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!

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!”

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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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Which brings me to this post...

I was impressed by the sheer number of photographs in the show, well over one hundred, mostly 11x14 in size. In traditional film photography, I’ve always felt that the actual making of the image in-camera represents only half of the final artwork. The other half, and by far the hardest part, is printing the image in the darkroom. This is where the photographer’s vision is realized, in the alchemy of light, paper and chemistry. These prints were awesome in the literal meaning of that overused word. Inky black richness and detailed highlights coexisting with a beautiful scale of grey that sucked you into its world. I read somewhere that to see the light, you have to print dark, and while that may be a gross generalization (and opinion!) I can see the genesis of that idea in these prints. Even more amazing is that almost all of them are contact prints, the negative and the paper sandwiched together in a frame and exposed to a light source. All of the beautiful richness of the print has to be on the negative itself, for there is little opportunity to use the usual tricks of the trade that photographers who enlarge their negatives use quite regularly and matter-of-factly.

I was surprised that I was drawn to the abstract photographs of intense beauty; cracks in a mud plain, peeling paint, broken glass, close-ups of tide pools, bubbles and other subjects, seeing that I hadn’t been interested in that style before, but these were printed so beautifully that I instantly “got it”. It took two hours to see it all and I could easily have gone back several times to let it all sink in.

The show’s no longer in Santa Barbara, but you can visit the Brett Weston Archive here.

A sold-out concert with Andrea Bocelli started things off in June and although Bocelli is everywhere these days with a ubiquitous concert video on PBS, it was a lot of fun. Some nice charts (especially a beautifully intricate written-out classical guitar solo on Besame Mucho) along with a good conductor made the night a very musical one; even producer David Foster sat in with us for a few numbers. Andrea was all business with no diva-osity in sight…a great sounding singer whom the musicians loved working with.

Next up was one of the greatest fantasy gigs in recent memory, the chance to play some music from Tommy with Roger Daltrey along with my mates, bassist Trey Henry, drummer Brian Miller and fellow guitarist Tariq Akoni. Roger, who is in incredible shape, rocked the stage, spinning and swinging his microphone at the end of its cable, belting out Pinball Wizard at the top of his lungs. I probably played louder and harder than I have in a long time and at one point was bouncing around so much that my glasses almost fell off my face! An unsurpassed gig that was pure joy in its unadulterated excitement that brought back all the reasons I wanted to play guitar in the first place…

A few weeks later, composer Bill Conti (Rocky, The Karate Kid, The Academy Awards) conducted a tribute concert to Henry Mancini and his music. Harvey Mason, Dave Grusin, Mike Valerio, Brian Pezzone and myself comprised the rhythm section, while Tom Scott and Plas Johnson added their saxophones to the mix. Plas reprised his original role as saxophonist on The Pink Panther and both he and Tom dueled on a special Dave Grusin arrangement of Peter Gunn. One of the highlights for me was another Grusin arrangement of Mr. Lucky, a really great chart! Dave Grusin has always been one of my favorite composer/musicians and I’ve always held him up as an ideal, so this chance to meet him and work with him was very special.

Monica Mancini, Henry’s incredibly talented daughter, and Brian Stokes Mitchell (Ragtime, Jelly’s Last Jam) added their beautiful vocals to many tunes…it’s hard to imagine a more musical and fun concert, unless of course, you add Frank Marocco and his accordion, too! Along with Bill Conti’s reminiscing and rapport with the audience (I think Bill Conti should be the next conductor/director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra…!) it all added up to a beautiful homage to a man who wrote so much of Hollywood’s most memorable and beloved music.

The very next week I hauled out my trusty banjo to play George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in its entirety (a first for the Hollywood Bowl) with the LA Philharmonic and a cast of wonderful singers, conducted by Bramwell Tovey, a superbly talented and good-humored conductor from England. In his short before-concert remarks, he mentioned that “for this opera, Gershwin added four saxophones and a banjo, which brought something different both musically and socially to the orchestra this week.”

There’s more to come before the season ends and once again, I feel so incredibly lucky to have these kinds of musical experiences and to get to share them with you here. Hope your summer is as fun and rewarding as mine has been…

One of my favorite Gehry design touches that appears in several different guises throughout the backstage area is the use of raw Douglas fir plywood (a favorite material of the architect’s since his early days) in the bookcases in the lounge, lining the angled backstage walls and serving as suspended shelves on which the musicians can park their cases during rehearsals and concerts. Even the hall’s signage sports a special typeface by Bruce Mau named, “A font called Frank”.

Those who have known Frank Gehry’s work for years can’t help but smile when they walk in and see all the small details that are probably overlooked and taken for granted, but spell out Frank Gehry louder than the curved stainless steel forms he’s become known for.

In my initial statement, I talked about a need to make the musicians feel important. So another big piece of this was what the building did for the musicians: what it meant to them, how they felt in it, how they got to it, their point of arrival in their cars, where they parked, where their dressing rooms were. I felt, and the client felt, all of these things were important…

The message you get when you go backstage at most concert halls is that you’re in a dungeon. These poor bastards: they’re asked to come out onstage in their tuxes and play beautiful music, then go back in their holes.

…it was written into the program that the musicians would get facilities that most orchestras don’t get. We thought the ambience was important in order to get people in the mood for making music.

The virtual orchestra, a sequencer controlling a bank of sound modules and controlled by a player (ha!) tapping a touchpad in time to a live conductor, has been trying to claw its way into theatres since its invention. Marketed for use in school and community productions, where budgets are nonexistent and a dearth of good players sometimes exists, they promise to enhance these amateur offerings. I can see the intentions of the marketers, but students don’t really learn anything about playing together by playing along with a machine.*

Utilizing sampling technology, whereby a natural instrument is duplicated electronically from samples of actual sounds and brought together with sequencing software, which puts all the instruments together in time, the missing element is the actual performance of the individual player, hence the heart and soul of the sound itself. Fortunately, I’ve never had to play along with one of these gadgets, but I have several friends who’ve been forced into this predicament. The shrill sounds and stiff metric performances may be able to fool some audiences but no musician will ever be conned into thinking that this is as natural as playing along with a fellow human, however good enough is good enough for many producers who are mainly interested in the bottom line, tradition be damned. In the meantime, they still charge $100 a ticket to an unsuspecting public, not realizing they’re seeing the cut-rate version of a show that originally had 20 or more players in the pit.

Recently, some shows have received permission from the international musicians union (exclusion of initial caps intended) to use prerecorded material in conjunction with live playing from a local orchestra. The bottom line is usually what’s being looked after, as they can hire half as many players and still get a fuller sound after it’s been beefed up by the tracks, however, these tracks aren’t always of the highest quality in terms of sound, performance and rhythmic time. That’s because, in an effort to save even more money, tracks are recorded by musicians who are plainly sub par, where the only clicks they’re likely to know about are related to their computer mice.

Orchestras, like all other organizations that thrive on teamwork, are only as good as their weakest members and when that weakest member is a poorly recorded, poorly played or poorly edited track, it brings an otherwise potentially inspiring performance down to a lower common denominator.

Musicians and audiences deserve better.

* Some schools hire a few professional musicians to sit among the student players, which has several benefits. The sound of the orchestra is stronger and more focused plus the students gain the huge advantage of working alongside a positive musical role model. The use of a machine to “enhance” student musicals also laments the loss of the charm of an amateur production; must everything be a slick and glossy techno-show, to say nothing of the falsifying effect on student egos which are already inflated due to the push for “self esteem” which has already had a detrimental effect on the student musician’s mindset (see video).

My friend Kevin Axt, bassist for Chuck Mangione, and one of the most talented, soulful and eloquent people I know, granted me his kind permission to publish his words and thoughts written shortly after attending Gerry Niewood’s memorial service in early March.

Words vs. Music

I suppose that it's rather ironic to comment on the effect that music has on us by using words, but I'm afraid that this written-word medium is the distillation process through which these thoughts and feelings must pass. Gerry Niewood was and is a great friend and musical partner. At his memorial service yesterday I was struck by the phenomenon of the contrasting visceral effects between words and music. Gerry's son Adam, a great sax player in his own right, wordlessly began the service by fronting a quartet that included Jim McNeely (p), Chris Higgins (b), and Bill Goodwin (d). They played jazz standards in a big resonant stone church. No mics. Every note heartfelt and laden with love, longing, gratitude, remembrance, worship; All the things that Gerry meant to these musicians as well as the assembled family and friends. Of course these same notes carried subtexts that cannot be described with words, yet were felt by all in attendance- timeless expressions of thought and emotion- spiritual expression without ideological definition. I let these notes move me and wash over me and through me. Then the service started, and by this I mean the words. The words were beautiful too, but they felt limited and fundamental. The music felt like a multidimensional crystal into which one peered- where the slightest twist of the wrist would reveal an entirely new universe. The words were flat like paper. I found my mind wandering, almost impatient. The words were spoken artfully, yet the content felt slow and cumbersome and monochromatic. I did my very best to attend, but the notes continued to reverberate within me causing my thoughts to disconnect from the words, seeking more fertile ground. As musicians we understand that we are gifted with the ability to communicate with the language of music. We experience the bliss of creating moments in time that levitate our beings; egoless expressions of the content of our hearts and souls which we share with each other and all those present to witness these moments. These are discourses of the highest order- the ultimate interfaith worship.

People came and went from the podium on the stage. They shared personal observations of Gerry and they offered their perspectives on the irrational twist of fate that brought Gerry's death. And then the musicians would play again. Gene Bertoncini played a solo nylon string guitar and took me to that place again- the place where I could feel Gerry and all the other musicians that were fortunate enough to make music with him. Chuck Mangione stood before a mic and in a voice choked with emotion, shared his tribute to Gerry honoring him as a great friend and musician. He then moved away from the mic to the center of the stage and played two choruses of Amazing Grace with absolute perfection. It was a mystical act of superhuman strength that provided the most profound moment of the service. We felt his love for Gerry and the anguish of his loss, all of our losses, in every note; the last of which trailed off for 20 seconds, a perfect decrescendo into absolute nothingness. We heard 50 years of love, and friendship and pain in a single resolute fading note.

How is this done? Words have not been invented to explain; we as musicians simply know this as a simple fundamental fact of what we do. We may occasionally forget how blessed we are to possess this gift and to share it among ourselves and with others that are not as blessed. Music is both this thing that we get to create and a mystical force that we get to channel at the same time. All the physical rules of the universe as we know them do not apply. Those of us fortunate enough to contribute to this force are granted a kind of eternal life. Those of us that leave too soon are no less eternal. Those of us left behind can only attempt to grasp the magnitude of the gift that we've been given as musicians, and our lives are the joyously futile pursuit of expressing our gratitude for such a gift. Gerry's playing and his life manifested this thing which I can't explain yet we all understand.

- Kevin Axt

In each rehearsal, Zubin conducted the upbeat and the downbeat, as well as the first bar, in one tempo, no stretching of the phrase. It was all business with him. On the night of the first concert, he gave the upbeat, the downbeat, and milked the hell out of that first beat and totally laid back the attack of beat two. It was unexpected, exciting and scary at the same time. I played that backbeat exactly where he placed it, and before beat four came around I looked up to see him staring at me with a big impish grin on his face! What a troublemaker…

Here’s a great quote from Zubin’s new autobiography that shows a wonderful insight I’ve rarely experienced or seen in words before. It shows the true meaning of musical collaboration.

Orchestras have a definite musical memory, and a conductor must see it as something being offered him by the orchestra. This kind of memory should never be underestimated; instead, it should be utilized as much as possible…If a conductor realizes this while he is still young, it helps him get past his uncertainties and doubts, not to mention the mistakes he will inevitably make.

What is needed is a willingness on the conductor’s part to take the musicians’ experiences and memories seriously and even to incorporate them, no matter how many years it may take. Only then can a conductor attain the necessary maturity, insight, understanding, and feel for the music he wants to perform. These qualities are just as important as all the analytical skills

- from Zubin Mehta’s new autobiography, Zubin Mehta: The Score Of My Life

“Where did you learn that?”, I asked.

“I just know it,” she replied.