Lords and Ladies of Venus (Z8)

I think that most of the players in the band really had no idea what the songs sounded like until they heard them played back in the studio. A combination of the instrumentation and the places where we’ve played and rehearsed makes it difficult to hear much besides the rhythm section and the horns. There was a certain leap of faith involved (for the composer as well) that these things would work or sound right to the audience through the PA, especially with the woodwinds.

This is the only explanation I have for why the playback of the intro to this song caused Chad McCullough to burst into a fit of titters, then giggles and then full on laughter. Still laughing, he imitated the ascending woodwind line in a faux-angelic choir voice. “I can’t believe you did that!” And then more singing. In hindsight, I wish I had asked him to do a vocal take in his angel voice.

I won’t say that the intro – inspired by the over-the-top theatricality of hard rock, progressive and metal bands of past and present – is intended as a joke, exactly, but it is presented with a fair helping of humor and affection. If it makes people laugh, that’s great, if it is accepted literally and enjoyed that way (maybe with a raised pair of devil horns), that’s also excellent.

As “Arrival” was written to be an opener, “Lords and Ladies of Venus” is a closer. A last attempt to get people onto their feet, maybe dancing, maybe pogo-ing in place.

The melody is meant to have the feeling of a fanfare, and I really liked the idea of having another melody inside the melody, featuring the trombone. Because there aren’t enough operatic heavy rock anthems with a trombone feature.

There are some musical details in this one that I’m very proud of. The recurring figure in the woodwinds and the guitar and keys before and during the solos features slightly offset lines a second apart. It took a long time to convince everyone to play what was written and that someone wasn’t actually off by a sixteenth note. I don’t know if it works, but it sounds really cool to me (and Tim Carey). Others are less sure.

The solos are by David Marriott, Jr. (trombone), Mark Taylor (alto) and Mack Grout (keys).

The title comes from an old sci-fi story, maybe part of the John Carter series? I think there were only Lords in the story, but I added Venutian ladies to the mix.

The Zubatto Song (Z36)

This is the Zubatto version of a “take a bow” or a “pass the mic” song, depending on your idiom. Not to be confused with the “pee break” song made popular by arena rock bands in the 70’s (see also “drum solo). The melody and changes are very simple and everyone gets a shot at a solo and playing the melody in pairs or trios. At the end, everyone comes in together with the melody one last time.

Shortly after her first gig with the band, Janet Putnam (oboe) approached me somewhat cautiously and said “I might like to try a solo on Z36.” Of course, I considered that to be a verbal contract and held her to it. Having Janet in the band is very validating on many levels. It would be easy for the orchestral woodwind players to treat this gig as a weird novelty – show up, read the part down, go home and back to your “real” gigs – but none of them do. Janet wants to understand all of the harmony, all of the choices, what is going on in this measure. She wants to learn about the tonguing techniques that jazz players use that are different than orchestral players. It’s stuff like that which makes me feel like I’m not a crazy person trying to make his crazy dream a reality in Crazyland.

For the record, the solos (in order) are Mark Taylor (alto), Jim DeJoie (bari), Janet Putnam (oboe), Greg Sinibaldi (tenor), Jesse Canterbury (clarinet), me (guitar), Tim Carey (bass), Chad McCullough and Dave Marriott together (trumpet and trombone), Byron Vannoy (drums), Mack Grout (keys). Phew. We have a flow chart.

A Brief History of Time Travel (Z30)

The riff and groove for this one originally came from one of my favorite bands of all time, (New York’s Finest) 2 Skinnee Js. I “borrowed” the germ of the octave bass line and changed it up, and then applied it to a chord progression that I was working on. I love that hip-hop groove with the swung 16ths – what’s cool about it is that the 8ths are straight, so the rocking riff between the different “verses” here can be really straight and then the groove comes back swinging. It’s a really nice feel, especially as played by Byron and Tim.

The end is my attempt to turn the woodwinds and the brass into dueling MCs having a freestyle battle. Seriously.

The title is an homage to those great pioneers of the Space-Time Continuum, Dr. Stephen Hawking and Doctor Who. (Maybe also Dr. Emmett Brown).

Jim DeJoie’s other showcase tune – his solos on this tune always make the hairs on my arms stand up. Jim’s one of those guys who is friendly, unassuming and just a complete pleasure to work with, who then stands up when it’s his solo and turns into a carnivorous beast and eats the thing alive.

During the recording sessions, Mack Grout would consistently deliver epic solos on the first takes. I think that every solo of his on the record is a first take, this one included. We had to isolate him and the Fender Rhodes during recording in a separate room (a hallway, actually) because the speaker couldn’t be separated from the keyboard. I could only see him through a small window on the door of the studio. When we finished the first take of this song, I saw his hand, devil horns raised through the window – his way of indicating “I think that take of my solo was pretty okay.”

Consistently, this is the favorite song of everyone who comes to see Zubatto live.

Ares and Gaea (Z34)

The Zubatto version of an Afro-Cuban 6/8. I think that I originally saw the melody for this one as part of a rocker, a Mahavishnu type song perhaps, but it ended up being much more subdued. In this case, I think the lower key nature suits the song and provides some contrast to the rest of the material. The melody begins with a dialogue between the clarinet and guitar and the bassoon. The second section is a bit of a fanfare with the rest of the groups joining in to elaborate on the melodic ideas and then we return to a restatement of the original melody with the bassoon now in unison.

For the guitar solo, I decided to go for different atmospherics for each section. The first part is atmospheric and filled with delay, the second is cleaner and features more through lines. Then it returns to the more saturated sound with the ostinato figure building to the end. Jesse Canterbury delivers a beautiful and distinctive solo and Chad McCullough ramps up the energy with a conversational trumpet solo.

The title comes from the marriage of 3 and 4 throughout the song. I envisioned it as a romance between the 3rd and 4th planets (Mars and Earth), although given the longstanding Earthling obsession with Mars and the lack of any sign of returned affections, the feelings are most likely unrequited.

The Abyssal Jungle (Z35)

This started off with the rhythm section part, which is my attempt to emulate a certain style of hip-hop beat, ala De La Soul from “Three Feet High and Rising.” The bass line came next and then the cascading chords. For the B section, I tried to contrast the big open chords with some active woodwind lines. I wanted this tune to be a fun one to play over, so the harmony is very straight forward. One of my goals with Zubatto was to try to balance writing and arranging for a large group with a looser, small group sound for soloing. I tried to figure out ways to use all of the instruments and to create interesting textures on each tune, but to keep a sense of the rhythm section as the core driving force. I think this is one of the tunes that comes closest to this idea.

Solos are by David Marriott, Jr. (trombone), Mark Taylor (alto) and Mack Grout (keys).

The title is a play on the pulp concept of the “Asphalt Jungle,” only underwater – the idea of Atlantis or an alien kingdom or world that is hiding right below us, off the shore somewhere. Instead of the usual Utopian portrayal of the underwater city, I thought it was fun to imagine that even Atlantis is really like any urban environment, filled with a vast multitude of different people, races, sounds and cultures.

Mechas Over Manhattan (Z1)

When writing the music for Zubatto, I was extremely interested in exploring structures from outside the typical jazz idiom (whatever that is). I know that I’m certainly not the first to do so, but I was particularly drawn to a staple of the Heavy Metal genre: the uptempo thrasher with the swampy, crunchy, slower middle section. “Battery” by Metallica, is a great example. It’s so ubiquitous in metal and hardcore that it’s probably cliché. Less so in large ensemble jazz. I mean, there are modulating tempos, of course, but it’s not quite the same thing. I won’t be happy until someone dives off the stage and crowdsurfs during this song. Maybe it will be Greg Sinibaldi.

The middle section contains a very slight, winky, only-funny-to-me joke, in that, despite the meter changes, the chunking connective tissues, and the woodwind flourishes, it’s just a very plain 12-bar blues. You could read that as my way of suggesting that it all comes from the same place, I guess, with your standard evolution from mutation and musical natural selection. There are Metallica mutants, and Mingus mutants, and Sly Stone mutants, and so on forever.

Solos are by me (guitar) and Greg Sinibaldi (heavy metal tenor)

Even though this one is designated “Z1,” it was actually the last tune written for this record. I wrote it in the Summer of 2010 in an effort to add some more rockers to the set-list. I couldn’t decide if I should continue my numbering system from the year before (I think it would be Z37 or 38) or start a new one (ZB1? Z2.1?) and in the end I made no decision. So it ended up with the default on the template in my notation program.

What can I say about the title? Robot smash!

The Green Boy From Hurrah (Z2)

I was experimenting one day with a 7/8 samba – just playing it and clapping along – and realized that I was hearing the whole thing a full sixteenth note off from where it really was. That is, what I thought was the downbeat really wasn’t at all. I worked some more on it and started to get it, but in a flash of insight, suddenly saw myself trying to lead 11 other musicians through the same process. So I changed it to how I was actually hearing it.
The result was a cool 7 – not the usual 7 – that had a very definite groove and immediately suggested a bass line and some repeating motifs. I think that the melody is one of the catchiest that I wrote for Zubatto (maybe that I have written ever), so much so that my girlfriend started to sing or whistle it after I had been working on the piano for a while.

It would be impossible for me to overstate the virtues of Byron Vannoy and his importance to this band. For every tune, I tried to provide a solid drum part that represented what I was thinking and hearing for the music. Byron took each song and brought the drum part to life, either building on what I had written or replacing it entirely with something better. For this tune, Byron took to that 7 groove and made it his own. For the recording sessions, he brought his full kit, including this cool sounding little Chinese cymbal he had (I think he said he found it for a few dollars somewhere) and you can really hear it on this song.

Solos are by Chad McCullough (trumpet), Greg Sinibaldi (tenor) and Tim Carey (bass). The song begins with a short drum solo by Byron.
One of the earliest mentions of “Little Green Men” is from a 1899 story in the Atlanta Constitution called “The Green Boy From Hurrah.” “Hurrah” is the aliens’ own name for their homeworld, which is likely Mars.

Inspector Automaton (Z9)

Believe or not – this tune started out as a James Brown style funk groove. It’s still there in the bass and drums, and you can hear it a bit when the saxes and brass come in after the initially melody, but it very quickly evolved into something else. Part of it is my complete inability as composer to let things sit still. I’m working on it. I love music that just hangs out on chord or a vamp or a groove, but when I sit down to write, I am constantly driven to move stuff around. The melody wanted to go to a Zappa-esque woodwind place, and the harmony just started rolling with its own momentum.

After our first gig, Mack Grout and I were talking about the music and the band, and the challenge of “bringing the rock.” His feeling (and mine) was that if the rhythm section delivered the rock or funk or the hip-hop, the whole thing would come across the way that it was intended. If we didn’t, then it would sound too much like “Big Band Jazz.” Which isn’t a bad thing at all, but not what I was going for. The key to the identity of the band really lays with the rhythm section, and the pieces were going to come to life or not according to foundation and the bottom end. This is especially true of this tune, which I actually cut from a couple of gigs, because it just wasn’t working right. I’m glad I didn’t get rid of it completely, because we eventually found its identity and that kernel of JB that ignites the booster rocket and gets this one into orbit.

Tim Carey really lays it down on the bass on this one – that glissando sounds like it’s never going to find the bottom! The addition of Tim to the band played a huge part in finding and solidifying the Zubatto sound and identity. My original idea for Zubatto featured upright bass, but it became apparent after the first show that electric would better get across the sound that I was looking for, and Tim brought all of the missing ingredients for Zubatto lift-off.

Solos are by David Marriott, Jr. (trombone), Jim DeJoie (baritone), and me (guitar).

My favorite Robot Detective is R. Daneel Olivaw, but the tradition of the cyborg cop in science fiction is a rich and honored one, including H8, Blue Senturian and RoboCop. Should we count Rick Deckard?

The Trouble With Earth Women (Z14)

This is probably the closest thing to “jazz” on the record, at least as far as this composer is concerned. It started out with a vamp between two chords (a Bb7 and a C7) and then the blues line played by the bass clarinet and then the bassoon. The melody grew out of that and really came to life on its own. I had the sense of the whole melody being out there somewhere and just having to transcribe it. Each note seemed to follow the last with obvious logic and the harmony followed suit. That probably means I stole it from somewhere unwittingly. I love that line on the bassoon and Francine Peterson really swings it. Originally, the drum part called for a funky 2 and 4 feel, but Byron (rightly) decided that it was a shuffle.

As far back as our first performance, this has been a showcase tune for Jim DeJoie (baritone sax), who absolutely kills it on the record as well. In that first concert, his solo was the moment in the set where things went from “kinda shaky” to “actual music.”

The weekend of the recording, Chad McCullough (trumpet) had a completely insane schedule, so that he was leaving each night to go play 2 and 3 set gigs, including a release party for his own new CD, I think. Maybe an after party too. Probably an after-after-party. When he arrived at the studio each morning, he looked a little green. After enough coffee and doughnuts (he brought a big box every day for everyone – you should know this if you need to hire a trumpet player) he would come back to life and just play his heart out. On the last day of recording, he stayed late, recording super high notes (ouch!) and doing several takes of the solo for this song. He had done a couple that were very good – good enough, even – but he kept at it. After he hit the one on the record, everyone in the control room burst into applause. Then poor Chad dragged himself home (or probably to his next gig).

The title riffs off of the idea of the lamentations of a little green or gray man or woman, who has become unprofessionally and unhealthily entranced by the human females of Earth. This Venusian has been sent to Earth as a researcher or observer (ala Dian Fosse) and has, perhaps, lingered for a little too long. The trouble with Earth women, for the diminutive visitor, is that they are so alluring and exotic, but there is no possibility of approach – not without significant risk, such as endangering the larger Venusian mission or (least of all) scaring the living hell out of the object of affection.