November 17, 2018 - Lift-Off
When I was starting to build the Inception program, I was told by Bill Kramer, who I knew as the development person from SCI-Arc (our local architecture school) and was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music when I reached out, to stop sending inquiry letters. Instead, make connections and take people to drinks, lunch, or dinner.
He reminded me for every 30 emails I sent, I’d get one response. That is if you’re Bill Kramer. (He is currently the President of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles). So for every seven or eight thousand emails, I got one response.
But all you need is one.
We were championed by Kim Bruno at the Ramon C. Cortines School for the Visual Arts in Downtown Los Angeles. They actually had a music composition program run by Michael Gasparik, but were having a hard time getting live musicians to play the kids’ music.
I was very generously offered the chance to pitch the program for an entire period. Out of the eight students who applied, five showed up.
The assignment was simple. Write an original composition for the instrument you play. You would come to Bedrock LA, a rehearsal and recording studio in Los Angeles, receive an initial mentoring session with a professional musician on your composition. You would go away for a couple weeks, and then come back for a follow up mentoring session with a master teacher.
One tiny flaw with this concept. The mentors I had lined up for round one were all not guitar players, and three kids wrote for guitar.
On Thursday night late, two days before program start, I was scouring music gig websites and whatever other platforms there were for a guitar teacher.
On November 18, 2018, professional Flamenco guitarist, Molina, answered the call. Perhaps not a composition teacher per se, he could improvise and certainly expand on the kids pieces and give them ideas. He also demonstrated some guitar playing techniques. He worked with Jayleen Montoya, Luis Diaz, and Noah Martinez.
Clinton Anthony Johnson, a LAUSD music educator and composer, went one-on-one with accomplished young composer Andrew Boone. (=He channeled God a lot, but that turned out to be ok because Andrew was very church-going.
And I, with a background in percussion and piano, worked with Jaime Tena, a drummer, who wrote a piano piece.
Each kid got thirty minutes of private instruction in the initial round.
Although we will mention her later, this is the first day we met Claire Morison, our Bedrock assigned engineer. She would eventually become the Co-Artistic Director and was nicknamed the “Mother of Inception,” especially while we were in-person.
How I knew we had something special? Claire not only catered to the hired musicians in the room, but also treated every young composer as though they were professionals. She asked Jayleen, who had brought in a loved (well-worn) guitar, if the temperature was right for her instrument. And she apologized to Jaime for not being able to remember his name after a single introduction.
Our film crew was Dave Tolley and Andrew Hwang from Getty Images where I had run the office briefly when it was WireImage (acquired by Getty) and the equipment was donated in kind. Tolley and Drew likewise treated these kids who were nervous out of their mind, simply like professionals.
We had given the kids a very special day, and we were just getting started.
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