Musicians

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.

Guitarist and ethnomusicologist Bob Brozman, who progressed from an early fascination with the delta blues of the South to a consuming passion for the traditional music of Hawaii and became a leading authority on the National steel guitar, has died. He was 59. Brozman was found dead April 23 at his home in Santa Cruz. His death was ruled a suicide, according to the coroner's office of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department. Brozman emerged in Santa Cruz in the 1970s as a street musician, playing a decidedly uncontemporary American roots style of music ranging from obscure jazz tunes to Hawaiian chanties.

In 1968, a fledgling band called Iron Butterfly released an album featuring a decidedly unorthodox acid-rock song that rambled on for 17 minutes and included a 2 1/2-minute drum solo. Executives at the band's label, Atlantic Records, cringed at the prospect of marketing an album whose title track took up the entire side of a vinyl LP and came with the tongue-twisting title "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." Efforts to persuade the San Diego-based group to edit its opus proved futile.

Robert Plant will bring his latest roots-music project, the Sensational Space Shifters, to the U.S. for the first time with a tour starting June 20 in Dallas. The 21 dates confirmed so far will span the country and take him to 15 states and is slated to go through July 27 in Brooklyn, N.Y., and stop at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on June 26. The Sensational Space Shifters consist of six musicians whose collective resumes include stints with a disparate group of acts such as Sinead O'Connor, Tinariwen, Portishead and Massive Attack.

Commercial-music licensing is a booming business, as advertisers, filmmakers, TV producers and others use pop songs to gloss their products. Recent ad spots include Texas blues star Gary Clark Jr.'s soulful number "Next Door Neighbor Blues" as the soundtrack to a recent J.C. Penney Co. swimwear ad, British folk singer Jake Bugg's "Lightning Bolt" selling Gatorade, and Seattle's breakout hip-hop team Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' "Can't Hold Us" hawking...

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.

Twenty-nine years ago, a doctor at a Denver mental hospital sat a sickly, slightly retarded boy named Tim Baley down at a piano and watched him run his fingers across the ledges and valleys of the keyboard. The puzzled doctor began jotting down notes. Baley had undergone hundreds of tests, but medical minds were still having a hard time coming up with a diagnosis for the boy's developmental problems and poor health. The piano test only deepened the mystery.

Mastering classical music within the Hsieh family means practice--and lots of it. The two Hsieh children--Tiffany, 14, and Timothy, 10--spend hours every day practicing, just as each has done since before their fifth birthdays. But they have a lot further to go to catch up with their mother, Shirley Hsieh, who studied piano with top-ranking teachers for 25 years and is now a teacher herself.

Guitarist and ethnomusicologist Bob Brozman, who progressed from an early fascination with the delta blues of the South to a consuming passion for the traditional music of Hawaii and became a leading authority on the National steel guitar, has died. He was 59. Brozman was found dead April 23 at his home in Santa Cruz. His death was ruled a suicide, according to the coroner's office of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department. Brozman emerged in Santa Cruz in the 1970s as a street musician, playing a decidedly uncontemporary American roots style of music ranging from obscure jazz tunes to Hawaiian chanties.

More musicians are in the midst of a labor dispute and a strike is threatened, this time in Seattle. The union that represents the musicians of the Seattle Symphony and Seattle Opera is playing hardball after the management of both groups proposed on Oct. 10 that the musicians  take a 15% reduction in overall compensation for the 2012-13 season.  The Seattle Symphony and Opera Players' Organization on Monday approved a “strike authorization” for...

People who experienced Woodstock through the lens of the 1970 documentary film "Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music" can describe every contour of Richie Havens' face. With focused eyes and a scraggly beard, the singer, songwriter, guitarist and activist, who died on Monday at age 72, is ingrained into a generation's memory. In the film and on record, you can hear the mantra that he offered echo across Max Yasgur's farm, and that message has resonated over the years to become one of Woodstock's archetypal performances.

Drawn to imaginative ideas about sound and pitch, musician and composer Dean Drummond found the traditional instruments of European classical music inadequate to perform the seemingly "out of tune" intervals of microtonal music. So he followed the lead of his mentor - iconoclastic American composer Harry Partch - and invented instruments that would produce a complete palette of tonal pitches. The music makers were known by such fittingly unconventional names as the zoomoozophone and juststrokerods.

HONOLULU - He's known as the Woody Guthrie of Hawaiian music, a virtuoso ukulele player who's helped to introduce new generations to music that might otherwise be lost. But on the autumn morning I met up with Eddie Kamae, few people seemed to recognize the octogenarian wearing Levis and a blue work shirt. It was just after 9 a.m., and Eddie was eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream at the Wailana Coffee House in Waikiki. He had risen before sunrise to pray, read the paper and watch the sky lighten from the nearby apartment building where he and his wife, Myrna, have lived for nearly half a century.

Kaunakakai, Hawaii - A fire that raged through Hotel Molokai's Hula Shores restaurant last spring did not keep the kupuna - and their audience - from claiming their spots near the lapping sea and coconut palms. For more than a decade, at 4 p.m. Fridays, 10 to 30 kupun a ("elders" in Hawaiian) have gathered at the hotel to strum their ukuleles and sing the lost songs of their youth. Half of the kupuna had their backs to the audience; instead of performing they sat around card tables sipping wine, laughing and enjoying themselves.

Violeta Parra grew up in poverty in rural Chile and became an internationally recognized musician, her songs covered by such luminaries as Joan Baez and Shakira. With its grand arc, her story would fit nicely into the standard biopic format, but director Andrés Wood wisely opts for a more impressionistic approach in "Violeta Went to Heaven. " His feature matches its subject in turbulence and intensity, scrambling chronology in a revelatory way. Francisca Gavilán's lead performance burns with a dark radiance that's anything but self-congratulatory.

A musician and a retired attorney were found fatally stabbed Monday inside their home in Davis. Oliver “Chip” Northrup, 88, and 76-year-old Claudia Maupin were found dead Monday morning inside a home on Cowell Boulevard. Officers initially went to the house to do a welfare check, as the two had not been seen or heard from all day. Northrup played guitar in a group called the Putah Creek Crawdads. They performed Saturday at the Davis Farmers Market. Northrup was also a retired attorney, dealing with court of appeals-level cases.

The start of a new season is usually a celebratory time for an orchestra. But for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the past few days have been a major headache for management and ticket holders. Musicians with the orchestra have been on strike since Saturday after contract negotiations fell through. The orchestra said the disagreement centers mostly around wages and employee contributions toward healthcare costs.  Chicago's orchestra joins a number of other classical groups experiencing labor problems.

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.

It was a balmy late-autumn Sunday in L.A.'s historic West Adams district, during what Henry James would've called "the perfect middle" of the afternoon. Nattily dressed visitors strolled through a hedge-rowed Italianate garden bathed in ocher light. Some paused to admire the facade of a handsome Baroque red-brick building, inspired by Sir Christopher Wren's Hampton Court in London. Yet the prime attraction was taking place inside, not outside, UCLA's William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

LONDON - Downing a lunch of fish and chips just before going onstage Friday at the Barbican Centre here, 10 upbeat teenagers from Los Angeles acted, like teens everywhere, as if they were casually taking it all in. They weren't. For most of these high-schoolers, this was their first trip away from home, and it didn't take long for them to admit that everything, from flying in an airplane to witnessing a snowstorm just after they landed last Wednesday, was a gleeful new experience.