Exploring the people, places & culture of greater LA
It’s not often you have the opportunity to experience a live performance of Baroque music played on a period instrument, but that’s exactly what’s taking place this weekend at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Seats are still available to hear Shirley Edith Hunt on a ca. 1720 bass viol.
With its many museums and art galleries, the Miracle Mile and surrounding mid-Wilshire neighborhood is one of several important centers of LA’s vibrant art scene. Home to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Architecture+Design Museum, and the Craft and Folk Art Museum, as well as numerous galleries, visitors to this part of the city can easily spend several days exploring the area’s wealth of art venues.
Bay Area-raised jazz pianist Taylor Eigsti was already a seasoned veteran when he moved to Los Angeles at 18 to study music at USC, with several albums to his credit and numerous high profile gigs under his belt. Now based in New York City, he returns to LA on Sunday for a performance at Catalina’s with his extraordinary quartet featuring vocalist Becca Stevens, bassist Rueben Rogers and drummer Kendrick Scott. He’ll be focusing on music from last year’s Concord Jazz release “Daylight at Midnight.” While always responding to jazz’s improvisational imperative, the 26-year-old Eigsti has found inspiration in contemporary pop songs by artists such as Elliott Smith, Bjork, Coldplay, and Nick Drake, essentially building on a jazz tradition that dates back to Louis Armstrong’s stunning reinvention of Tin Pan Alley tunes in the 1920s.
If you’re into electric guitar and fascinated by the intersection of music and technology, there is a lot to love about this upcoming event. Tomorrow evening, Machine Project hosts Nick Didkovsky at their Echo Park gallery and performance space. Didkovsky is a New York based composer, guitarist, bandleader and principal author of the computer music language Java Music Specification Language who teaches computer music composition at NYU and Columbia. He’s also well known for his Black Sabbath guitar lessons on YouTube.
For many people, cemeteries are places to visit occasionally, and then only to pay respects to dead friends or family members. The owners of Hollywood Forever Cemetery make a concerted effort to give people more reasons to spend time on their grounds and expand their visitor base by hosting a variety of events not typically associated with cemeteries. This Saturday is one such happening.
This week jazz lovers in Los Angeles have the opportunity to hear Kurt Elling, one of the foremost male vocalists working today, perform with longtime pianist Laurence Hobgood at Catalina Bar & Grill. Their three night stand celebrates the release of “The Gate”, a new album produced by Don Was on which Elling explores contemporary rock and pop tunes.
With his perpetually dazed, beatific gaze, jazz guitarist and composer Bill Frisell found an ideal creative foil in the deadpan mug of silent film genius Buster Keaton. An ongoing relationship first documented on Frisell’s 1995 albums “Music for Films of Buster Keaton: Go West” and “Music for Films of Buster Keaton: One Week and High Sign” (Nonesuch), Frisell revisits his evocative scores for the three films Saturday afternoon at UCLA’s Royce Hall with bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen (the original recordings featured bassist Kermit Driscoll and drummer Joey Baron).
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