I can’t tell you verbatim about the life and times of my father circa pre-Aryn, but, I can tell you what I’ve heard, and goes something like this… My father, Martin Grusin, was a jazz musician, he was a writer, an academic, a performer of the arts and amongst many other things a brilliant story […]
It’s been said you can tell a lot about a person from the company they keep. When asking friends, fans, and fellow musicians about Sharifah Muhammad it became abundantly clear in two questions or less: that she was born into this world to sing. One of her friends, San Diego vocalist Missy Andersen, says she […]
Rhea Makiaris has always seen possibilities. For the San Diego-based singer a sense of adventure and trust in what life might offer have taken her from New York to Hawaii, and have seen her cruise the Caribbean. Though much of the rest of the world has experienced her music, we San Diegans can feel lucky […]
The dining room table. It’s where I left off in our story and, somewhat fittingly, where this last chapter begins and ends. As a writer of songs (and in recent years technical musings and product reviews), I have always felt most comfortable doing so at the kitchen table. I’m not quite sure where this phenomenon […]
Yale Strom is a musician, documentarian, author, and ethnographer that I had the privilege of profiling in last month’s Troubadour. His latest disk, Yale Strom and Hot Pstromi Present: City of the Future, Yiddish Songs from the Former Soviet Union, is a remarkable recording. The material, interpretation, and the performances of this disk make it […]
In the 1970s and early ’80s I worked at the Summer House Inn in La Jolla as a combination desk clerk, switchboard operator, bell man, reservationist, and whatever odd job that needed to be done that didn’t require driving the company car. It was an okay job, nothing great, but the greatest benefit of working […]
It took James Lee Stanley 20 years to put the finishing touches on his musical, Straight From the Heart, a story whose central theme details the close friendship of two women, played by Pamala Stanley and Chris Bennett, with the action focused on the joy and sorrow of life’s roller coaster. What stands out immediately […]
Fans of Hollywood movies concerning the trials and troublesome turns in the lives of gifted musicians, real and imagined, will doubtlessly note a curious habit among many of the movies attempting a cogent blend of music and moving image. What I’m thinking of in particular are those portraits of a singularly brilliant musician, a jazz […]
