Northern Daydream 3: Future Proof Past… the concept for my next jazz fusion covers album project takes shape

In late 2019 and early 2020, I recorded Northern Daydream, a collection of covers of some of my favorite jazz fusion-ish songs. Then in the summer of 2020 I created Northern Daydream Volume Two: Miles Behind, a self-deprecatingly titled album of Miles Davis covers.

Not long after that, I came up with a title and tentative track list for the third album in the series: Northern Daydream 3: Future Proof Past. But I lacked the momentum to see it through. When Chick Corea died, I finished an early outtake from the first Northern Daydream project, 500 Miles High. And then I went off on a tangent with my Senioritis album, which ended up including that Chick track along with Pat Metheny’s Minuano (Six Eight), which I had originally been planning for Future Proof Past.

I also decided a couple of the tunes I had planned for the project were perhaps just a bit too ambitious. As challenging as “Minuano” was, it was no comparison to either Don Grolnick’s “Minsk” or Herbie Hancock’s “Actual Proof.” Was I really going to try to tackle that one???

This summer I decided to take a less structured approach, and instead of preparing an entire album project, I just recorded a few one-offs. A couple of Herbie tracks that had caught my ear, and a Keith Jarrett tune I had already been tinkering with for Future Proof Past.

The thing that got me really interested in revisiting the album concept was a great screenshot from the “Wiggle Waggle” video, which seemed perfect for a new album cover. So, as is often the case, I created the cover before I recorded most of the music:

I had decided I would record a side of Herbie Hancock tracks… then I considered going with all Herbie tracks… but now it seems clear to me that I need to really highlight the contrast between these two great jazz pianists, both of whom were at the peak of their powers in the 1970s.

I find the juxtaposition interesting because both played key (pun… intended?) roles in the development of Miles Davis’s electric style that really represented the birth of jazz fusion, but while Herbie Hancock was always eager to embrace the newest technologies and incorporate them into his music, Keith Jarrett rejected electric instruments entirely after his time with Miles, and ended up being one of the strongest proponents of the continued evolution of acoustic jazz through the 1970s, even though the majority of the genre’s purveyors had firmly embraced electric instruments and the fusion sound.

So, what are we talking about here exactly? This is my planned track listing:

Side H
Sly
Wiggle Waggle
Tell Me a Bedtime Story
Mashup: Rockit / Hidden Shadows

Side K
Le Mistral
Grow Your Own
Sorcery
Mashup: Long as You Know You’re Living Yours / Gaucho (Steely Dan)

“Sly” is from the 1973 classic Head Hunters, arguably the second-biggest jazz album of all time after Kind of Blue. “Wiggle Waggle” and “Tell Me a Bedtime Story” are both from the 1969 soundtrack album Herbie recorded for the first “Fat Albert” TV special, and released on his Fat Albert Rotunda album.

I’m planning a radical de-techno-fying of “Rockit” (from 1983’s Future Shock album), to mix with the esoteric Bitches Brew-esque “Hidden Shadows” from the 1972 album Sextant.

“Le Mistral” is from Keith’s 1974 Treasure Island album. It was the first Keith Jarrett track I heard that made me think, I really want to play this myself. “Grow Your Own” is from Keith’s 1971 album with Gary Burton, and it just sounds to me like music that would’ve been used in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the early ’70s that I would’ve heard a lot as a kid, and which makes it a nice counterpart to the Fat Albert Rotunda tracks!

“Sorcery” is an interesting one I’m still researching… I’m only aware of it existing as live version on a Charles Lloyd album. I really should probably consider making it a mashup with Herbie’s track “The Sorcerer,” which appeared as the title track of a 1967 Miles Davis album and a year later on Herbie’s own Speak Like a Child album. (There’s also a small fragment of “Sorcery” that reminds me of Coltrane’s “Impressions” so maybe there’s something there I can work with as well…)

The “Long As You Know”/”Gaucho” mashup is a bit cheeky… Keith Jarrett famously sued Steely Dan over the similarities between “Gaucho” and his own track from 6 years earlier (from the 1974 Belonging album), so why not mash them up?

I really felt I had to include tracks from both Treasure Island and Belonging — both recorded in 1974 — because at the time Keith Jarrett had two working quartets, one in the U.S. and one in Europe, and it’s interesting to hear the different directions the two groups took.

I’m also going to try to compose two new originals, respectively in the significantly different styles of these two artists. We’ll see what happens with that.

My timeline for this project is fairly long-term since I don’t expect to work on any more of it until after I finish playing in the pit orchestra for a community theater production of The Addams Family in October. But who knows?!

Here are the videos for the three tracks I’ve finished so far:

When easier isn’t (or: Why I typically avoid using managed hosting like Flywheel)

I’ve been building websites since there was no alternative to the command line when it came to configuring web servers. Well… unless you were using a Mac as a server, which didn’t have a command line back then. (And, yes, it could be done. The ISP I started working at in 1996 ran entirely on Macs, except for one Sun SPARCstation we were using as a DNS server.)

I still prefer the command line, and when I have a choice, I build web servers on a VPS from a vanilla install of Ubuntu Linux. I used to use Digital Ocean, but now Linode is my preferred host.

But if a client already has their site hosted somewhere else, I’ll work with what they’ve got. I take the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach. As long as the client doesn’t have major issues with their current hosting provider, it’s usually much easier to keep things where they are than to move their site somewhere else.

Even if that current hosting provider offers, ah-hem, “Managed WordPress Hosting.” I cringe at that phrase, because what it really means is that I have less control to set things up the way I like.

The way I like things isn’t the way they have to be, of course, but it would be nice if their easy-to-use tools actually made things easier to use.

Let’s take rewrites, for instance. Editing the .htaccess file can be a dark art, but once you know the basics and can handle regular expressions, it’s not that difficult.

Launching a new site that’s replacing an existing one almost always involves setting up rewrites. You want to make sure URLs from the old site, especially ones that people might have bookmarked or, even more importantly, Google might have indexed, automatically shunt users over to the corresponding URL of the new site.

Often a client will give me a fairly large spreadsheet of URLs to map. Setting this up in a text file, especially if you use an editor with good find-and-replace, is a snap.

Flywheel offers SFTP access to your site, and it even contains an .htaccess file

Is T-Mobile bypassing local ad blockers when using your hotspot?

I hate online ads.

That could be the end of the post, but sadly it’s not.

I understand that sites need ad revenue to function. But the online advertising ecosystem is so fundamentally broken that I refuse to participate in it, even to the detriment of the sites whose content I value. It’s possible to run a sustainable business through ads without ruining your site visitors’ experience.

There are various tools you can use to block the most obnoxious ads, but I’ve taken a very direct, hands-on approach. I’ve actually taken the time to view source on sites I visit that go overboard with ads, identify the domain names of the ad servers, and add them to my Mac’s /etc/hosts file so they resolve to localhost (127.0.0.1), effectively killing any ads from those sources.

And it works. I often see “broken image” icons, but all of those hideous animated ads screaming at my eyeballs are gone.

Except when I’m tethering to my phone’s hotspot.

Somehow, when I use my T-Mobile hotspot instead of my home wifi, all of those ads come flooding back. What. Is. Happening.

The only explanation I can think of is that T-Mobile is somehow using a proxy to bypass my local hosts file, but I though the local file always trumped anything else.

I don’t have an answer. But I don’t like it. And perhaps more importantly, if T-Mobile is doing this, what else is it doing with the data I’m sending and receiving over its network?

Noted for future reference: Fixing a slow-to-boot Linux server

I have a few Ubuntu Linux VPSes that were originally spun up on the then-latest-and-greatest 16.04 LTS. Over the past year I’ve been belatedly upgrading them to 20.04 LTS. Almost without exception, all now have a really irritating flaw: where they used to reboot almost instantly — making me capriciously run OS updates involving reboots at any time of day, even on servers with a bunch of sites on them, since it only meant a blip of about 5 to 7 seconds — they were now consistently taking 2 to 5 minutes to reboot. Yikes!

Poking around, I learned that cloud-init was timing out, causing that delay, but since systems administration is just a small sliver of the work I do, I never had a chance to investigate why it was happening or really what cloud-init was even for. I just resigned myself to having to do those reboots in the middle of the night when no one would notice.

Well, I finally decided I needed to get an answer, and I found it. If I’m reading this correctly, cloud-init is really only needed during the initial creation of the VPS, and can safely be disabled after that. So, let’s do it!

touch /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled

I’m pleased to say, it works perfectly. I ran it on a test mirror of my biggest server and it worked, so I then applied it to the live server and… capriciously rebooted it, right in the middle of the day!

Shush. It worked.

Update (August 3, 2022): Mayyyyybe it’s a bit more complicated than what I described above. I just went into another server I had previously updated to 20.04, and I just went ahead and pre-emptively ran this before an update that required reboot. After the reboot, I could not connect to the server at all, other than through Digital Ocean’s direct access console. Thank goodness for that. It did not initially occur to me that this change might be why I couldn’t connect, but after trying a few other fixes without success, I just went in and deleted this new /etc/cloud/cloud-init.disabled file and rebooted, and everything came up just fine… and without any kind of delay on boot. Weird.

A lament for a lost video gaming era

For a long time I have been lamenting why computer games aren’t like the ones I loved to play in the late ’90s/early 2000s… games like SimCity 2000 and Age of Empires. Even the über-nerdy version of Scrabble I had on my computer back then, with tournament rules and rankings, etc.

Oh, the descendants of those games certainly exist, but they have lost all of the things that made them interesting to me. And there are no new games that really capture that spirit effectively anymore. (Even the new ones that ostensibly try to evoke that spirit… don’t. At least not for a purist like me.)

Finally today I realized why. Because back then the video game market was way smaller than it is now, and it only catered to hardcore nerds like me. These days, it’s so much bigger, and so much broader, that there’s (comparatively) no money to be made on the types of games I liked back then.

And the real tragedy for me is that I can’t even play those games I loved anymore, because I don’t have any hardware that can play them. There’s emulation, but these games seem to exist in a technological gap. Emulators are great for even older games, mostly console games, but I haven’t really been able to find a decent way to emulate these games that required more computing power. Then again… maybe I just haven’t been trying hard enough.