Happy New Year everyone. We had a most relaxing and enjoyable holidays. Caught up with lots of friends and family, had some guests, did some traveling \u2013 hundreds of miles of it in snow \u2013 and got in some good partying too. Seems like we often go weeks or even months on end without having a chance to hang out with friends, but we made up for it this holidays. Played lots of games: Risk, Sorry, Carcosonne, the green screen door, the triangle game, one up\/one down, open\/closed, and even chess.<\/p>\n
It seems upsizing your house this the thing right now. Mary and Lou have been putting a second story on their house out on Long Island, adding four more bedrooms. It\u2019s almost done, they\u2019re just waiting on a railing for the stairs and a countertop for the bathroom sink. That\u2019s pretty amazing considering they only started work in November, and the contractor with doing lots of post-Sandy repair jobs at the same time. Meanwhile upstate, Larry and Jackie moved into a sprawling ranch house with a really cool glass-enclosed family room and loft, on a lot adjoining the woods. Very nice for all of them.<\/p>\n
When Lou came over on Christmas day we managed to get a few minutes together for him to play and sing some of his new songs into a mic. I\u2019m producing his new record, and these are the demos. My first step is to listen to the songs and learn them, then I\u2019ll put together some arrangements and see what Lou thinks of them. So far he only has 4 or 5 songs \u2013 enough for an E.P. Should be a fun project. We\u2019ll see how it goes.<\/p>\n
Among the parties we went to was New Year\u2019s Eve at Erik\u2019s. I brought along my new bass to show him. It turned out the house was full of musicians, so it was a jam session. I spent most of my time on the bass cuz Erik was on the piano. There was a drummer too. The guitar player kept on calling songs that I didn\u2019t really know but weren\u2019t too hard, things like \u201cAbout a Girl\u201d and \u201cI Wanna Be Sedated\u201d. I found it wasn\u2019t too hard to keep up and lay down a good bottom. Later on I played some piano but switched back to bass after midnight cuz we had to lower the volume. Next thing I knew it was 4 am. It was a great to chance to get a feel for the bass. I\u2019m really digging it.<\/p>\n
Also watched about half of the Godfather trilogy, and got some new records including the abridged Ella Fitzgerald songbook (the three-CD set, not the 16-CD one), and Celebration Day by Led Zeppelin. BTW, when we up in Buffalo visiting my parents, Led Zep were on TV receiving an award. My dad turned and asked me \u201cHave you ever heard of these guys? That guy has really fast fingers.\u201d I\u2019m like, \u201cYou told me to turn down their damn music so many times when I was kid!\u201d You\u2019d think he\u2019d remember. Ah well, he\u2019s certainly mellowed out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Happy New Year everyone. We had a most relaxing and enjoyable holidays. Caught up with lots of friends and family, had some guests, did some traveling \u2013 hundreds of miles of it in snow \u2013 and got in some good partying too. Seems like we often go weeks or even months on end without having … Continue reading “Celebration Day”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14,16,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-music","category-people","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}