You see, platinum printing is a contact process. You need a negative the same size as your final image and it needs to have certain properties in order to create a rich print, but that’s only the beginning. The prints are made on beautifully tactile watercolor or printmaking paper. Because such paper is manufactured acid-free for archival longevity, it contains carbonates that raise the pH of the paper into the alkaline end of the scale. This alkaline pH doesn’t get along with the platinum/palladium emulsion, which is by nature slightly acidic, and all sorts of maladies ensue ranging from washed-out images to mottled, blotchy prints. Soaking the paper in a relatively benign dilute acid bath for several minutes and drying it overnight usually ensures success.

By now you’re probably saying, “Doesn’t he know that there are digital cameras and inkjet printers that would save him a lot of time?” Well…yes, but there’s nothing like the fun (my definition) of slopping, I mean, brushing emulsion on paper. You’re making light-sensitive paper by hand and it’s as analog a process as can be especially in today’s speed-of-light existence, no pun intended.

After the paper dries, you slap the negative in place and expose in the sun or a UV exposure unit for a few minutes, take the paper out and pour hot developer over it all at once. The image comes up immediately in beautiful rich tones. After a few clearing baths to rid the paper of excess salts, the print is washed and laid out to dry. It’s as close to magic as anything can be.

Once you’ve done this a few hundred times you start getting the hang of it (Malcolm Gladwell says that 10,000 hours is needed to become an expert in a field) and you can count on getting reliable results despite the huge number of variables inherent in a hand process like this.

Until…something goes wrong.

Well, it happened. Just as I was looking forward to making many new prints (while my girls were out-of-state visiting family for the week), I started getting results that didn’t match the quality of the prints I had been making for the past year. I checked my chemistry, the exposure unit, the brush…even the humidity, but it takes a lot of time to isolate the problem by changing just one variable at a time. Each iteration seems endless…mix chemicals, coat paper, wait for it to dry, humidify paper, expose, develop, clear, wash, dry.

I finally tracked the problem down to the paper, an all too common occurrence among platinum printers. Manufacturers change formulas without notice and although the changes don’t matter much to watercolor artists and printmakers, people like me who are dependent upon a precarious set of conditions are thrown into the abyss.

It got me thinking about how much life is like a platinum print. We settle into a groove, going about our daily routine, learning and loving, making it better, keeping our heads down and going for it. Then something comes along to uproot the balance we’ve struck and our lives need to be reevaluated, reordered, reconsidered. Sorting through can take a while but hopefully we’ll come out the other side stronger, confident and ready for more. Here’s to that hope for all of us…

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

- Ray Bradbury, The Paris Review, Spring 2010

I remember seeing the look on Esa-Pekka’s face just before one of our first rehearsals for John Adams’ El Nino in March, 2003. He had just had a run-through with Lorraine in his dressing room and his normally unflappable demeanor was replaced by a gushing look of amazement as he confided backstage to several players, “I’ve just had the most amazing concert in my room.”

Esa-Pekka and the orchestra premiered Neruda Songs in May, 2005 with Lorraine singing and Peter participating in an onstage conversation with EP regarding the piece and Peter’s inspiration for it. Although I didn’t play Neruda Songs that night (there is no part for my instrument in the orchestration) I was onstage to play excerpts from Stravinsky’s Agon, which Peter cited as an influence.

Peter’s father was Goddard Lieberson, the long-time president of Columbia Records who signed so many artists to that label and built it into a powerhouse of its time. During his conversation, Peter recounted that while growing up the house was always full of musical luminaries for visits and dinner. Shortly after Stravinsky had immigrated to this country, Goddard sent an invitation. He was so very concerned with the composer’s well-being in America that he gifted him that evening with a rather large book, the voluminous Tax Code of the United States. The maestro accepted the gift quite graciously as any guest would. Several weeks later when Goddard was speaking to Stravinsky on the phone, he asked him if he had enjoyed the book. Igor replied, “Yes, and I cried on every page.”

As I may have mentioned here before, I’m a dedicated photographer who uses film almost exclusively, prints in the darkroom and use various 19th Century historical processes to produce my final images. Yep, it’s all very geeky but it allows me to combine a love of visual arts with the technical side of my nature, plus I get to have the biggest chemistry set a kid could ever dream of.

After a few years and many hours of darkroom toil, I’m happy to announce that I’m participating in my first ever gallery show at the Elias Gallery in Whittier, California along with a group of incredible local photographer/printers who have been most encouraging and supportive. I have four prints in the show, two platinum/palladium and two gelatin silver lith prints, chosen by the show’s curator, Domenico Foschi.

Domenico Foschi is an Italian-born photographer living in southern California whom I met on the internet in a photography forum. His images were dreamlike and evocative. When I first saw his prints in person at two different shows I knew I had found someone with great vision and articulate skills to bring the image to life on paper. When the opportunity arose to buy one of his prints, I was thrilled to meet him in person and spend time talking, but what surprised me most was his openness and generosity. He was more interested in seeing and talking about my nascent work than telling me about his. It was a great hour and I came away so inspired, one of those rare moments that make you want to work harder to achieve your goals.

The gallery exhibition is currently open, with a reception scheduled for May 8.

Elias Gallery
6736 Greenleaf Avenue
Whittier, CA 90601
562.696.6868

Photographs by Domenico Foschi, Matthew Blais, Tori Nelson, Vinny Walsh, Patti Lemke and Paul Viapiano.

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!”

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

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 in revealing 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.