatic difference.  Lovely to be outside, and a great boost of energy.

Easter was about as late as it could be this year.  We had Mary and the family over, and Jeannie made a rib roast.  It was a nice time.

I’ve been doing plenty of biking, getting to know my new bike.  We’ve been out on the Empire State Trailway twice now, the second time with my new bike.  Both times I did sixteen miles, which has become my basic trip.  I’m trying to get my time down to 64 minutes, which is fifteen miles an hour, or four minutes a mile.  So far my best time is more like four minutes and five seconds a mile on average.  This last trip, I made it to the end where I turn around in thirty-one minutes!  But I got tired on the return trip, and in the end didn’t go much faster than my first time this season.

I’ve also taken my bike into the Nature Study Woods a few times now.  It’s a woodsy place near my house with trails that are mostly pretty flat, but hilly and rocky in a few sections.  I can pull up all the hills pretty handily on my new bike, which is good cuz I wasn’t able to test it out on that kind of terrain before I bought it.  I’m exploring different, longer rides in my neighborhood.  Last time I went all the way thru NSW up to Mill Road, then zigzagged my way back home thru New Rochelle, for a total of 10 miles, and about 500 foot elevation gain.

Jeannie’s bike is in the shop right now, so this weekend we did some hiking instead.  Went up the Timp in Harriman State Park.  Four and half miles, 1000 feet vertical.

I watched the new Bob Dylan movie a couple weeks ago.  It was lots of fun, especially cuz my patron Alan Lomax, the visionary behind The Global Jukebox, was a character in it.  One thing about it found funny was that I used to live in Greenwich Village, so to see it reconstructed thru combination of hHollywood backlot and AI-generated CG took a few minutes to get used to.  It also made me miss smoking.  Perhaps predictably, the story ended just after Dylan turned electric in 1965.

I also watched the new Led Zeppelin documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin.  It was done by the guy who did American Epic, and in cooperation with the surviving members of the band.  It features lots of interviews with Page, Plant and Jones, and archival interviews with John Bonham.  It mostly focuses on how Jimmy Page put the group together out of the collapse of the Yardbirds, in the midst of British psychedelic heavy blues scene of the 60’s.  Also a deep dive into Jimmy and Jonsey’s work as session players and that scene at the time.  Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger was shown an example.  There’s concert footage from early TV and concert appearances as The New Yardbirds, the as Led Zeppelin in America in 1969, culminating in the band’s triumphant return to England shortly after the release of their second album to play their first major shows on their home turf as Led Zeppelin. In a surprising twist, the story ends just before they turn acoustic in 1970. 

The next night I had to watch Celebration Day, the Zeppelin reunion concert from 2007.  It still holds up, great song selection and great performances.  Musically and sonically is actually better than most of their concert footage from when they work together as a band.  It makes me wonder how much they fixed up in the studio in postproduction.

Speaking of the studio, my recording project Spellbound is coming along.  I’m up to tracking vocals on the first batch of four songs.  One is really low in my range, one is really high, one is right in the middle and the last one’s an instrumental.  The low and middle ones went down pretty easily, and now I’m tracking the high one, which is well within my range if I’m warmed up.  It’s kind of a belter, a power ballad sort of thing. I’ve done a few takes and am getting comfortable and focusing on the phrasing, which is a good place to be.

I’m also continuing to cleanup and reorganize my studio.  In the last couple weeks I got rid of a whole bunch of old computer and electronic equipment.  The last thing is go thru boxes and boxes of origami models and cabinets of paper and consolidate all that.  I hope to be finished will all this before Michelle moves home in a few weeks.  Meanwhile I’ve also set up the mic stands and microphones around my drum kit.  The final step is to plug everything in and start recording.  BTW, I’ve decided to learn how to play The Crunge on drums.

One more thing, my jazz and funk group Spacecats has another gig coming up on Friday May 30th at the Green Growler in Croton, which is fast becoming one of our favorite places to play.  The band is in a fun place now, playing at a very high level.  I’ve been slowly making charts in software of my backlog of songs, and bringing them in to the group, so we have some new originals each gig. 

The most recent of these is Mo’bilty, which I originally wrote for my pre-pandemic band with Gary and Jay and Rich, and subsequently recorded on my record Bluezebub.  The recorded version was a sort of cartoon-jazz vibe in 7/4 meter.  The band took to the odd time signature but came up with a pretty different feel, but also very hip and much more modern sounding.  Should be fun to see how this one develops.

Meanwhile, watch this space for updates on the gig as the time draws closer.

Here be Dragons

It’s been another busy couple of weeks.  When we last left our intrepid hero protagonist, he was on the eve of a jazz gig at a club in Mt. Kisco.  Here’s how that went.

I hadn’t been to Mt. Kisco in a while, and it was a bit further than I remembered, out past Bedford almost to Katonah.  The club itself was in this funny little pedestrian mall.  Inside the place was nice, with a bar, a dozen or so tables, and a stage with a grand piano and drum kit, and a PA and mixing provided.  The club owner was the bartender, sound engineer and host for the diners.  He was a bit fussy about the setup, and insisted the bass go direct and not use his amp or effects.  I guess he was afraid of the bass being too loud.  However, we had trouble hearing the bass thru the monitors, which affected our performance. 

Still overall it went well.  The energy and playing were good.  We had a decent crowd and they seemed to really dig us.  Robyn sat in with the group, singing a bunch of standards.  We had more of a chance to rehearse the arrangements since her last gig with us, and it felt more together.  The show was a single long set, so we did about half songs with Robyn, and half our originals, and one or two standards.  The food there was pretty good too, and the cocktails too.

That was Wednesday night.  That Friday evening Jeannie and I drove up to Buffalo for a visit, leaving home right after work and arriving after midnight.  The motivating event behind this trip is was wanted to have Charlie go on a tour of UB, his first college visit.  We figured it’d be good to do while Michelle is still a student there.  Saturday was rain out, and was a chill day without any plans, the first in a long time.  I’d been thinking of buying a new bicycle, so we went to Burt’s Bikes, a big bike store up there.  Our local bike store is small, and I need an extra tall sized frame and would rather test ride a bike than order one unseen.  I looked a few bikes, but due to the rain wasn’t able to ride them outside.  So they said come back the next day if the weather is better.

We also went to the Walden Galleria mall.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been to any mall, and the last few trip the mall was always pathetic and mostly empty and on the verge of closing down.  But this mall was really hopping, full of people and stores.  There was a gaming store where I looked for a new D&D module and Jeannie bought some dice.  There was an anime store, a Lego store, and Apple store, and even a Spencer’s.  Wow, throwback to another era.  That evening we took Lizzy and Josh and Michelle out to dinner at a nice place in Allentown.  Before and after we hung out at Lizzy’s apartment.  They have alot of legos in their place.  Everyone is happy and doing well. Lizzy and Josh just got back from a min-vacation to Washington D.C. Michelle and Josh are both graduating in May.

Sunday morning I went back to bike shop and auditioned several bikes.  In the end I bought a Trek Dual Sport, which is a hybrid trail and road bike.  It has an aluminum frame and carbon fiber front fork, and disc brakes and a single ten-speed derailleur, as is the modern way.  It also has more comfortable handlebars than my current bike, is more curvy looking and is a nice shade of blue.  When I got it home I saw that the proportions and dimensions are almost identical to my old bike, a Mt Trek 850  I bought in the 1990’s when Google was just a small startup with their office above Palo Alto Bicycles and a handcrafted neon sign on the door.  (I talked Jeannie out of applying for a job there, but that’s a whole ‘nuther story.)  Sunday afternoon Kathleen and kids showed up.  I took them for a walk out to the local playground.  In the evening we played D&D.

The D&D campaign had reached the big climax of the adventure.  By now all the characters are third level and are gaining some good fighting and spellcasting abilities, and the players are learning how to use their characters well.  And the monsters and bad guys are getting tougher and more fun to run.  The module we’re doing is called The Sunless Citadel, and the big boss is an evil druid doing unnatural experiments with growing plants underground without sunlight, aided by evil animated plants and a plant-zombiefied Paladin and his Cleric sister.  In the middle of the cave is the tree of evil, so Charlie (playing Luna, and Elfin Ranger) decides to climb it to try and pick the white apple of pure evil, and finds a host of monsters up in its branches.  At some point the rest of the party realize that if they destroy the tree it may break the spell of the zombified NPCs, so thay start hacking at it with their weapons.  Charlie’s cousin Rylee (playing Nyx, and Elvish Fighter, rolls a natural 20, so I have Charlie roll a dexterity check to see if he falls out of the tree.  He failed his save and so fell and took enough damage to reduce him to 0hp. 

Charlie was revived, but was really upset and decided to attack Nxy with an unarmed strike for revenge.  (All of these characters are neutral to chaotic, but I figured it would have been Matthew and Abbie to come to blows first.)  I guess to his credit he used is second attack for this.  Rylee retaliated by swing her sword at him, and Charlie was reduced to 0hp again! 

All that was the week before.  This last week they spent mopping up and making their way back out of the dungeon.  I give them some magic beans of levitation, but they never figured out what they were and spent a good deal of time climbing up a shaftway and falling repeatedly.  At last they made it out, only to be ambushed by a White Dragon Wyrmling they encountered earlier.  It had escaped when Abbie tried to charm and befriend it while Matthew tried to kill it, and an altercation erupted between the two of them.  This time the dragon incapacitated most of the party instantly, and soon the only ones left standing were Nyx and Luna.  Nyx had climbed a cliff wall and jumped on the dragon’s back, and was attempting stab it in the neck but rolling low, when it dove out of the sky to lunge at Luna.  Charlie delivered the killing blow, which caused the creature to crash into the earth rather than veer back skyward, and so Rylee had to roll a dexterity save or take massive damage from the fall.  Fortunately for her, but much to Charlie’s chagrin, she made her save and took only half damage, and survived the ordeal with 2hp remaining.

Monday morning was the campus tour.  Jeannie went with Charlie and Kathleen, since she’s an alum of the engineering school, which is where Charlie’s interest lies.  I took Abbie, Mathew and Ellie on an informal tour of the campus of my own basically walking around.  We went to Baird Point, where Abbie found a strangely crafted and polished stone block.  She and Match developed a theory that there were five of them hidden around the campus, so she was on the lookout the rest of the morning (she’s a bit of a collector) but found only a random brick or chunk of wood or metal.  We walked out to Ellicot complex and across the terrace and ended up at Goose Poop Island.  There was sort of circle in the ground like a giant seal, probably where people did tai-chi on the weekend.  The kids surmised that if you brought the five stones together in that spot and stacked them in the shape of an Inukshuk, it would grow to enormous proportions and re-arrange Ellicot into the shape of a normal, rectangular building!  Meanwhile Charlie enjoyed the tour and both he and Kathleen found it informative.

Wow, I’ve been going a while.  Gonna hafta call it a night here.  Next up: the new stuff at work, progress on the Spellbound recording project, and defragging the studio part II.

Windin’ Up the Main Spring

It’s been a busy couple of weeks.  Our band had our gig at the Green Growler a week ago Saturday.  It went great!  The band is playing at a really high level, together and free at the same time.  We debuted two new originals.  One was What You Bring to the Table by Rick, which has undergone considerable evolution since he brought it to the group.  The other was mine, Son of the Sun, replete with meter and key changes, and borrowing from the prog idiom.  I’m impressed the group wanted to learn it, and stuck with it until we got it together.  Of course it evolved alot too as this group made it our own.  We rounded out the set with a mixture of originals, jazz standards, and funk and rock covers.  We had a good crowd, including Michelle who was home for spring break, and Nick and Giovanni came up from Long Island.  Giovanni was fascinated by playing mainly improvised music and how it works, asking me what I had written down on my charts and that sort of thing. 

And hey everybody – we have another show coming up two days at Jazz on Main in Mt. Kisco.  This one features special guest Robyn Ferracane on vocals, so we’ve been learning a whole ‘nuther repertoire for that one.  The band songs are mainly our originals since we have alot of them now, while the vocal songs lean heavily into standards and vocalese.  Lots arrangements with dramatic beginnings and endings.  Should be an excellent show.

And right on the heels of that my team at work had an onsite in the Manhattan the better part of the week.  Lots of people came in from out of town.  I took the train in to Grand Central, and each day walked one way down to or back from Union Square.  It was an excellent week to be in the city, with the beginnings of spring stirring.  We had a few meetings in the park or just waking around the neighborhood.  I the middle of that I met Jeannie after work on evening to see Kurt Elling at Birdland, doing a tribute to Weather Report. Kurt remains one of my favorite jazz singers, and has such a great voice and phrasing and a unique take on things, and rock-star level cha-rasma.  

The Innovation Lab as grown to twelve people, and we have alot more confidence to think big this year.  We also have a new CEO, who met with us for an extended roundtable discussion and asked us what resources we need, and what new ideas we have cooking.  Nobody really knew what he’d be like until he arrived; it turns out he’s friendly and bright and sees his charter as turn-this-ship-around, and signaled he’s willing to to put some resources into it.  My VP used the phrase tip of the spear to describe our role this coming year.  I’m in sort of transitional phase right now because the two main projects I’ve been working on the last three years have successfully transitioned from R&D to production, and the challenges with them are to make them scale up and be cost effective.  Indeed three of our new hires this year are involved in that endeavor.  So I successfully lobbied to be a sort or researcher-at-large for a while.  My boss said I should look around and think about what I want to work on next.  I haven’t had that luxury since the 1990’s.  And, on the train ride home the last day, I thought of an idea that looks promising.  It cut across several things we have going on, and would move our agent AI work forward to enable productization at a multi-dimensional level.  But first, to understand some critical technical systems.  So this week I’m starting to talk to the other engineers and managers about what it would take to pull it off.  Wish me luck!

And then this last Saturday, spring arrived in earnest, if only for a half day.  It got up to seventy-five degrees.  Jeannie and took our bikes out in the morning to the local trail.  I’ve been biking most of the winter when the weather permits, but mostly short rides (five miles or so) on the streets near my house.  This is the first time I’ve gone a long distance straight and flat.  I did sixteen miles in a little over an hour.  Not bad for the first real outing of the season.  Last year it took me until May or June to reach that distance.  Last year my longest ride was thirty miles.  This year I hope to reach forty or even fifty.

Also over the last two weekends I started the spring yardwork cycle, clearing out nine cans and bags worth of leaves and trimmings and other debris, plus a big bundle of sticks and branches.  And, I took the Mustang out for the fist time of the season.  It started right up and ran just fine.  Woo-hoo!  Of course by the time we were on the way home I was anxious to beat the gathering rainclouds.

Next up: the D&D adventure comes to the final boss!

Spacecats Gigs

Here’s announcing two upcoming shows for my jazz group Spacecats.

First is a return engagement to the Green Growler in Croton, NY, on Saturday, March 22 at 7pm. The group features John Szinger on saxophone, Josh Deutchman on piano and synthesizer, Ken Matthews on Bass and Rick Arecco on drums. We play a blend jazz and funk, originals, standards, and pop songs with our own unique twist.

The second is at Jazz on Main in Mt. Kisco, NY, on Wednesday, April 2 at 7pm. This one features special guest Robyn Ferracane on vocals. We’ve been working up a bunch of exciting new tunes for both shows. Come out and enjoy!

Autumn Leaves

We had a very nice Thanksgiving weekend.  I was ready for some downtime, since it had been a pretty busy couple of weeks.  The week before I hit a major milestone for my project at work, so now life got a bit easier just in time for the holiday season.

Biking season is over now because it’s too cold and too dark, but I did manage to get a few rides in the first few weeks of November.  Looking forward to starting again next spring.  Meanwhile we have ice skating and skiing to look forward too, and I’ve switched back to the Nordic Track on what used to be biking days.  On the plus side, I can listen to tunes while I do that.  Meanwhile, my shoulder has been hurting off and on the last few months, no doubt from using the computer too much.  So I’ve been going up and down on the amount of weight I’ve been using on weightlifting days.  This is the time of year when I usually start to feel generally tired and achy and low energy anyway, and I often go down in weight for the winter and back up again in the springtime.  In any event, I seem to have stabilized at a level that’s close to my nominal maximum for everything but bench press, which is about 20 lbs. less.  If I continue to feel okay, I’ll probably go up in a week or two.

November is the time of year for raking leaves, and we’ve been out and at it every weekend since we got home from our trip out west.  Most of the leaves are down now, and this last time we filled up only two cans, compared with 6 or seven cans and bags a couple weeks ago when it was peaking.  We also put up fresh new holiday lights outside.  I like to keep them up over the winter, and last year I just never got around to taking them down, but they all burned out over time. 

Lots of people in our neighborhood go in for big Hallowe’en and Christmas displays on their lawns.  Some of them even do Thanksgiving, but compared the other holidays the choice of imagery is kind of thin.  Pretty much you can have an inflatable turkey, and that’s about it.  If I ever do a lawn display, I want something that will last the whole season.  Start with a scary dragon, then give him a pilgrim hat, then a Santa hat.  Something like that.

Michelle came home from school to visit for a whole week.  The weekend before Thanksgiving we went up to Albany to visit Kathleen and the kids.  Now Michelle and I are planning a D&D campaign with them as a fun way to get more regular face time with everyone.  More on that as it develops.  Michelle spent Monday and Tuesday baking up a storm – cookies, sós kifli, more cookies. 

On Thanksgiving day we had a whole lot of family over: Mary’s family, Denis’s too, and Jeannie’s parents.  She made a turkey and all the things – stuffing, potatoes, gravy, and our guests brought lasagna, sweet potatoes, Brussel sprouts, pie, lots of great stuff, and a really good time.  Good to be around family. 

The next day, which in our house we’ve dubbed Slack Friday, we normally stay home and strive to nothing at all.  This year, however we went out to Long Island to visit Mary, since Denis was in town, as well as her cousin Carla.  After that we went over to visit Nick and Lisa, who live just ten minutes away.  The motivating excuse was to sync up with Nick on his progress on the Global Jukebox, but we ended up staying and enjoying Nick’s homemade bread and talking well into the night.

As for Nick’s progress on the Global Jukebox, that’s coming along nicely.  He’s been ramping up and doing his first major chunk of feature work, so we had a code review and I was able to explain to him a bunch of things he wasn’t ready for before, but now that he’s in the problem space he can grok.  He’ll make a good partner going forward.

Saturday was the Spacecats gig up at the Green Growler.  It went amazingly well and was alot of fun.  Thanksgiving weekend is a bit of a wildcard for playing in bars.  Sometimes it’s dead because everyone is out of town or doing family things.  Other times is packed because people are home visiting family and also want to go out and see their friends.  This night the place was really packed, the most crowded I’d ever seen the place because it turned out thee was a group having an informal ten-year high school reunion.  And everyone seemed to really dig the music.  They’d come in, notice the band and start bobbing their heads or doing a little dance.  We also had a good number of family and friends of the band, including a couple of the guys from my Wednesday group.

We did combination of straight-ahead jazz and more rock-funk oriented stuff, including eight songs off our record Los Gatos Del Cosmos, and a new song by Josh called Getaway Car.  We also had our drummer’s wife Robyn sitting in on vocals.  She’s sort of a theatre and show tunes type singer, but can do some standards and pop stuff.  She’s really good.  So we had her sit on on three songs each set, plus accompany the sax on the melody of Kamasi Washington’s Street Fighter Mas.  Having a singer provided a different kind of energy that helped the overall package I’d say.  We’ll probably ask her to sit in again.

The only downside is we were supposed didn’t have quite enough material to cover three hours.  We ended up spending more time rehearsing with Robyn than I’d planned because we wanted her songs to sound good.  We tried a good bunch of songs with her before we settled on the ones we chose, and there was just some getting to know one another musically and work out the arrangements.  A few of her songs had rubato beginnings and endings and we had to get a feel for how to do that together as a group.  This meant there were a few other new things that weren’t adequately rehearsed that we decided to skip.  Ah well. We ended up closing the second set with an extended jam of John Coltrane’s Mr. P.C., which went over great, and did a short third set that included a couple repeats from the beginning of the night.  No one in the audience seemed to mind, and the bar invited us back for another gig.

Sunday we finally had a day to sit at home and relax.  The Bills game was on TV.  The week before they defeated our arch-rivals the Kansas City Chiefs, which was great to see.   This week they played the Forty-Niners, and it was a lake-effect snowstorm the whole game.  Buffalo showed their cold weather prowess and won handily while SF totally fell apart, and the Bills clinched the AFC East championship.  Woo-hoo!

Spacecats Live at the Green Growler November 30

My group Spacecats is going to be making a rare and much-anticipated live appearance at The Green Growler in Croton, NY on Saturday, November 30 from 7 to 10 pm.  The group features John Szinger on saxophone, Josh Deutchman on piano and synthesizer, Ken Matthews on Bass and Rick Arecco on drums, with special guest Robyn Ferracane on vocals.  We play a blend jazz and funk, originals, standards, and pop songs with our own unique twist.  Come out and enjoy!

Spacecats – Jazz and Funk
Saturday, November 30, 7 to 10 pm
at
The Green Growler
4 Croton Point Ave., Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520

Announcing the Release of the Spacecats Debut Album – Los Gatos del Cosmos

The debut album for my jazz group Spacecats is complete.  Spacecats is a funky jazz quartet featuring John Szinger on sax, Josh Deutchman on piano/synth, Ken Mathews on bass and Rick Arecco on drums. The group grooves across a spectrum of styles from cool hard bop to the high energy fusion, modern jazz, and rock and jam music of the present day. We are excited to announce the release of our debut album, Los Gatos del Cosmos.

The album is available on major digital streaming services:

Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/album/71lUrJKbrW1tMu3k6ti4mE

Apple Music:
https://music.apple.com/us/album/los-gatos-del-cosmos/1756181613

Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D934S1SW

For more info, check out the band’s web page at:
https://spacecatsjazz.com

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.

Spacecats – The Recording Session

I’ve been pretty busy the last month or so, but it’s finally time to tell you about the new album my band Spacecats is making.  It’s far enough along now that you can listen to some rough mixes:

https://zingman.com/music/mp3/spacecats/recording_session_240316/edit_mixes_2

We recording the whole thing, ten songs, in a single day back in March.  The project grew out of a desire to have some samples of our music to use to try and get gigs.  We had been taping our rehearsals, but using just a portable audio recorder with a built-in stereo mic to capture the live sound of the room.  It sounded pretty good, but nothing like a professional record.  The inability to separate the instruments or control their tone and dynamics was limiting.

Our friend Gavin, who sets up our rehearsal space, heard us talking about this, and mentioned that he is trained as an audio engineer and we could use our rehearsal space as a recording studio.  A plan was hatched.

Meanwhile, we’d all be writing songs, and at some point last fall our drummer Rick started bring in more and more material.  Soon we realized we probably had enough songs for a full-length album of original material, if we focused on getting the songs tight.  This took a little time, because once we started, there was alot of work on the details of the arrangements.  Also, the guys in the band kept bringing in new tunes that upped the overall level of the project, so we added them in and dropped some others.  In particular Rick brought in a song that was replete with meter changes following a really interesting but complex pattern.  My kind of weird.

We had originally thought we might be ready to record right after then new year.  But between wanting to get the material tight, people in the group having to take a week off at various times, and the availability of the studio, we couldn’t book a date until mid-March.

Although the rehearsal space, the big room downstairs at Lagond, is not a professional studio in the sense that it lacks a control room, we like it because it’s big and has good acoustics, and most of all it has a really nice grand piano.  It also has a mixer and PA for doing live events, which can be hooked up to a computer easily enough.  The studio also has a deep bench of high-quality microphones.  So we really had everything we need.

Gavin came in early that morning to set everything up.  We decided to do it like a traditional jazz record, everything live in the studio.  The instruments were close-mic’d but not completely isolated, which meant limited options for overdubs later because there’s be some bleed-thru.  So what you hear is the real thing!

The setup was: six mics on the drum (kick, snare, rack tom, floor tom, and left and right overheads for the cymbals and hihat); two mics in the piano for left and right, plus a third just outside for ambiance; direct inject plus a mic on the amp for the bass; and two different mics on the sax, one a large diaphragm condenser and the other a ribbon mic, to capture different tones.  That’s thirteen channels total.  

The session went smoothly.  Everyone was relaxed and playing well, and Gavin was able to capture a good sound without difficulty. Once we got set up and soundchecked, we started running down the set list.  The goal was to get two complete takes of each song.  Sometimes we had a false start or broke down in the middle, so we ended up with some partial takes, or even three complete takes sometimes.  After five songs in about three hours we were getting tired so we took a break for lunch.  We front-loaded the more difficult songs, so after lunch we jammed thru the rest in about two hours.  All in all it couldn’t have gone better.

I brought the tracks home and imported them into protools, and set up a project for each song.  I put each instrument on its own bus since we had multiple channels for all of them, then did a basic setup with some light compression, EQ, reverb and dynamic compression on the master out.

The next step was to go thru and listen closely to everything and decide which takes to use, in some cases editing together the song from several different takes.  Also in this phase I tightened up the timing where it was needed, and pasted over the occasional clam.  I must say overall the group has a really good sense of time and the tempos were very consistent between takes and within a song.  For one song, I dropped in a minute-and-a-half sax solo from another take and did not have to adjust the time at all.  I discovered we sometimes to a slight ritard at the end of someone’s solo or anther turning point in the tune for dramatic effect.

Now I’m at the point where I’m listening again for the mix, to try and get that as good as can be.  In particular I’m paying attention to how the bass sits in the mix, and how to make it present but not to overbearing. 

Here’s the list of songs in the order we recorded them, which is probably not the order they’ll appear on the record.

Kamala – written by Rick our drummer, features a 4-against-6 latin groove that breaks into swing in the bridge, and a thru-composed structure with a break after the piano solo that I call the Zappa section.  I play soprano sax on this one (and tenor on most of the others).

There’s Snow Tomorrow – written by Josh our piano player, a light mid-tempo number in a minor key, with a sort of wistful feel.  When we were coming up with the arrangement, I thought it would be cool to have the sax in a supporting role and the piano mainly carry the melody, since Josh has such a great feel for it and we don’t have any other tunes that do that.

Los Gatos del Cosmos – one of mine.  An uptempo samba in the Hungarian minor mode.  Starts with an atmospheric section inspired by the Police, which reprises in the middle as the foundation for a drum feature section.  Lots of fun to play, lots of dynamic ups and downs.

Paris on the Hudson – written by Rick, this is the one that features lots of shifting time signatures, and a tricky melody and chord progression to match.  I guess you’d call it a swing feel, sometimes waltzing, sometimes in four, sometimes in double time.

Lift Off – another by me, this is an uptempo swing number inspired by John Coltrane’s Countdown, and features a tricky 2-5-lift-inside-a-2-5 as the main motivic idea for both the harmony and the melody.  Also has a drum solo.

Lance’s Guitar – a power ballad by Rick with a beautiful melody and a striking chord progression. 

Pour Me a Fifth – another light mid-tempo number by Josh, this one is 3/4 time and has a minor-key chord progression that moves around the cycle of 5ths alot, and a melody that reinforces that idea.  Ken’s bass playing gets really abstract and melodic on this.  I play soprano.

Autumn Eyes – a ballad of mine, very open and atmospheric sounding.  Features a bass solo.  I play soprano. We later did the one and only overdub on this song, some piano comping behind the bass solo. It’s amazing how well my synthesizer piano patch matched the sound of the grand piano from the studio.

Dr. Pluto – a funk jam, my composition.  We had a few funk and R&B kind of numbers we were rehearsing (indeed our tagline was Jazz and Funk, or maybe it was Jank and Fuzz), but this was the only one that made into the set for the session.  I wrote it with the bass having the melody line, and the sax doing a response.  The title comes from a cool-looking sparkly bass Ken brought to rehearsal once. It said Di Pinto on the headstock, but from a distance I misread it.  Josh plays electric piano on this one.

At a Laundromat in Pamplona – Josh’s composition, basically a samba jam.  This is one of our looser songs, with the whole middle section being just two chords.  Toward the end I do this rising thing that Ken calls the Kamasi section.  Josh plays electric piano on this one too.  A perfect way to end the set.