yesterday we biked uptown along the hudson river to the topmost neighborhood in manhattan, inwood, to visit the cloisters.

it was quite hot out, but the ride was beautiful and thanks to the awesome parks system, uninterrupted by traffic, because the hudson river park runs all the way up the west side of manhattan. the cloisters was very cool, and featured a lovely outdoor garden

as well as some really cool stained glass, which I am a huge fan of in general:

afterwards, we stopped at dinosaur bbq for lunch. I had heard this place was awesome, and it was good, but I wasn’t a big fan of the brisket, and prefer both hill country and pete’s waterfront ale house for nyc bbq.

here is all the pictures we took.

just got a super cool “backup” amp, as my main amp is on the fritz. it’s really small, and means that for the first time ever, I won’t have to take a luggage cart to a gig!

it is surprisingly loud, pretty excited to try this out on my gig tomorrow!

I’m playing at the capital grille this friday, july 23rd, with the rich russo quartet. No cover or minimum, so stop by and have a drink! We play from 6:30-10pm.

I’ve been working with the Blue Saracens quite a bit recently at swing 46, so I decided to write a few charts for the band. The first tune is one that I wrote recently, and instead of writing a melody and then arranging it for five horns, I composed the whole thing at once.
Listen to “Spring Again” (PDF of score)

The second tune is an arrangement of a tune I wrote more than 10 years ago, when I was in college. I had come home from a classical guitar lesson, it was a perfect 73 degrees outside, and I had no classes that afternoon, so I wrote this tune, entitled “73 degrees”. It’s fairly tricky to play, especially the bridge.
Listen to “Seventy Three” (PDF of score)

Hope you enjoy these new tunes and arrangements. Both recordings are from gigs at Swing 46, recorded using a Zoom H2 recorder, so the sound quality is not the best.

this morning I recorded a version of the tune “amazing grace” on my 11 string fretless guitar. you can listen here.

playing fretless is definitely a work in progress, although I wasn’t as hard as I initially thought it would be to play kind of in tune. the guitar has 5 doubled strings and a low drone string similar to an oud, I tune the drone string to C and the rest of the strings are tuned in just intonation relative to that C.

As is our tradition, we did “murph” today at crossfit south brooklyn. it’s a workout named after Michael Murphy, who was killed serving our country in Afghanistan.

The workout is as follows:
run 1 mile
100 pullups, 200 pushups, 300 squats
run 1 miles

The first time I did this was my first workout at crossfit south brooklyn, recently after I stopped boxing due to a hand injury. my time was 45:36. last year, my time was 44:10. this year, I managed to eek out 41:58, which I was pretty happy with, considering I am a year older, and haven’t crossfitted in 2 months as I’ve gone back to boxing.

it was a great day and really fun being back at crossfit south brooklyn, which is an awesome community of people. I’ve missed going to crossfit, but I really love boxing and I am sparring alot now and learning a ton so I’m going to stick with that for the time being, and drop by crossfit when I can.

memorial day reminds me of how lucky I am to live in such a great country, and thankful for the enormous sacrifices so many service people have made on our behalf.

I’m playing quite a bit over the next month with the Blue Saracens at Swing 46, a great swing dance club in midtown manhattan. If you are in the neighborhood, I’m playing next saturday the 26th, and am there every thursday night in June, from 8:30-11:30.

There is a free swing dance lesson, food and drinks, and atmosphere is great. Come on by!

I was going to include a picture, but a picture of a pot of lentils does not do justice to this dish.

Dice one spanish onion and the stems of a bunch of swiss chard, carmelize with 1 teaspoon of sugar and 2 tablespoons of neutral oil, such as grapeseed. After the onions and stems have browned, add one and a half cups lentils; I used half beluga and half split yellow lentils. Sweat the lentils for a few minutes, and add enough stock to cover, bring to a simmer. Add 2 teaspoons of salt, 1 box of frozen cooked winter squash and some tomato paste if desired.

While the lentils are cooking, heat a cast iron skillet and toast 1 tablespoon apiece of: yellow lentils, beluga lentils, cumin seed, coriander seed. add a teaspoon of yellow mustard seeds and a teaspoon of fenugreek seeds, 8 dried curry leaves, 4 dried red chiles and 2 bay leaves. toast the spices until almost black, then transfer to a spice grinder and add 1 teaspoon of turmeric. grind the spices, put 2 teaspoons into the lentils and save the rest to eat with eggs and sauteed vegetables.

I clean my spice grinder by grinding a small amount of white rice in it, I did this, and then added the ground rice to the lentils as well, to act as a thickener.

once the lentils are tender, about an hour, pour in a can of coconut milk, the leaves of the chard, and bring to a boil. simmer for 10 minutes or just take it off the heat and leave it covered for an hour.

eat them however you like, I had some with a fried egg and brown butter, and washed it down with a dogfish head brown ale.

my pedalboard

For the past 10 years, I haven’t used any effects save a rat distortion pedal when I was on the road with dem brooklyn bums. my amp doesn’t have reverb, and I always meant to get a reverb pedal, but I never pulled the trigger. A few years back, I got a looping pedal, which is one of the most useful practice tools I know of, and after needing overdrive on some gigs recently, I decided to spring for a pedalboard.

sonic research turbo tuner – ridiculously accurate tuner. I have shied away from using tuners in the past, preferring to tune to the piano or bass on a gig, but I’ve been doing more big band gigs recently and it’s really nice to be able to check tuning silently and quickly.

fulltone fulldrive 2 – I borrowed one of these from my friend Dan for a gig recently, and it’s the best sounding overdrive pedal I’ve tried for an archtop and solid state amp combo. I tried a few of the other fulltone models, but nothing sounded as good as this for my setup.

digitech rv-3 reverb – pretty standard reverb pedal, sounds great and I don’t have any complaints.

electro harmonix POG2 – I have always liked octave pedals and this really takes it to the next level. you can create some really cool, organ like sounds with this.

digitech jamman – standard looping pedal, really great for practicing. I frequently record a bassline with the POG2 and loop that.

The power supply is a voodoo labs pp2+. this was expensive, but really worth it, as it has an AC outlet, which the jamman needs, in addition to lots of other power slots for the other pedals. I questioned getting this at first, but I’m really glad I did.

the board itself is a pedaltrain board, which is designed to work with the voodoo labs power supply, in that it mounts comfortably underneath.

Here is an mp3 of my orchestration of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 4th String Quartet, 3rd movement. Here is a link to my score. It was originally scored for 2 violins, viola and cello, in my orchestration, the instrumentation is:

• 2 flutes
• 2 oboes
• 2 clarinets
• 2 bassoons
• 2 trumpets
• 2 trombones
• tuba
• timpani
• snare
• marimba

the recording is from a juilliard orchestra who sightread the piece twice, the recording is actually their second time through. I was happy with the results and definitely learned a lot, there are some things I thought worked very very well, like the solo clarinet part, and some things that I would have changed, such as backing up the flutes more with the oboes, especially in fast passages.because this is my blog and I’m allowed, I will add a personal note. I did this orchestration at a time when I was working 12-15 hour days at work, and much of it was done when I was very, very tired. I would have liked to have taken a day off to work on this and had uninterrupted time to write, but life isn’t like that. It’s my belief that we create despite our circumstances, rather than because of them. I will remember this the next time I think to myself I don’t have time for something important to me.