Musicians

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

JAZZ A fleet-fingered and frequently awe-inspiring bassist who first rose to prominence as part of Chick Corea's Elektric and Akoustic bands in the '80s, John Patitucci could most recently be heard on his knotty 2009 release "Remembrance" as well as holding down the bottom end in Wayne Shorter's touring band. For this performance he leads a trio that includes pianist Jon Cowherd and drummer Adam Cruz, who turned a few heads in his own right with his 2011 debut album "Milestone.

As the guitarist for hard-edged pop-rock band Incubus, Mike Einziger has headlined arenas and festivals around the world. But standing in a rehearsal room at Los Angeles Valley College in front of an assembly of trained musicians gearing up to perform his "End.> vacuum," an ambitious "Realization in Nine Movements" that will have its premiere today at UCLA's Royce Hall, he seems, well, nervous. Einziger, 32, fiddles with various keyboards and devices, including three vintage typewriters and an old gramophone that he and two friends will play to supplement the more traditional orchestra.

Southwest Chamber Music's L.A. International New Music Festival is more a Los Angeles interstitial new music festival. Skirting touristy Europe, these Southwesterners are not interested in inclusiveness but in filling gaps that very much need filling. Monday's installment, the third of the festival's four concerts at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall, did feature two admired L.A. composers who do not lack local institutional attention. Anne LeBaron, on the faculty at CalArts, happens to be the local composer of the moment with her breathtaking opera "Crescent City" currently in production and a piece on the Los Angeles Philharmonic's opening Hollywood Bowl concert in July.

Nancy Hefley looks like the meek lady behind you in the supermarket checkout line unloading a week's worth of groceries for the family. Tall and trim, her brown hair cut short and neat, butterfly-shaped glasses riding the bridge of her nose, Hefley hardly looks the part of a musician who gets standing ovations 80 nights a year from crowds that sometimes top 50,000.

In 1975, Donna Summer released a pop single unlike any before it. The singer, then an unknown in the U.S., was living in Germany and working with Italian producer Giorgio Moroder and lyricist Pete Bellotte. Together they came up with a breathy, minimalist number that sounded flagrantly sexy. Summer's coos acted as musical erotica atop a simple, four-on-the-floor drum beat. "Love to Love You Baby," all 17 minutes of it, set a template that would ignite Summer's career, and a style that defined an era: disco.

The light bulb moment for Chris Kantrowitz came in the form of a broken disc drive. Sitting on a bus as it was rolling across Turkey on a concert tour in summer 2009, the 37-year-old Los Angeles entrepreneur watched singer-songwriter Lenny Kravitz fire up a disc drive where he had stored a song he had been recording. To their horror, the drive was dead. "I started asking other musicians how they kept copies of their work," Kantrowitz recalled. "They were all on these old tapes and disc drives.

The message on a pillow in the bedroom she shared with her late rock star husband now serves only to mock Troy Nowell. "Grow Old With Me," reads the stitched lettering. "The Best Is Yet to Be." The former Troy denDekker was married only seven days before Bradley Nowell, her 28-year-old husband and the creative force behind the Long Beach-based punk-ska band Sublime, died of a heroin overdose May 25 in a San Francisco motel room.

When celebrity photographer Barbra Porter picks up her camera, such stars as Billy Bob Thornton, Garth Brooks and Eric Clapton know she'll make them look good. But in her other career, Porter also makes the stars sound good -- by performing as a violinist for the Academy Awards telecast, on the soundtrack to "Pirates of the Caribbean" and in concert with Celine Dion. "I think many musicians have multiple talents," says Porter, who rejects the image of stuffy, single-minded classical artists.

About two years ago, Raul Malo was in the midst of a career crisis, so the lead singer and songwriter for the boundary-bending rock-country-pop band the Mavericks made a visit to a guru, and it shook him to the core. "When I left there I thought, 'You know what? We know nothing. We don't know a thing ,"' the 35-year-old musician says in the gravest of tones. "He's seen it all, he does it all." Yes, Malo found religion, but not in a Tibetan monastery nor under a revival tent down South.

Bono could become the richest musician on the planet after Facebook Inc.'s first day of trading, according to numerous reports. Elevation Partners, the investment group of the lead singer of the rock band U2, owns 2.3% of Facebook, worth an estimated $1.5 billion based on the company's IPO, according to various reports on the Web.

In the days and weeks after Hurricane Katrina made landfall and the dark waters rose in late summer 2005, it didn't take long for people outside New Orleans to begin inquiring -- not just about the safety of loved ones or the state of the infrastructure but something larger -- as distinct as it was amorphous. The concern was not simply what would be physically erased in the wake of disaster -- and forced diaspora -- but what would happen to the culture. Its "ways" -- the music, the language, the rituals and rhythms -- all of what animated this unique piece of our nation's history and identity: the country's conversation piece.

Film producer Stacey Sher and musician Kerry Brown have listed their house in the Beverly Crest area at $5.795 million. Originally designed by Wallace Neff, the 1948 house was once the home of actress Julie Andrews and director Blake Edwards and later remodeled. The 1.61-acre site includes a 7,800-square-foot main house, a 2,480-square-foot guesthouse, a separate building with a bathroom, a tennis court, a basketball court, a swimming pool and waterfalls. The living space features beamed ceilings, stained-glass windows, brick, stonework, mahogany doors and six fireplaces.

Timpanist Joseph Pereira was in the kitchen, preparing to marinate short ribs in French wine, when he made an important discovery: That nice plastic cork at the top of the wine bottle had a terrific consistency. It wasn't long before Pereira, who has long customized his instruments, was experimenting with the plastic cork inside the end of his drum mallets. "I cut the top part off and wrapped it for a new stick, which I use every week," says the musician and composer. "It has a really warm tone to it. " His compositions also come from unlikely sources.

It wasn't the words of Shakespeare that sprang to mind Monday night as I found myself sitting onstage at the $240-million Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, surrounded by members of the Pacific Symphony, my trusty clarinet in my lap, the score to Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" ballet music laid out before me and music director Carl St.Clair wielding his baton in front of us. No, it was the immortal question posed by Talking...

In a world devoted to the instant and the new, Bob Marley, dead for more than 30 years, could be a dusty musical footnote. Instead, the enormous popularity of the transcendent reggae superstar shows no signs of abating, a situation"Marley," a moving and authoritative new documentary, takes as its mission to illustrate and explain. Only 36 when he died of cancer on May 11, 1981, Marley went from strength to strength as a recording artist and cultural figure, breaking out from early Jamaican success to enthrall a world of listeners in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Blowing a kiss to the audience and hugging every judge and presenter onstage, an exuberant Pablo Sainz Villegas, 28, of Spain took the $25,000 Stotsenberg Prize on Friday in the closing ceremony of the first Parkening International Guitar Competition at Pepperdine University in Malibu.

It was the day after Christmas, and Eric Castro, a lawyer who also sings professionally, was warming up his baritone by running through trills and hums. After working hard right up to the holiday, wasn't he eager to have a day off? "To tell you the truth, it's a complete pleasure and honor to do this," said Castro as he prepared to sing arias inside a crowded living room where "jam session" took on a whole new meaning. Each Boxing Day since 1998, the Spanish Colonial Revival house at the end of a cul-de-sac off Los Feliz Boulevard has vibrated with the sounds of Handel's "Messiah," performed by as many as 125 choristers and orchestral musicians.

In a move that could mark the final chapter in a financial tailspin, the San Antonio Opera will file for liquidation bankruptcy within the next 20 days. The organization, which began its 16th season in September, also faces a federal lawsuit from the American Federation of Musicians alleging that the company still owes musicians payments from a canceled production from January 2010. The San Antonio Opera's lawyer, Randy Osherow, told the San Antonio Express-News that he believed the musicians' suit would become part of the bankruptcy claim and that the company will also cancel upcoming performances of "Don Giovanni" and "Barber of Seville.

The show tune unfurls grandly from the Roland Super Spinet organ out across antique Dodger Stadium, momentarily and splendidly turning a game of baseball into a ride on a calliope. You hear the familiar melody and think of one person, the composer of Chavez Ravine, the keeper of the Dodgers soundtrack, the franchise's most enduring three names since Pee Wee Reese, the organist known as Nancy Bea Hefley. Listen closer. Listen close enough to hear past her sophisticated chords to the Southern twang of a man standing by her side and softly asking, "Everything OK, dear?"