paul_viapiano_guitarist

music, technology & life in pasadena, california

Just Do It, Part 1

No, I’m not talking about Tiger Woods’ motto for living life, but the inescapable fact that things are happening out there and you have to take advantage of them before they go away. So suspend your NetFlix account, turn off your television, get in your car and celebrate the new year with a few of these ideas.

First things first. Coffee.

Not one, but three…wait, make that four new places to satisfy your caffeine addiction. Three are in downtown LA (hey, I’ve been working there for the last three months!), one in Pasadena and one more in Silverlake. Here we go:

Urth Caffé
451 South Hewitt Street, on Hewitt and 5th, in the Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles.

Housed in an old egg factory and part of the current downtown Renaissance, this place has it all with an especially friendly staff, exceptional organic coffee and plenty of dangerous desserts. The funky neighborhood-turned-lofty is a perfect setting for getting your fix day or night.

GroundWorks
108 West 2nd Street

Another organic coffee resource with several locations. The 2nd Street café is the one closest to the Music Center and although I visited only once, the coffee was excellent. The counter staff is a little disorganized and not as together as at Urth Caffe, but the beans (Lucky Jack) I brought back to the orchestra pit to be brewed by our in house coffee bitcharista, Kenny Wild, were incredibly flavorful. Maybe next time we’ll try the aptly named Bitches Brew, their darkest roast.

Prime Grind
714 West 1st Street

Just across Hope Street from the Walt Disney Concert Hall in a small shopping center on the ground floor of one of LA’s earliest downtown residences, Prime Grind is without a doubt my favorite convenient downtown coffee hangout. A long narrow room with work from local artists on the walls, the staff at PG know how to make the perfect espresso and a lot more. Perfect, as in taste…and perfectly made every single time. A lot of LA Opera musicians can be seen there juicing up before those 4 ½ hour marathons they play. Oh…and the gelato is an accompaniment without compare.

Jameson-Brown Roasters
260 N. Allen Avenue in Pasadena (just south of the 210 freeway)

I’d been passing this shop for months wondering about it until I stopped in after dropping my daughter off at ballet class just down the street. A funky hang in a community-cum-living-room makes me feel like I’m not in LA but maybe somewhere in northern Wisconsin. They roast their own, and while the service may be on the slow side, the finished coffee drink is one of the best in Pasadena.

LaMill Coffee at 1636 Silver Lake Boulevard is an amazing coffee and tea lovers paradise. Along with good food, they offer coffee via several methods of extraction. Yes, I said extraction…this place is serious. Choose the Chemex method and your personal coffee brewmaster will hang out at your table until the nectar is finished cycling through the filter. This is the connoisseur’s coffee nirvana and it’s well worth taking a detour to experience. Can’t say enough about it!

January 31, 2010 | Link to this entry

The Girl in the Magnesium Dress

When I received the email asking if I’d like to participate in the LA Philharmonic’s Left Coast/West Coast Festival, curated by composer John Adams, I immediately said yes. I’ve written here before about my experiences playing John’s music and it is fun, challenging, sometimes terrifying but always incredibly rewarding. New music can be like that, walking through the ring of fire to prove to ourselves that we’re still alive and kicking.

Turns out John himself would be conducting five pieces from Frank Zappa’s The Yellow Shark, a collection of music Zappa had hiding in his Synclavier and realized late in life for Pierre Boulez and the Germany-based Ensemble Moderne. Some of it is pure Zappa, a faithful orchestral rendering of his trademark multi-time-signature and syncopated antics that he often used as episodic interludes between guitar solos or other comedic lyrics. Others inhabit a world that Frank was indelibly drawn to, the world of Varese and the early avant-gardists and the late ones as well, culminating in the crystalline order of Pierre Boulez. As John Adams writes in his blog (and if you haven’t discovered it yet, it’s a must-read…you can find it here):

Ah, but the timbres are super—all dazzling, hard-edged and brilliant. The ensemble for “The Girl” is pure magnesium. Total Pierre. Check out that cimbalom. And a mandolin and classical geetar! Un éclat of shattering crystal. A regular explosante-fixe in a glass factory.

Ah yes…The Girl in the Magnesium Dress. It seemed more like molybdenum to me, denser than dense, almost impenetrable in spots, but there also were islands of pure coherency, a near-miss and then, near-bliss. An attempt to fuse chaos onto a 32nd note grid and thereby tame the quark, but the quark laughs at such foolish behavior and bites you on the ass for trying. At least that’s what my mandolin part was like.

I met Frank Zappa in Buffalo, NY many years ago, before I moved west. He had hired the Buffalo Philharmonic to rehearse some orchestral music he’d been writing. A friend in orchestra management invited me to hang out in the hall and listen. After the rehearsal I ran across Frank backstage, sitting on an Anvil road case and having a smoke all by himself. I struck up a conversation that centered on the possibility of him writing for the guitar in an orchestral setting, and he mentioned that several of the afternoon’s pieces did indeed have parts but weren’t with him that day. We chatted about a mutual friend who had been playing in his band and Frank relished telling me more than a few Vinny Colaiuta stories. I invited him to dinner and he declined because he was flying out immediately after the rehearsal. That was the extent of my 15 minutes with Frank Zappa, never to be forgotten.

Meanwhile, back in LA, we had to rehearse this stuff, after everyone had already put in a bazillion hours on their own. The fact that the first rehearsal was two days after Thanksgiving meant that a lot of shedding and polishing was going to be happening during a busy, busy time.

The first thing John said at the rehearsal was, “Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for giving up your Thanksgiving.” We laughed a knowing laugh since we all knew how close to the truth it was, but we were ready for anything because, my God, when someone acknowledges a simple fact like that, you will go to the ends of the earth for him.

I imagined turkey roasting to the sounds of a violinist pizzing and plucking, smacking the instrument with an open hand, a quick arco gesture and returning to more percussive abuse. Questi Cazzi di Piccione (find your own Google translator cuz I ain’t writing it here, buddy) for string quintet was brilliantly played and to tell the truth, sounded damn near perfect at first run-through.

Ruth Is Sleeping, a four-hands piano piece was also brilliantly performed by Joanne Pearce Martin (LA Phil principal) and Vicki Ray (principal everywhere else). I heard a lot of stories about their practice sessions together for this piece and that’s part of the fun and excitement of being involved in something like this. They’re war stories, really, and the bonds they create translate to the commitment and performance of the music. I love the smell of 32nd notes over the barline of a compound meter in the morning. That kind of thing.

Uncle Meat/The Dog Breath Variations was pure Zappa writ large with an expanded ensemble. The mellifluously titled G-Spot Tornado was a manic romp/trance dance full of fractured energy, especially when Mark Watters’ baritone sax literally burst through the seams of the orchestra to announce its presence. John had wanted to play this one “as fast as we can play it, and then one notch more,” and he got his chance when four or five bows and curtain calls later from a hopped-up new music audience on their feet in Walt Disney Concert Hall, he turned to us and said, “Let’s do it again!”

--------------------------------------------------

Note: More pieces on new music and John Adams from this blog can be found here:

A Short Ride with John Adams
New Music, John Adams & Boulez
From Mahler to Adams
Preparing for Boulez, Part 1
Preparing for Boulez, Part 2
Preparing for Boulez, Part 3
Preparing for Boulez, Part 4

December 4, 2009 | Link to this entry

Yeah, Kenny!

With that little catch phrase, so end many nights in orchestra pits in and around LA. Local tradition holds that whenever a substitute player finishes his or her first night on a show, if they are particularly “on” (and they usually are!) someone in the orchestra will yell out, “Yeah, (name here)!” immediately after the exit music. It’s a nice accolade from fellow players in response to a good first performance. About ten years ago at the Pantages Theatre, after a great substitute performance by bassist Kenny Wild, “Yeah, Kenny!” could be heard throughout the pit and it stuck…even if Kenny is not there. So now, after the usual accolades to the evening’s players someone will always add “Yeah, Kenny!” and it cracks everyone up and puts all in a good mood for the evening hang or the drive home.

I think it’s a fitting tribute to a guy who has always been one of my favorite musicians in LA, a bassist of extraordinary feel and versatility, with a personality that is so infectious with good will and optimism that you can’t help but rise to the occasion whenever he sits next to you. That, and his playing are what has made him a mainstay in the Los Angeles studio scene for over 30 years.

Before I moved here 27 years ago, I was a fan of the band Seawind. They burst on the local music scene, after honing their songs and performance in Hawaii, with a debut album on Creed Taylor’s revered jazz label, CTI. It was a change for Creed’s label, which was used to releasing sides from jazz artists like Joe Farrell and George Benson. Their songs had a fresh sound with a tight horn section and featured incredible vocalist Pauline Wilson (then-wife of drummer Bob Wilson), keys/saxophonist Larry Williams and, of course, Kenny Wild on bass. It heralded a new direction in pop music. Almost every player in the band became popular in the studios appearing on countless recordings that were made during that rich time in LA’s music history.

Recently, Seawind got back together for a reunion CD and subsequent tour of Japan, where they were extremely popular. I’ve been listening every chance I get and it is so much fun to hear the band play new renditions of some of their most popular tunes and introduce new ones. The CD is engineered and mixed by Steve Sykes with a big sound that while modern in its aural space brings me right back to the high energy of the band’s original sound.

Seawind’s Reunion CD can be found here at seawindjazz.com along with the latest news about the band.

November 19, 2009 | Link to this entry

The Big Beta Test

This week T*Mobile announced that due to a massive server outage almost all Sidekick data, including email, contact info, events and to-do lists are gone forever, vaporized into the ether of cloud computing. The Sidekick, you may recall, was one of the first phones to offer email and web access, a forerunner of today’s state of the art Apple iPhone.

The lesson here is to make sure that if you rely on a so-called smart phone or web application, you must have a reliable in-house backup method. This applies to services like Google’s Gmail, Yahoo Mail or any of their online services (calendar, to-do, etc) as well. All your info is stored on their servers, nothing resides on your computer. Should a mishap occur, you just can’t rely on that provider’s possibly nonexistent redundancy.

Cell phones…they’re an indispensable convenience in so many ways allowing us to do business from almost anywhere, keep tabs on the kids, get help in emergencies; the list goes on. They’ve been around for how many years now? Then, why is it no matter what phone you use, whether a lowly RAZR or the latest iPhone 3GS, do we still have to deal with dropped calls, voicemail messages that sometimes arrive a day late and other annoying anomalies that should have been taken care of long ago for a service that charges $50 or more per month?

I think it’s a big never-ending beta test.

October 16, 2009 Update: Microsoft, owner of the maker of the Sidekick phone, announced that they would be able to restore most, if not all of the data lost by the server outage.

October 14, 2009 | Link to this entry

Irving Penn: An Appreciation

Late last night I read the news that photographer Irving Penn had died at age 92. Although he was widely known as a fashion photographer, his career spanned many radically different phases but the common thread through all was his clean, spare style and his particular view of the world.

Portraits, still lifes, ethnic studies, nudes, almost nothing escaped the gaze of Penn’s camera and was transformed in the process. Penn was an inveterate experimenter in photographic processes having almost single-handedly, in the 1960s, brought back the nineteenth-century art of the handmade platinum/palladium print.

He was an adept master printer in the darkroom, turning out beautifully luminous photographs on gelatin silver fiber paper, the common black and white photographic paper of the day and used workaday methods such as bleaching and toning to bring his subjects alive on the paper. Penn realized that the art of the photographer lie not only in clicking the shutter but to reveal that image in now seemingly anachronistic alchemic methods which remain unmatched in quality and beauty. The integrity of the artist having a hands-on dialogue with his materials from spark of creation to finished print is Penn’s legacy to all creative persons.

He was known as a perfectionist, but we know that perfection can never be attained no matter how hard we try, for in the moment it is within reach it becomes a sterile and inhuman thing and shatters into fragments. Penn never achieved the perfection he was looking for, but what he did achieve was resonance and there can be no greater achievement for an artist than to have an audience who feels the reverberations of knowingness when they gaze upon your work.

October 8, 2009 | Link to this entry

The Speech

A few weeks ago, as kids across America returned to school to begin another academic year, a fever pitch arose from din to clamor over the President’s then-upcoming address exhorting students to stay in school and work hard.

At first, I was amused by the few comments I read, though even amongst this partisan America, was still surprised, but when all hell broke loose within the next few days I had to step back, take a look and figure it all out.

How could anyone have any objection to any President past or current, addressing students and giving them a pep talk about buckling down, doing the work and staying focused? In recent years Presidents Reagan, GHW Bush and Clinton gave “new school year” speeches without the maelstrom of protest we saw this time around. (GHW Bush’s speech was decried by Democrats post-speech but on the basis of spending taxpayer money for “paid political advertisement” purposes. Bush the W was conspicuously absent from the practice.)

I went to the website of the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, which had raised one of the first objections. There I found a press release explaining their position.

It seems they were miffed by the Dept of Education’s handouts and lesson plans that were distributed and/or available to teachers to help students prepare for the speech and analyze it afterwards. They objected to the “glorification” of the President by the suggestion that students “read books about Presidents and Barack Obama” and by questions to be answered after the speech, such as “How did President Obama inspire you?”

They didn’t like that the children were asked to make posters about setting “community and country goals” and to “listen to the President and other elected officials”.

Are people actually worried that this will “indoctrinate” our children into “group speak/group think” and social activism of the Democratic persuasion?

Sorry, but this kind of thinking will indoctrinate children into a world of paranoia and a culture of fear that has no place in anyone’s America.

October 6, 2009 | Link to this entry

Back Again

Fall is here, the weather is cooling off in Southern California (finally!) and hopefully I'll have more time to devote to writing. Life stays busy, especially with a six year old daughter, and I've been experimenting with new-to-me antiquarian photo processes, each of which you could devote a lifetime to. I'll be writing about them sometime soon as well as an array of other subjects. At times I may even get a little political...well, maybe not political but c'mon...someone's got to keep a sane take on things, right?

Which brings me to this post...

October 6, 2009 | Link to this entry

about

Paul Viapiano

Paul Viapiano is a guitarist working in film, television and live performance based in sunny Pasadena, California.

You can email me here.

search

browsing

reading

listening
archives