Exploring the people, places & culture of greater LA
To help usher in the holidays, the Los Angeles Conservancy is sponsoring its sixth annual holiday film matinee. This year, you can bring the entire family to see Miracle on 34th Street (1947), starring Edmund Gwenn, Maureen O’Hara, John Payne, and Natalie Wood.
Southern California and the Bay Area both boast large and fervently creative communities of jazz-steeped sonic explorers, but there’s surprisingly little cross pollination between the two scenes. Hopefully bassist/composer Lisa Mezzacappa’s SoCal sojourn this week will set some interesting collaborations in motion. She’s performing a series of gigs around the region with her rough and tumble quartet Bait & Switch, a garage jazz band steeped in the avant-garde lexicon of Ornette Coleman, Henry Threadgill, Eric Dolphy, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
This weekend, the Tim Burton exhibition at LACMA comes to a close. To help usher out this fantastic show in true Burton style, the museum is screening six of Vincent Price’s ghoulish classics back-to-back in honor of his centenary.
Chamber Music at the Clark is one of the city’s notable, if lesser-known, live music programs. Organized by the UCLA Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies, the series is distinguished by the excellence of its musical talent and the unique venue that hosts its concerts; namely, the ornate drawing room of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
The World Festival of Sacred Music is back with another eclectic program of music and dance performances that highlight the diverse range of sacred heritages in Los Angeles. Originally inspired by the Dalai Lama’s call for a festival of music on every continent to celebrate the dawn of the new millennia, this two-week series takes place once every three years and seeks to provide “…opportunities for people to come together and investigate issues of tolerance and diversity within our complex, urban environment,” according to Judy Mitoma, Festival Director.
Each week I receive dozens of press releases and emails about upcoming events around the Los Angeles area. Many of these happenings sound enticing, but it’s the rare event that truly captures my attention and stands out from the crowd. The upcoming performance of String Theory at the Ford Amphitheatre is one that jumped out at me.
Barbara Morrison always demurs when she’s described as a jazz singer, asserting that her primary and predominant allegiance is to the blues. But over the course of a career spanning five decades, she has earned the love and respect of an international array of jazz artists, and now that community is rallying to her at a difficult hour.
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