Exploring the people, places & culture of greater LA
In case you missed the January 16th update to my first post about the 2012 Edwardian Ball Los Angeles, the event had to be postponed because the original venue, The Music Box in Hollywood, unexpectedly closed. While it was unclear for a brief time when and where the Ball would take place, I’m pleased to report that the event’s producers have regrouped and everything is back on track. Read their update below for all the latest details.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology periodically hosts musical performances, lectures, and other special events. The first such program of the New Year was just announced, and it will feature Romanian music performed on fiddle and accordion by Lulu Starr and Josh Petrojvic.
When Justin Katz and his San Francisco-based band Rosin Coven set out to celebrate Edward Gorey’s whimsically macabre aesthetic in 1999, little did they know that the event would grow into a beloved Bay Area tradition (one that has recently spread to Los Angeles). But that is exactly what the Edwardian Ball is today.
Pianist Kenny Werner is best known as a longtime accompanist of harmonica legend Toots Thielemans, who’s still playing unspeakably beautiful and sophisticated music at the age of 89. But Werner is also one of jazz’s most prodigious bandleaders.
An improviser of fearless temperament, he has a gift for transforming personnel who look interesting together on paper into sensational ensembles. Featuring an all-star quintet with tenor saxophonist David Sanchez and trumpeter Randy Brecker, his latest CD “Balloons” (HalfNote) is a case in point.
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.
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.
As LA Times Art Critic Christopher Knight pointed out in a recent article, “…retrospective knowledge [of the early years of post-World War II art in Los Angeles] is broad but shallow, a surface barely scratched.” Recognizing the dearth of knowledge and understanding of this formative period in the city’s cultural development, the Getty Foundation and the Getty Research Institute set out to uncover, document and reclaim the historical record of art in Southern California.
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