mkp's blog 2005

Cold New Year

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Spent the whole week in bed with a nasty cold. Grrrr....

Oh, well. Happy New Year in any case!

Shopping, Sightseeing and Soul Medicin

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Today we went shopping on 5th avenue. We some small stuffed animals at FAO Schwarts, 13 dollars worth of chocolate and that concluded our New York spending spree. Yeah, we hate shopping. Oh, ok. I found a few rare jazz organ CD's at Virgin on Times Square.

We went to Ruby Foo's for dinner with grand cousin Steve. And then we went to the Rockefeller Centre to see the Christmas tree. We also went to Top of The Rock and got an excellent view of the city. Cool to see things from a different angle than the Empire State Building for a change.

Given our complimentary tickets we went back to Iridium and caught the last set of the organ summit. Lonnie was in top form as usual. And we finally got to meet Akiko Tsuruga. 6 organists in the house? But wait! There's more! Mike Torsone was there. As was Seleno Clarke. And Lonnie Gasperini stopped by briefly. Full house!

After the show we kept Jimmy McGriff company backstage. Good to talk to him! And good to hear that he's still with it despite his illness...

Brooklyn, Transit Strike and Jazzy Goodness

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EDT

After an uneventful drive, we arrived in Brooklyn at Rob and Amy's place around 11pm last night. We chatted for a couple of hours and crashed really hard.

We had timed our trip to New York to coincide with the transit strike. Going from Brooklyn to midtown Manhattan took 3 hours. And when we finally made it to the Hilton they didn't have valet parking so Vanessa had to go around the block and waste another half hour. No fun.

While waiting for Vanessa to return from parking, I bumped into the renowned jazz singer Joe Doggs.

Meanwhile elsewhere Dr. Smith was on his way down from uptown to meet us for dinner. Traffic was equally insane going in that direction so we decided to save time by eating at The Iridium. Vanessa's grand cousin Steve came and joined us. Lonnie was great fun and chatty as usual.

Reuben Wilson opened the night with a couple of tunes and then Lonnie went on. Towards the end of the set they helped Jimmy McGriff onto the stage and he played as well.

I hadn't seen Jimmy for about 5 years and his health had obviously deteriorated in the time that had passed. You could tell he could hear what to play but his fingers couldn't keep up. So sad. But Jimmy still played lots of cool notes and he sounded unmistakingly like himself.

Melvin Sparks on guitar was excellent. It was the first time either of us saw him live and what a treat that was. Especially his interplay with Lonnie was amazing. And Don Williams did a great job trying to follow three organists each going in their own direction.

Oh, yes. 3 organs. The house organ had conked out. So Reuben and Jimmy were sharing in the first set. In the set break I went up on stage to take a look. B-2 in miserable state with Trek percussion installed. The organ was humming loudly when powered on. Easy to track down. One of the output wires had come off of the tremolo control box so it was running unbalanced. Fix took two minutes and in return we got free drinks and a complimentary set of tix.

Start Spreadin' The News

Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EDT

We're leaving today.

We want to be a part of it - New York, New Yoooork...

Snow & Show

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Yesterday was a veritable nightmare. Montr�al got 41cm of snow overnight. At 11am the organ movers showed up (3 hours late). The back alley was inaccessible to the truck so we had to shovel a 1m wide path from the back door through the alley and all the way out onto the street. The street only had one ploughed lane so cars were piling up behing the truck honking, etc. For every piece we loaded we had to send the truck a trip around the block so people could get out.

Driving from here to the venue across town took over an hour. Stuck cars and buses everywhere and we almost got squashed by a garbage truck that slid out and almost keeled over on St-Laurent.

When we finally made it to the venue the mover's truck went into a pit and we spent half an hour digging and pushing that out. Then we had to dig a path to the front door so we could get the organ in. Once inside it turned out the venue didn't have elevators. So the movers had to carry the organ up the stairs.

These guys were not our regular movers and despite moving pianos for a living, they had no idea how to handle my Hammond. So they made things a billion times harder for themselves. They were, however, not susceptible to reason or my experience. So whatever.

Once we got the organ on stage and the cover taken off, I discovered that a tube had fallen out of the preamp and that two of the back panel screws had stripped the wood. This is the last time I let rookies mess with my instrument!

Before the show, Dave, Melissa, Jim, Kenny, Vanessa and I went to Los Planes for an awesome pupusa/plantain dinner. Yum! The show itself went well although the room had boomy acoustics so the sound wasn't too hot.

Looking forward to moving the organ back home on Monday...

Xmas Par Tay

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Last night we had our annual Christmas party. This year the event itself took place at Keriann's but we did most of the cooking and baking here before we went. I baked Danish vanilla shortbread (vanillekranse), made Rice Pudding (risalamande) and mulled wine (gl�gg). Vanessa baked chocolate chip raspberry cookies and made apple cider. A bunch of people came out. Good hang!

Recording Session

Sun, 11 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Last night I schlepped the my gig organ to the studio so Jason from Shtreiml could use it for overdubs.

Today the usual suspects showed up at the studio for our demo recording session. Oddly enough we were much more uncomfortable and had worse sound than last time. But hopefully there's some material we can use.

After the session I wasted two charming hours waiting for the organ movers to show up. Grrrr...

Mac crash, Pedro's organ and Leslie control kit

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Vanessa's Mac has developed some unfortunate quirks (that's my polite way of saying that it's irreparably cursed). This morning ProTools wouldn't talk to the MIDI interface. Any application that touches MIDI now hangs or crashes. That includes Audio MIDI Setup and Garage Band. Good thing Vanessa had bounced most of MIDI parts to an audio track.

Then a few hours later the external drive with all her ProTools sessions decided to commit suicide. Finder goes into an infinite loop and then dies when trying to copy files off of the drive. Meanwhile Disk Utility says that everything is fine. sigh

I managed to salvage most of the session files off the drive. I hope this will teach Vanessa to leverage the amazing powers of my SCSI-based backup RAID in the future...

Pedro called in panic. His organ had suddenly started to emit unwanted harmonics. I went to the church and had to wait for a couple of hours until rehearsal was over. Broken drawbar wire on the lower manual B preset. Easy fix. And the Montr�al Jubilation Gospel Choir is awesome! Well worth the wait.

Back home to muck some more with the Mac and rebuild the 428 Leslie Control Kit from the Chinese Alliance Church. The components had gone way off causing a volume drop when switching speeds. Hope this fixes it...

Gospel concerts and Christmas kicks in

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Busy couple of days. I was performing with the Montr�al Intercultural Gospel Choir Friday and Saturday. Friday the stage crew was taking their sweet time so we had to start playing without a sound check. Total disaster - sigh. Saturday was much better and I brought my own monitor so I could at least hear myself. It was fun to play a gig with Vanessa for the first time ever. We share jams, etc. but this is the first time we actually performed on a stage at the same time. Cool!

Our Funk Defenders gig Saturday got cancelled due to a booking conflict. Grrr! And apparently we got bumped despite the fact that we had booked this way before the other band. Very annoying. Club owners don't seem to understand that this is not a hobby and that we have passed on other gigs (and income) to play at their venue.

Yesterday I had a rehearsal with the boys for our recording session next Sunday. And in the afternoon I went grocery shopping and made a Mexican bean salad for the Christmas potluck at the Neufelds'. Christmas coming up. Time to start baking Danish cookies...

Plumbing and Harnessing Wires

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Alex our regular organ mover helped us lift the old water heater out of the pit under the livingroom and put the new one in. I then spent most of Sunday soldering new pipes in (old pipes had to be cut to make room for the heater to go through the small hatch opening). When I finally turned the water on one of the connectors on the tank turned out to be bad. Had to cut the pipes again and get more fittings from the hardware store. This time around I decided to use flexible connectors for hookup instead of fixed pipe. Much better. Unfortunately there turned out to be another leak - this time further down the crawl space. More pipe cutting and soldering. And finally - as of late last night - we have hot water again. Man, that first shower felt awesome!

I spent the first half of today on the phone and the second half fixing Pedro's B-3. Had to replace the wiring which had gone completely bad. Plastic was cracking all over. Just what you want for a 117V hookup. Also redid his brake accessory hookup and soldered several broken drawbar wires. Now the organ is good to go for his concerts in a week and a half.

After the service gig I went to Fur's studio to rehearse for the Funk Defenders show on Saturday. By the time I got there, however, I was spent. Need a break...

Kablooie

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Woke up this morning and wondered why there was no hot water. Checked the breakers for the water heater. They were ok. Opened the hatch door to the crawl space where the water heater sits. Sound of gushing water. Argh. Turned on lights - 2 ft of water in the basement. I quickly turned off the supply valve. The water heater had sprung a leak. Absolutely wonderful.

We took a cab to Reno and bought a suitable heater, rented a van there and brought it back home. Unfortunately it turned out that whoever had installed the old heater had soldered the nuts onto the nipples. And it was after opening hours so I couldn't go buy a blowtorch. Project on hold until tomorrow. sigh

Trip to Ottawa + getting things done

Fri, 25 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Vanessa and I rented a car yesterday and drove to Ottawa to pick up a fibre channel disk tray for my tachyon driver project. We had timed the trip perfectly so we ended up driving in a snow storm. Lovely.

We stopped in Rigaud on the way to work on an M-100 organ which couldn't start. Weak spring on the tonewheel generator drive shaft combined with lack of oiling meant the start motor couldn't engage.

In Ottawa we had an awesome chinese dinner at Richard Briggs' place. Good to see Carole and Booboo again. mort, Stephanie and scjody were also in attendance. Good hang.

After dinner we went to Patty Bolands with Matthew and Danielle. And then we drove back home. Fortunately the roads were clear.

We still had the car today so we decided to make good use of it. Bought some more panel heaters at Reno Depot, stocked up on produce and I bought a new UPS for the lab. Returned the car to the rental place and went out for sushi. Nice!

Furnace

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

First Funk Defenders rehearsal at Fur's new studio after the fall hiatus. We were all pretty chipper and on the beat. Sounded good. Yay!

Fur, Jigsaw et al. did a great job on the studio. Very nice work indeed. Once they finish the control room they're good to go. Looking forward to hearing a take recorded there.

Jam night

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Whoa! What a night. We had a blast. The boys and I started off with a really solid first set and the good times just kept rollin'. Jason from Shtreiml came and sat in on both harmonica and organ. And as usual Jon Lindhorst and Alan did some impeccable work on sax and guitar. The big surprise of the night was George Fok who had reluctanty agreed to sit in. Turns out he plays a mean soprano. Awesome! Also a big thanks to all the people that came out to listen including Randy, Suzie and Anna.

Can't wait till the next jam in December...

Winter preparations and jam night

Sat, 19 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Vanessa and I spent the afternoon getting the yard ready for winter. Moved bikes, lawnmower, bbq, etc. inside and covered up the rest of the stuff with big tarps. Ok, winter - bring it on!

The jam at Delifrance tonight started out slow but a lot of people came out later in the evening. Lots of guitar players (Alex - cool, man!) as well as the ubiquitous Vince. Was also great to see Richard, Judith, Julie and Keriann. George (from the Chinese church) also showed up with a friend. Cool beans! Hope tomorrow is going to be a blast as well...

Vanessa's birthday

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Tonight we went to the Blue Nile to celebrate Vanessa's birthday with Keriann, Deb and Shirley.

Tomorrow the organ jams are back at Delifrance. Vanessa's hosting the first night, I'm hosting Saturday. Hope some people come out and play...

Tachyon hacking

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Been busy hacking on the tachyon driver again. Fun, fun, fun. I got all the message queues set up and the chip programmed correctly. Unfortunately I still don't know how to fire up the laser on an XL2 board. On TL/TS boards it looks like there's a convention to have laser control on GPIO4.

We're going to Ottawa next week to pick up a fibre channel disk tray at willy's. Looking forward to retiring the RA4100 (the disk array that doesn't look like a disk).

Jody in town, new recording session booked

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Jody came to Montr�al to see Nine Inch Nails at Bell Centre and crashed at our place. We went for Indian food with Jeff, Angie and Scott last night and today we went to Beauty's for breakfast. I stopped by Archambault on the way home and got some XLR extension cables so we can record Angelique's vocals on Thursday.

Other than that I've been swamped with work and I'm still waiting for organ parts. Hope they get here soon...

New studio recording session booked for the Certified Organic Jazz Quartet on December 11th. Time to put some more good takes in.

Calling the doc, a call from the Doc plus good news wrt. Rhoda

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Got up early (10:30am <8) ) to call my mom and wish her a happy birthday.

Our little cat Shirley didn't seem to be doing so well. She's been suffering from an eye infection and we finally thought we'd gotten rid of it. This morning it was back with a vengeance - on the other eye. She couldn't even open it and it was all red inside. Vanessa called the vet and we rushed there without getting breakfast. Shirley wasn't a happy camper when the doc took her temperature. Or at all. She's been alternating between sleeping in my chair and my lap all day. Poor kitty :/

Our soul and organ guru Dr. Lonnie Smith called tonight and asked how we were doing. Nice to hear from him. We haven't seen him in several months.

Lonnie appears to be doing well (faaaan-tastic) and is busy touring as usual. His NYC gig organ is still broken. We may go see him soon and I'll try to fix it. No fun - it's a broken manual wire. That's going to take a whole day...

In other organ-god news it looks like we've finally got everything sorted out with regards to bringing Rhoda Scott to Montr�al for two shows at The Upstairs in January. Really looking forward to this - never seen Rhoda live.

ProTools & Cascading Stylesheets

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

The time had come to get all Vanessa's latin arrangements off the Triton and into a decent music program so I spent most of Friday night messing with ProTools. I also managed to convert the MOTU Triton LE midnam file to the correct XML format using CherryPicker and a bit of hand-editing. Now V. can select the sounds directly from within PT.

Yesterday we recorded all her work into MIDI tracks (yay for parallel recording!) and messed with initial editing, as well as a quick bounce to WAV. Works well. Now we just need Angelique to stop by later this week and do the vocals.

Today was another busy day. I messed with converting Vanessa's mom's design for Chris' memorial site into XHTML and CSS2. Oh, man. That turned out to be a very hard problem to solve. The graphics pretty much enforced a 640px total width with a floating menu on the righthand side. Not CSS' favorite kind of setup, I tell ya. But it works now. V. has already started adding content. Check it out at: www.chrisdriscoll.com.

Free Oxygen

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Subbed for Vanessa in Free Oxygen last night at Le Divan Orange. Cool venue! I had lots of sound problems in the first set because the Leslie was in front of me. In the second set I had gotten used to to the muffled sound.

In any case the gig went fairly well. These guys write insanely hard tunes, but I've been subbing enough now that I can start loosening up a bit and do my own thing on top of the otherwise very strict arrangements.

Fun night!

YADOOF - Yet Another Day of Organ Fixage

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Two service gigs yesterday. One in a Chinese church. Late C-2 with a 70's Leslie 122 and a home made tone cabinet. HR-40 power and reverb amps in a custom wooden box hooked up to a HiFi speaker. Lovely! Leslie motors were all stuck. Took them out and cleaned them. Organ was all distorted. Suspect 6SN7 is bad. B+ for tremolo kit was fetched from inside preamp using the thinnest gauge wire I've seen in a long time. Fortunately B+ is relatively low voltage... hey waitaminnit!

The other organ was a gig organ in a miserable state. Hadn't been serviced since the 70's and had spent several winters outside under a tarp. Spent an hour getting the Leslie amp out of the cabinet (screw rusted to t-nut). And another hour trying to open the outlet box on the organ. Also rusted shut. Lots of shorts as the wires were all cracked - sigh. This baby needs a lot of TLC...

Been busy doing inventory and ordering parts today. Gotta get all those church Hammonds ready in time for the Christmas season...

Aside from that I'm still cranking away on HP stuff. Hope to get some more work on Chris' memorial site done tonight.

Ubuntu Below Zero, Jeff's birthday & Altsys Jazz

Mon, 31 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Got up early this morning and went downtown to attend the Ubuntu Love Day. Hung out a bit with Jeff Bailey and finally met Simon Law.

Lunch was a bit of an exercise. Both Jeff and I are vegetarian and explaining this to the Chinese hotel staff proved futile as they spoke neither English, nor French. Simon to the rescue!

In the evening we went to The Blue Nile with a 30-odd bunch of Ubuntu-ites to celebrate Jeff's birthday. And after dinner Vanessa and I went to see the Altsys Jazz Orchestra at Foccacio. Awesome! Shame on the local jazz community for not attending this show. I always end up being completely mesmerized when I see Jennifer & Bill's ensemble...

Work, work, work

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Nothing to see here, move along.

Well - ok, then. Vanessa and I went out for dinner with DJ Killajewel tonight. Sushi-goodness followed by rehearsal with Funk Defenders. And then back to the boilers. I've put lots of hours in on the HP contract this week. Has been fun!

Gonna have the boys from the Certified Organic Jazz Quartet over for dinner on Sunday. Time to listen to our studio session recordings and decide which takes to use.

More Organ Fixage

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

I had an organ service gig today at a church in Lachine. Old Northern Hammond CV, JR-20 tone cabinet near the console and an HR-40 and a beautiful early '63 Leslie 122 in the choir loft.

A chorist had been zapped last week so they called me to check out the installation. This is one of the first times ever I've seen a sane church hookup! B+ return from the JR-20 located by the console. Signal from the 3H echo kit as well as two wires from a 9V transformer going through a conduit to the choir loft. A project box with a relay triggered mains power to the speakers when the 9V from the console was sensed. No AC or B+ going back and forth. Nice!

Unfortunately the roof had been leaking and the floor in the choir loft was all wet. And the aging speaker cables were not only rotten and cracked--they were also soaked in water. No wonder people were getting zapped! Now to find some replacement 5-pin plugs. Or I can rewire the breakout box to use 6-pin amphenols.

Back to the stoking the HP boilers...

Hammond Organ Fixage

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Lars Mikael and I had a really busy day yesterday. LMV fixed the percussion on my C-3 while I installed new felts in the manuals. Wow, it feels really nice now. Then Lars Mikael returned the XLR-ified 122 amp of horrors I had to stock. And I cleaned the busbars on my precious B-3. Now it's poifect. Wheee!

And to top off our Happy Hammond day, Peter Abrams of Hamtech fame stopped by and we all went out for dinner. Good times!

Back to school, impending LMV & new toys

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

As of a couple of weeks ago I've been sucked into the note factory. I'm auditing Jazz Materials at McGill. Very odd to be back in school after 10 years. Still trying to work out how to fit in.

Lars Mikael is going to stay with us for a couple of days this week. Hammond hacking time. Got some bus bars to clean, percussion switches to fix and a Leslie amp. to rebuild. Gonna be fun, fun, fun!

A couple of weeks ago we finally bit the bullet and got the Triton workstation we've been talking about forever. Vanessa has been messing with it and appears to like it. We also got a M-Audio 1814 FireWire interface and ProTools. It's going to be nice to be able to record and edit stuff here at home. Whether the Mac mini can carry the load remains to be seen...

It's getting cold out. Maybe I can turn off the A/C in the lab soon (Itanium 2 processors and air conditioners are natural enemies).

New website

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Ok, I finally bit the bullet and redesigned my website. Mostly because I wanted to shape up wrt. stylesheets as we're starting on Chris' memorial site right away. So my new site is just a result of me trying out stuff.

Funk Defenders @ 1221

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

We played at 1221 last night. Crescent St. was deserted. I guess everybody is taking a long weekend to celebrate Thanksgiving with their families. In any case the crowd was miniscule until towards the end of the 3rd set where we got invaded by a bunch of Italian teenagers.

This was a very hard gig to play. Due to my cold and general fatigue we decided not to bring the Hammond this time. So I played the whole thing on my Nord Electro. What a drag. Don't get me wrong. I love the Nord for Clavinet, Rhodes and Wurly. But I can't play organ on a dinky piece of plastic. It's just not the same without two hundred pounds of beast between you and the audience.

I'm hoping that we can afford an XK-3 / 2101 rig early next year. I think that would complement the Nord well for the funk gigs. The current B-200/Leslie 302C rig is literally falling apart.

BBQ and cold

Wed, 05 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

I've been suffering from this miserable cold since Sunday. Most annoying since I never get sick. On a more positive note we had an impromptu bbq here last night. Kevin, Turell, Runa, Joel & Christine, Ross, Al and Keriann came over for a good hang.

Revived blog

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Ok, it's been a while since I blogged last. I intend to fix that. Since last update I have:

Lost my friend Chris Driscoll
Visited Dr. Lonnie Smith in Florida
Played a bunch of great gigs in and around Montr�al
Finished the shed (yay!)
Gotten all my stuff out of storage
Co-hosted the annual organ jam during the Montr�al Jazz Festival
Co-hosted an organ jam in Charlottetown, PEI
Recorded with the Certified Organic Jazz Quartet
Been on tour in Denmark with Vanessa, Jesper and Kresten

Busy times!

Jam at l'Utopik

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Went to hear Thierry and Vince at l'Utopik last night. Had a good hang. Booked both them for the tentative gig at Upstairs on March 13th. Hope the weekend swapping thing works out. It's going to be Vince on sax, Thierry on drums and me on organ. And hopefully Josh on guitar. Going to make this really tight and professional. Codename: "Don't Suck". I want to practice weekly and make it obvious to the audience that we've done so. Fur called. We're doing a fund raiser gig on Sunday with Funk Defenders. Should be interesting...

Funk Defenders Rehearsal

Tue, 04 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EDT

Went to the practice space. Thierry had recorded our performance at Le Swimming in December. And we sat down and listened. *sigh* We are so not tight enough. Can't play funk without being tight. Brought a CD home of the recording. Very demoralizing to listen to.

Music Room

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EDT

I got sick of the ghettoness of our music room and rearranged everything. I like it much better this way. Cozy vibe now. Should be good for jam sessions...