Another video, another tune, another hiatus • November 6, 2015, 12:15 AM

Overall, things have been pretty well steady over the last few months. Cayenne Spice did the July 15 gig at the Carlingwood Retirement Residence, essentially doing the same range of material as in previous shows. The trio then did rehearsals till the end of July, plus one further rehearsal toward the end of August, following which we went on a hiatus of several weeks to allow one of our members to have surgery done on her shoulder. We should be starting rehearsals again in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, our choir season started up in September, allowing me to work further on the decluttering project by running off the material for our church gigs and choir practices every single week.

As for the project itself, the scanning work is just about completed, and I will soon move on to the audio production phase of the project, which will involve the digitization of many hours' worth of key material that I have recorded on cassette over the years, along with the entire analog subset of my musical library, some titles of which are not likely to see reissue on CD. This combined material, in its raw form, spans hundreds of hours of playing time.

Meanwhile, I've done some more audio and video production. In late June I began work on a video for a friend of mine, Adolf Mayer, who years ago began work on a German operatic adaptation of Goethe's Faust, but put it on the backburner. Several months ago he reworked an aria he had written for it, called "Ach neige", which is essentially Gretchen's lament once she realizes she's pregnant with Faust's child and thus in danger of being shamed. Adolf had me do the vocals for a demo recording of the piece, the ultimate view being to have me put together a video to accompany the recording. Working from footage that Adolf produced of his granddaughter playing Gretchen, plus a list of the visual elements he had in mind, I worked on the video over a period of a few weeks. Adolf posted the final cut to YouTube in early August.

On September 26 I posted to ReverbNation a new instrumental called "Firedance", which features my debut on didgeridoo. I bought a didgeridoo way back in 2003, but it was only about two months ago that I finally figured out the circular breathing technique in terms of the embouchure that the instrument calls for. The tune has something of a Celtic rock flavor, tripling the melody with the fiddle, the bagpipes (minus the drone) and the penny whistle, and adds the didgeridoo for a multi-stylistic flavor.

On October 14 I debuted "Firedance" in a private show that I did for the Bytown Rotary Club. It was similar to the ham supper shows I had done at St. Augustine's in previous years in that it featured songs in multiple languages plus a sprinkling of my original material. My next gig for the Bytown Rotary Club is their annual Christmas sing-along on December 22.

So it's steady as she goes. Stay tuned!

Well, summer's here and I can finally take a bit of a breather with our choir at St. Augustine's on hiatus until September. In the meantime, despite my working almost full time on my decluttering work and taking time to attend and watch soccer games in the Women's World Cup (including the Canada-Netherlands game in Montreal on June 15, my first time attending a professional soccer game), I've still had time to work with the Cayenne trio and produce some more material—including my first music video, which was for my instrumental tune "Elegy For My Father".

Every time I go out of town I take photos and shoot video footage that I then assemble into one or more DVDs for a friend of mine in Germany so that I can "share" my trip with him. And over the years I've studied the behind-the-scenes aspects of film and TV production. As a result, I had some video production experience to draw from when I shot and edited my music video.

From day one I had the idea in mind of incorporating three "ghostly" images of myself in a three-shot. Since I didn't have the budget to use or create a professional blue- or green-screen setup, this would have involved shooting several minutes' worth of footage of the empty room as a background plate, then shooting the three sequences of me playing the different instruments—in this case, piano, trumpet and clarinet—and then compositing the four images together. However, I found I wasn't able to pull my tripod back far enough to get all this into frame, and so I shot the piano element separately for the intro and then dissolved to a trumpet-clarinet two-shot. To keep the video elements synchronized, I used a toy clapboard in each clip that I appeared, and shot a separate clip with the clapboard to serve as a visual metronome. It was by sheer chance that I discovered that the editing software I used, Corel VideoStudio Pro X4, had the flexibility to allow me to composite the footage exactly the way I envisioned it.

I also wrote, recorded and released a new instrumental tune called "Hustle and Bustle". It was inspired by the Antonio Carlos Jobim tune "Double Rainbow" (aka "Chovendo na rosiera"), mainly in the area of the use of odd meters. When I finished the arrangement, it reminded me of Lee Morgan's jazz tune "The Sidewinder" in that it suggested the idea of people moving around in cars or on foot in a busy city (which I suspect is what led "The Sidewinder" to be used in a car ad).

Meanwhile, I've begun work on an arrangement of an instrumental tune called "Stopped on a Streetcar", which I wrote back in the mid-1980s when I was living in Toronto. One night I was heading east on a streetcar along the dedicated line that runs parallel to the Queensway, several blocks west of Roncesvalles, when for some reason, probably a power failure or something, the streetcar stopped and we ended up sitting there for a while. The driver must have had the blinkers going because the streetcar kept producing a low buzz on F-G-F-G the whole time, and I thought this might be an interesting foundation for an instrumental piece. Eventually I came up with a melody for it. I still have to experiment with the orchestration, but I hope to have the tune recorded and posted to ReverbNation soon.

Cayenne Spice has started rehearsing for the season and has a gig tentatively scheduled for July 15. Among the material we hare in the process of adding to our repertoire are tunes like "St. Louis Blues", "All the Pretty Little Horses" and "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra". More details of the gig will be posted here as I have them.

So it's steady as she goes. Stay tuned!

How time flies. Here we are, in the middle of April already, and not only have I released another song on ReverbNation, but I'm also about to release a set of learner CDs for our choir, and in a little over a week I'll be heading to Toronto to attend a CD release party thrown by a dear friend of mine.

On February 14 I released my song "L-O-V-E" for streaming on my ReverbNation page. The reason the title is spelled out has to do with the rhyming scheme of each verse: the L verse rhymes on "ell", the "O" verse on "oh" and so on. The song talks about how we can make the world a better place by loving and caring about each other and by turning to our Creator—referred to here with the blanket, multidenominational term "the One"—for help in situations where we don't have all the answers. In the meantime, I have been working for the last month and a half on processing a second batch of choral material for our choir at St. Augustine's—this time the entire set of 101 Chorales harmonized by Johann Sebastian Bach as compiled and edited by Walter Buszin. Like the material in our filing cabinet, I have entered all the chorales into my music software, evaluated their difficulty levels, and determined the section-specific vocal ranges called for in each chorale. This week I produced a series of "learner's CD" recordings of the chorales for the choir, and will be distributing them to the choir members over the next few weeks (some choir members are away over that period).

In a little over a week I will be going back to Toronto, primarily to attend a party thrown by my dear friend Mary Panacci that will launch her new CD Her Perfume. Featuring a number of jazz tunes such as "Tangerine", "A Child is Born" and George Benson's "Love Dance" and outstanding musicians such as Mike Murley and Mary's husband Anthony Panacci, this album is truly a gem. I've read reviews to the effect that this album, four years in the making, was a labor of love, and it shows in every word and every note. I highly recommend it.

Our vocal trio Cayenne Spice will be starting up again on April 30. While we have no gigs lined up yet, we are thinking of expanding our repertoire to include material from The Sound of Music, the film version of which will be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year.

And finally, a computer-related warning. About two and a half weeks ago I got hit by a nasty computer virus. The original version of it is called CryptoLocker, but while it was isolated last June, variants of it are still in circulation, and I think it's one of those variants that I got hit with. In late February I did a funeral at St. Augustine's, and at the reception I ended up talking to a guy who was interested in having me work with him on a music project involving contemporary Christian material. I didn't remember his name afterward, though. However, about three weeks ago I got an e-mail purportedly from a "Matthew Novak", who had attached a compressed Zip file that supposedly contained his resume. I thought maybe this might be the guy I'd talked to at the reception, and so I opened the attachment. The file turned out to be a JavaScript program, which I thought might generate the resume if I ran it. Well, it didn't: as I would later learn, it was the CryptoLocker virus or some variant thereof.

What the program did was encrypt certain types of data files on my laptop's hard drive, including text files, PDF files, audio files, document files (including our Sunday church programs), spreadsheets, databases, JPEG images, movie clip files and so forth. (Fortunately, the masters of the material I've written and recorded are on another computer, and were thus untouched.) Once a file is encrypted, it cannot be decrypted except via a decryption key that is available only on the malware's control servers. Once this encryption process is complete, the virus then displays a message which offers to decrypt the data if a payment, usually to be made in Bitcoins, is made by a stated deadline—I've heard it's usually the equivalent of around $500. The message also threatens to delete the decryption key and/or jack up the fee if the deadline is not met. While the virus itself is fairly easy to remove, the files remain encrypted in a way which researchers consider unfeasible to break.

After the virus finished with my laptop's hard drive, it moved on to other drives that were plugged into the laptop, including a two-terabyte external hard drive that I use for weekly backups. Luckily, I noticed what the computer was doing, and unplugged my external drive before the virus could reach my weekly backup files. What it had encrypted so far on that external drive was a number of less important archive files that I had managed to copy from failing hard drives and since copied to other hard drives not attached to the computer. If I had not severed the connection, I would have lost irreplaceable document files, including image files and PDFs of material that I have been scanning over the last ten months, some of which I no longer have in hardcopy.

As far as I can tell, my overall data loss was minimal. But as you can imagine, I did not appreciate the inconvenience. I had to spend a day cleaning the virus off my computer and all the drives that had been attached to it, and then another day restoring the data from the backup—and I hardly ate for two days. It's a sickening feeling, knowing that your life has been violated by the creator of a computer virus. My computer is back to normal now, but I wouldn't want any of you to go through anything like that. So make sure you check to see that an attachment you're getting is from someone you know and trust!

The last few months have seen a few changes in some areas, with progress made in others, and new horizons presenting themselves. For the most part, though, it's still steady as she goes.

Our vocal trio, Cayenne Spice, and I worked hard over the summer and fall to prepare for two gigs that we had at the Carlingwood Retirement Community on September 25 and December 4. As I mentioned in my last entry, I debuted my "Elegy" piece in performance on the latter date. We also made a cameo appearance at the Casino du Lac Leamy on December 12, where we were, in effect, the opening act for a band that was playing there for a private party. We are now on hiatus for the winter and will be starting up again around March or April.

In November Hotter than Ice, looking to go in another direction, decided to let me go after twelve years. This development was not entirely unexpected, as my sounds and ideas had never really fit the band. One of my old music teachers used to say that if you're offered a gig by a band, you should take it whether or not you have a background in the genre that the band plays in, but over the years I've come to disagree with that statement. If you don't have a background in that genre, you're going to hinder and harm, rather than contribute to, the authenticity of how that genre is played. And I think this is especially true of genres that demand immersion in, and appreciation of, the cultural elements that contribute to that authenticity. Take those cultural elements out, even to a small extent, and there will be something missing in the performance that casual listeners and non-musicians alike won't be able to put their finger on.

Our choir at St. Augustine's has begun its 2014-15 season learning new material, consisting of selections from the choral library that I had been processing over the previous year. Though I went through the Sunday-specific music suggestions that the Cantica Nova and NPM websites had provided, there were still very few matches between those and the pieces we have in our library. On the other hand, this is a good thing in a way, as I don't want to dump too much on the choir all at once.

Since I posted my initial batch of songs to ReverbNation this past summer, my recorded output has been slow, mainly because I am in the process of clearing out some clutter spanning the last forty years or so. For example, there are a number of documents that I have had over the years that I no longer need to keep in hardcopy, but for which I ideally still should keep a record. Over the last several months I have scanned these into my computer and either discarded them outright or, where possible, used the blank side of each sheet for temporary printouts. As time permits, however, I intend to keep on composing, arranging and recording; for example, I have a song in the works, tentatively titled "L-O-V-E", whose lyrics talk about how the world could be a better place if we loved each other more. I hope to have it recorded and posted in the next month or so.

Last Wednesday I went to Toronto for a few days, mainly to visit my "Loving Friends" co-lyricst Mary Panacci. While I was there, I went to the Orbit Room to see LMT Connection, which consists of Leroy Emmanuel on guitar and lead vocals, Mark Rogers on drums, and John Irvine on bass. I've known Leroy and Mark (and their musical nuances) since their days in the 1980s playing in a Motown revue band called Power Play. Since I started going to see the band semi-annually a few years ago, John had always wanted to work with me. Between the band's second and third sets last week, he and I got to talking about my original material and my approach to recording, and he introduced me to a recording engineer friend of his named Dusty who happened to be there that evening. The three of us talked about getting together online to work on recording projects involving jazz fusion material akin to Jeff Beck and Jean-Luc Ponty, with each of us contributing recorded ideas via Dropbox. I'm excited at the possibilities!

The evening ended with an unexpected treat when John invited me to sit in with LMT Connection for the band's final set of the night. Though I had become familiar with some of their original material over the years, when Leroy asked me which tune I'd like to do I fell back on an older original of his, "Things a Man Need", which he had played regularly in the Power Play shows. We then did a blues tune. I had fun that night and am really grateful to Leroy, Mark and John for the experience.

So things are looking up. Stay tuned!