After the epic effort to finish of my last song, A Plague of Frogs, my new studio album Plutonium Dirigible is nearing completion. I’m up to thirty-seven minutes of music. I have another song, called Sisyphus’s Blues, a reworking of a song I’d recorded previously but not released, which will bring it up to just over forty minutes. I feel like an album should usually be between forty and forty-five minutes long, so that leaves room for one more song. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I’m working on a new song called Head Downtown.\u00a0\u00a0It’s coming together really quickly, and is alot of fun.\u00a0\u00a0I only started tracking a couple weeks ago and it’s already half done.\u00a0\u00a0I’ve had the lyric for a while.\u00a0\u00a0It started as a bit of wordplay based on the observation that the terms for many body parts can also be used as verbs. From there it evolved in to a story about a down-on-his-luck kind of character, perhaps some kind of petty gangster or hard-boiled gumshoe, trying navigate the give-and-take of life in the city.\u00a0\u00a0The music started of kinda jazzoid, with parts of the chord progression lifted from Duke Jordan and Horace Silver.\u00a0\u00a0But as I fleshed out the arrangement the shuffle groove took on a sort of ska\/reggae feel. I just finished the guitar part, which was very Andy Summers inspired, with the main sections being a minimalist atmospheric riff and a big chunky rhythm groove on the backbeat. Hopefully I’ll get this one in the can by the end of the holidays, and the album will ready for release early in the new year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile my jazz group Spacecats may have a record in the offing too. Since our new drummer Rick joined us a while back, it turns out he’s a great songwriter and we now how have ten or twelve originals written by various members of the band. There’s a great variety of sounds and feels, from swing to samba to funk, even a couple ballads, and from tightly composed and arranged to more open and free. We may toss in one two interpretations of tunes by Bird or Trane to round it out. We have a friend who is a sound engineer and record producer with a sixteen-track mobile rig who has agreed to record and co-produce. We’re thinking of a live, one-day recording session sometime in the new year, and we’re trying to decide it it would be better to do it at our rehearsal studio, or at my house. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Only thing that remains is to woodshed the tunes so they’re tight enough to be assured of capturing a killer take or two of each. We were well on the way, but then a few weeks ago Rick brought in a new song that plays with the the meter in a fascinating way, four versus three. It’s not an easy one to play, but it’s my kind of weird, so we had to spend some time to get that one together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After the epic effort to finish of my last song, A Plague of Frogs, my new studio album Plutonium Dirigible is nearing completion. I’m up to thirty-seven minutes of music. I have another song, called Sisyphus’s Blues, a reworking of a song I’d recorded previously but not released, which will bring it up to just over forty … Continue reading “Head Downtown”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5738","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=5738"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5812,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5738\/revisions\/5812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zingman.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}