Listen here:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/mperlichvideo/video/martin-perlich-global-village-nov-2011.mp3

or here:

http://www.kpfk.org/programs/110-globalvillagethurs/5396-10-nov-2011-duo-amantiscarl-stonemartin-perlich.html

My new novel, The Self-Pity Chronicles, is soon to be published, and I will be signing and reading from this at the amazing Book Soup on Sunset Blvd. on Saturday November 12th at 4:00 PM.

Click here to read the event listing at Book Soup’s website…

I hope to see you out at one of the greatest independent bookstores in existence!

I will also be interviewed by John Schneider on the wonderful radio show Global Village on Thursday November 10th at 12:30 AM.

Watch here.

I’d known Mark, of course, as “everyone in LA” does: nodding to him at concerts, reading his reviews, and now his on-line “Culture Monster.” http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/mark_swed/

But this was “quality time”, as they say—or is it “face time”??  In either case, in sidewalk cafes in front of the Hanoi Opera House or in the crowded allies outside the Vietnam National Academy of Music, I found myself listening closely—never a bad sign. He promised to contribute to CONVERSATIONS IN NEW MUSIC.

Back in LA I reminded him of his promise, wading through crowded lobbies at Zipper, Royce and Disney Halls, loosing mighty shafts of email. And finally at a PianoSpheres recital at Zipper I brought him to ground. Held at bay, he named the date. And, as you can see, he showed up with a big (for a critic) smile.

Of course, you can ask Mark anything, and I did. Mainly he touched on: work on his book on John Cage, the history of LA New Music, student life at Berkeley in the 60s, and the role of critic/reviewer (beginning with Shaw). I told him how important his review of the 2000 premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s “la Pasión Segun San Marcos” (St. Mark Passion) at the Stuttgart Festival had been to me. How I’d run out and bought the subsequent Hänssler 2001 recording, and programmed it on radio every chance I could since then. Mark spoke of the importance radio has played in turning people on to new music.

Watch the interview here.

I’d met Daniel in March, 1994 at the American premiere of his opera Rappaccini’s Daughter in San Diego. I’d seen his next opera, Florencia en el Amazonas at the LA Opera in 1996, the next —a comic opera Salsipuedes—at the Houston Grand Opera in 2004. Daniel had been an occasional guest on my public radio program, and we had become best friends.

In the months since Daniel went off to Austin we spoke only irregularly. But in the last weeks before his death we communicated more and more by email. I told him I had interviewed Grant Gershon who had conducted Il Postino at the World Premiere and spoke lovingly of Daniel as a man and a colleague in rehearsals for the opera.

Daniel called me from Austin for advice on an Andrews Sisters-like song for Meet John Doe—the opera he was never to finish—even sending me text and pages of the score. He was deciding not to take the Chair of a new department U of T was creating for him: “I miss my friends in LA,” he said. I told him: “Come here straight from the airport. We’ll have a welcome home dinner party waiting for you.”

For Il Postino, I’d already attended the Final Dress Rehearsal as well as the World Premiere, and later attended the free screening of the movie that had been zipped together from the following Saturday’s matinee live performance and screened four times to large crowds in Downtown LA and Orange County.

As his friend my concern over Daniel’s music was that it might be attacked by critics for its lack of avant-garde harmonic language—dissonant modernisms, radical staging, angry updated politics, etc. I suppose I was perhaps unprofessionally protective.

But I needn’t have worried; Il Postino was a smash hit. The greatest success of any new Opening Night in LA Opera history!

This video interview was taped about a week after the World Premiere—September 23, 2010—which was also the Grand Opening of the LA Opera Season 2010-2011. In the grey light of Daniel’s passing the tape shows us, as Mark Swed said in his Appreciation, a man who “…knew himself and he knew what he was doing.”

In the interview, shot in his office at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in the Los Angeles Music Center on March 15, 2011, Grant lavished praise on the new opera and the ease of working with the composer in the rehearsal process. He also looked back at his ten years leading the Master Chorale, his great satisfaction with the many new works they had commissioned, the qualitative changes in L.A. classical music world that he has observed growing up in Southern California, and his fruitful collaboration with Peter Sellars and John Adams.

On February 26, 2011 Southwest featured an entire evening of Smith’s music at Zipper: three of his works—In the Diaspora: Earthquakes & Sunrise Mission, Moths, Flames & the Giant Sequoia Redwood Trees and Taif: Prayer in the Garden of the Hijaz—featuring the composer as trumpet soloist. The hall was jammed; more black people than any New Music event I’d ever attended.

And, although Smith is a jazz trumpeter (although Braxton-like, if you will) the music was purely abstract “serious” music for ensemble. I never saw an audience concentrate so totally, especially after Intermission, when Leo joined the ensemble on trumpet, bending over, standing back up, bending again to change mutes, aiming his bell straight down to the floor at his fight. Although heard Black Church the year before, I was hammered cold. Our director, Mia Hannah and I were silent on the drive back to West Hollywood.

I knew from Jeff von der Schmidt  that next year Southwest has planned to premiere of Part One of Smith’s  two-year project of Ten Freedom Summers, a three evening cycle of concerts inspired by the Civil Rights Movement from1954 to 1964. This ground-breaking enterprise, in collaboration with Smith’s Golden Quartet is a special project celebrating the 25th anniversary of Southwest Chamber Music . Recording and domestic touring will be recorded by Cambria Master Recordings distributed internationally by Naxos of America.  Ten Freedom Summers is a project between Southwest Chamber Music A national tour beginning at Mutable Music in New York City is planned in 2012-2013.

The interview, taped March 9, 2011 at North Huntley Studios in West Hollywood, was a joyous event for me and Wadada Leo Smith, who explicated the meaning of each Freedom Summer, remembered his childhood in Leland, Mississippi and his roots in the blues. I regret to report that our time ran out before we could illustrate WLS’s unique personal approach to group improvisation and notation, Ankrasmation.

Watch the interview here.

Matt had played live on my radio program twice was a unique example among conservatory-only young performers. His ultra-democratic “take-it-to-the-streets” approach heroically (and perhaps a bit quixotically) included playing solo in coffeehouses and bars. Now the proprietor of Oxingale Records, he is responsible not only for making his recordings but marketing them as well. He has recorded the music of Jimi Hendrix, as well as Webern, Crumb, Elliott Carter, Berio, and other “difficult” music, and “jammed” with guest artists John Mclaughlin, Matt Wilson, Jan Jarczyk and David Sanford.

The cellist introduced his three new CDs: Meeting of the Spirits, Matteo: 300 Years of an Italian Cello, and Vinyl Cello. We recorded him January 21, 2011 at North Huntley Studios.

Watch the interview here.

As a youthful retail record clerk at Discount Records, I had sold many copies of Lalo’s Verve LPs, so the opportunity to visit with him at his comfortable, award-bedecked home on Hillcrest Road in Beverly Hills was worth bending the definition of New Music for this CONVERSATION. We shot him the afternoon of Tuesday, January 18, 2011.

The great Argentine composer, pianist and conductor has four Grammy Awards and six Oscar nominations, and is best known for his enormous output of work in jazz, Latin, film and TV scores. However, I chose to follow the “classical” side of the composer—the collaborator of Astor Piazzolla, friend of Dizzy Gillespie and arguably the best arranger this side of Gil Evans for his Jazz Meets the Symphony series.

I loved him at once: “I’ve heard good things about you,” he told me, leading us into a small exercise room to a basic BOSE “Wave” music system and proceeded to join me tapping our toes to his tribute to Thelonius, “Miraculous Monk” medley.

During the taping we talked about all of the above, “Pampas”, Argentine music, Piazzolla, Dizzy, Clint Eastwood. Mostly though I wanted to be sure the we doffed our caps to the work of Bob Attiyeh, founder of Yarlung Records, and the Yarlung Foundation, who bring so much support to young artists, both composers and performers.

Watch the interview here.