Influences: Actress and singer Christine Ebersole

Christine Ebersole has had long and substantial careers in theater (she won a Tony for playing Big Edie and Little Edie in “Grey Gardens”) and movies (“Amadeus,” “Tootsie”), and as a singer, interpreting the music of Ira Gershwin, Rodgers and Hart, and Noel Coward. (Her performance in Coward’s comic play “Blithe Spirit” is also celebrated.) Not to mention television: She has appeared on programs including "Ugly Betty" and "Will & Grace," and was a cast member on “Saturday Night Live.”

An Illinois native, she escaped the Midwest for the world of New York theater after what she describes as an “extremely supportive” upbringing. 

Ebersole will be at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts  on Saturday with Stephen Sondheim and Brian Stokes Mitchell as part of "Stephen Sondheim: In Conversation." She discussed the story of her development.

Gene Laurent: At MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Ill., I had a professor who told me to leave school and go to New York. It’s rather shocking, isn’t it? He said, "Don’t stay here." I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, graduated … and got a job as a waitress.

Carole Lombard: My biggest influence was Carole Lombard. I loved her childlike mischievousness — that, I identified with. She had a complete honesty about her performance. I was drawn to “Twentieth Century.”  I identify her with the sophistication and the acting of that era. I felt like I had lived then.

Joni Mitchell: Joni really spoke to the human struggle — she was very deep. She just transcended the now. There was something about her lyrics — she’s a poet. I love all the early albums, particularly “Court and Spark” and “Blue.”

Colleen Dewhurst (in “A Moon for the Misbegotten”) and Vanessa Redgrave (in “Orpheus Descending”): There’s a theatricality to their acting and yet it never veers from honesty: It’s like they don’t put on airs. I love that directness about the acting. It’s not just a bag of tricks.

Gerald Gutierrez: I did "Dinner at Eight" at Lincoln Center with him [directing] — one of the great acting experiences of my life. He was always likening acting to baseball — it wasn’t always about the individual. You’re always onstage to get the team to second base, to get the player home. He saw it as a team sport. 

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— Scott Timberg

"Stephen Sondheim: In Conversation," Segerstrom Center for the Arts, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, 615 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, ( 714) 556-2746. 8 p.m. Saturday. SCFTA.org.

Photo: Christine Ebersole. Credit: Kit Kittle / Segerstrom Center for the Arts.

 

Influences: Veteran jazz club owner Catalina Popescu

Catalina Popescu has been running the club named for her for 25 years this month. In 1986, she’d been in Los Angeles for 10 years, after arriving in town from a repressive, jazz-averse Romania, and she had tried to open a restaurant that hadn’t worked out. A chance meeting with horn player Buddy Collette led to Popescu and husband Bob opening the jazz supper club that has survived numerous waves of openings and closings in a city that has not always been friendly to jazz. 

Catalina Bar & Grill will celebrate that quarter century with a party Monday night that will be guest-hosted by KABC’s Doug McIntyre and KJAZZ’s Bubba Jackson and that will include a tribute to Jack Sheldon and performances by artists including David Benoit, Hubert Laws and the Yellowjackets. (The evening, dedicated to the memory of Popescu's husband, will benefit the California Jazz Foundation.)

“I can say it’s quite stressful and consuming,” Popescu says of running a club. "But when you have the passion, things happen.” 

The Influences column usually focuses on performers and not proprietors. We wanted to ask Popescu: Which artists inspired you to open a jazz club and –- through all the ups and down of the economy and jazz’s popularity –- keep it going for 25 years?

Buddy Collette: We met him through a family friend, and were thinking of maybe presenting music. After he spoke to us about how great jazz was, we decided we would open the next weekend -- with his band. He was a charming man with a beautiful smile. The way he spoke about music was a total winner for us. 

Dizzy Gillespie: He was the first big musician who came to our club. I’d always liked his style, and he was the only jazz musician who had been allowed into my country. When we thought of opening a club, he was the one who came to mind. When he came to perform, I had to pinch myself –- that was my biggest thrill, when he picked up his trumpet.

Ahmad Jamal: He played about 1990, and he came many times over the years. When he performs, he becomes a totally different person. You can watch and realize there’s something you can love in this world. When he touches the piano, I feel like he is leaving us, becoming an angel.

Chick Corea: He performed here and would say, “Welcome to my living room.” His music is so variable. He can play an electric concert, or a solo performance, or Spanish music. He’s so versatile. He affects the very youngest to the very oldest.

Steve Tyrell: He has such charisma and such beautiful music, so romantic. We’ve had him for Valentine’s Day concerts. He can make people fall in love. He was a record label person; he did his first show in our club, and decided, “This is something I love.”

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-- Scott Timberg

"Jazz 25: An Unforgettable Night," Catalina Bar & Grill, 6725 W. Sunset Blvd., (323) 466-2210, Monday night. www.catalinajazzclub.com

Photo: Catalina Popescu at Catalina Bar & Grill. Credit: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times

 

Influences: Violinist Ray Chen

Violinst Ray Chen has been called “a thoughtful player” by Gramophone and the possessor of “a beautiful sound” who “doesn’t get lost in tone for its own sake” by the Washington Post. Chen, who was born in Taiwan and raised in China, released his debut album, "Virtuoso," in January and has won acclaim for both the recording and for his extensive touring. 

Wednesday night Chen will inaugurate the new season at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, performing pieces by Bach, Tartini, Franck and Wieniawski. The 22-year-old violinist, who is also an enthusiast of food, exercise and family, talked to us about his influences.

Influences: Composer Philip Glass

For a composer associated with the minimalist movement, Philip Glass always has a lot to say. In comparison to the repeating and sometimes laconic quality of his music, he’s full of words and ideas and speaks in long, often coiling sentences. 

Glass is interested in film –- he’s composed Academy Award-nominated scores for “Kundun,” “The Hours” and “Notes on a Scandal” –- and in Franz Schubert, India, vegetarianism and spiritual matters. (The Baltimore native has called himself a "Jewish-Taoist-Hindu-Toltec-Buddhist.")

In April, he brings his Ninth Symphony to Walt Disney Concert Hall, to be conducted by John Adams (who dissed Glass slightly in his own memoir, “Hallelujah Junction”). The symphony, performed and co-commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, will make its West Coast premiere. “It’s a very high energy piece, not contemplative like my Eighth Symphony. There’s lots of time for things to happen, and they do.”

And on Tuesday Glass will be in town to lead the Philip Glass Ensemble in a performance of “Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation, at the Hollywood Bowl.” He also recently announced that he will write a memoir to be published by W.W. Norton.

 “In a way,” Glass said as he spoke about figures who have shaped his composing, “these people are all more connected than they seem. All of these people were about social responsibility, and being open to the world and alert to life.”

Here are five of his key influences: 

Influences: Choreographer Meg Wolfe

Meg Wolfe is a Los Angeles-based choreographer who is not afraid of machines and technology. She's not so sure about gravity, though, and “trembler.SHIFTER,” which she brings to REDCAT June 2-5, will break all kinds of rules as it makes its world premiere.

The piece is a collaboration between Wolfe and composer Aaron Drake — whom Wolfe credits with a sensitivity to “the physical experience of sound.”

“I have definitely been influenced by the recent proliferations of natural and man-made disasters,” Wolfe says, explaining that the piece “pairs full-out dancing with a destabilizing sonic environment, to investigate thinking on our feet, searching for grounding in a dramatically shifting landscape, and finding moments of clarity in seeming chaos.”

Beginning in the early '90s, Wolfe was part of New York City's downtown dance subculture. She moved to Los Angeles in 2004 and currently serves as director for Show Box LA and founder-curator of performance series Anatomy Riot.

Wolfe and Drake share what she calls “a love of extremes.” That means “the intimate and epic, deep quiet as well as the grand gesture … a sort of contemporary romantic, slightly jaded, sad-yet-hopeful ache for the world.”

Her influences:

Patti Smith: Ever inspiring ... the quiet poet who explodes and transforms into a raging feral prophetess when she takes the stage. I admire her artistic longevity, her political outspokenness.

Kate Valk of the Wooster Group: I first saw her in a piece called “House/Lights” and was captivated by her magnetic stage presence and masterful ability to play multiple roles while negotiating meticulously organized chaos and mobile stage sets (and Gertrude Stein's text).

“Necessary Weather”: A collaborative work between Dana Reitz, a solo dance artist, and lighting designer Jennifer Tipton. I saw it in 1994 and it's stuck with me all these years ... detailed, delicate, and mysterious.

BP Deepwater Horizon explosion and the ongoing environmental devastation: Massive and profoundly disturbing realities that are at the heart of my current work. With “trembler.SHIFTER” I ask myself: What ground do we stand on and how will we navigate the dramatic shifts that we are facing?

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Meg Wolfe: trembler/SHIFTER, REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles, (213) 237-2800. June 2-5. More at www.redcat.org/event/meg-wolfe

—Scott Timberg

Above: Meg Wolfe. Credit: Mathu Andersen

Influences: Los Angeles composer Hugh Levick

Saturday will see an ambitious grab bag of daring music on the Westside. Hear Now: A Festival of New Music by Contemporary Los Angeles Composers will offer pieces by a few well-known figures -– provocative British transplant Thomas Adès, longtime USC professor Stephen Hartke, someone named Esa-Pekka Salonen -– as well as less celebrated ones. A number of chamber groups –- including the Lyris, Eclipse and Calder quartets -– and solo artists will render the works in afternoon and evening programs at the First Lutheran Church of Venice. 

One of the composers whose work will be performed is Hugh Levick, a longtime Angeleno, who also organized the festival. As a young man, Levick earned a writing degree at the University of Iowa and headed to Paris to write a novel, but his interest in jazz saxophone and its furthest edges brought him back to music. 

He’s written pieces that employ video and voices –- including “The Man Who Disappeared,” an opera adapted from Kafka’s distorted first novel “Amerika.” The The Diotima String Quartet will soon record a CD of Levick’s string quartets.

The festival, he says, came out of his sense that “there were a lot of composers writing interesting and significant contemporary music in L.A., and that it was difficult to get it performed. I wanted to try to shine a spotlight on this work both for the benefit of those making the work and those who would get to hear it.” His influences:

Alban Berg: A rigorous approach to structure and the imperatives of  20^th century compositional materials did not keep Berg from understanding the expression of extreme emotion as one of the foundations of his work.

John Coltrane: From bebop, to hard bop, to post-bop, to modal, to free jazz, Trane never stopped stretching the limits of the possible. His striving, his reaching toward new and other dimensions, has always inspired me. 

William Blake: Born into the explosion of the Enlightenment and its belief in reason as beacon, Blake refused to abandon the reality of the metaphysical. For Blake divinity was within and vast; the prevailing cultural current was narrow in scope and reduced society to reason and the material. To see that Blake was right in judging this to be catastrophic we need do no more than look around us at today’s world.

Franz Kafka: For me Kafka, the bohemian Jew, has always been the consummate Buddhist: Not this not that. Is K being put on trial by society or by God? The right answer is probably neither and both. Kafka’s work is in language, but like music it dances around meaning by being other and just beyond one’s reach. 

Walter Benjamin: Benjamin postulated that history and time are two different things. History is a linear continuum that moves inexorably forward from beginning to end. Time, on the other hand, zigs and zags, breaks, changes direction, ruptures, and moves through different dimensions. It is through these breaks in "time" that light can shine and, Benjamin believed, the Messiah could — doubtful as this might be — erupt into the world. 

-- Scott Timberg

Hear Now takes place at 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday at the First Lutheran Church of Venice. Info:  www.flvenice.org

Photo: Composer Hugh Levick. Credit: Melba Levick.

Influences: Unorthodox organist Cameron Carpenter

Cameron Carpenter is a kind of wild man of the classical organ. Born in rural northwestern Pennsylvania, he joined the American Boychoir School in Princeton, N.J., and later went to high school at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. 

“When I moved to New York in 2000,” he says of his years at Juilliard, “I became an advocate for doing things differently –- and fighting on every front.”

Carpenter, who often performs in skin-tight white jeans and shirt, may be the only organist in the world who can be called controversial. He’s known for his virtuosity in the instrument, his favoring of unusual repertoire –- ranging from excursions on Chopin to his own demonic “Homage to Klaus Kinski” -- and his emphasis on the physicality the instrument makes possible. 

Carpenter, who performs Brahms at Walt Disney Concert Hall on May 8, said he was happy to discuss his inspirations, especially those beyond his chosen instrument, which he thinks is in the grip of a new kind of orthodoxy and conservatism. “I’m all about taking things out of the organ,” he says, “and the organ out of things.”

Here are five of his key influences: 

Silent movie organists: “From the beginning, my concept of the organ had nothing to do with the retiring figure in the organ loft. But rather, someone playing an ornate organ with Mary Pickford on the screen, looking very much like Clark Gable. I had no idea of the organ as a religious instrument.”

Percy Grainger (Australian composer and pianist): "The strongest influence on me musically. I discovered him about 10 years ago, after I had started on a musical path: I found this character who was very misunderstood. The thing that made him unique for his time was the degree to which he remained an individual.”

Kate Bush and Laura Nyro (pop musicians): “They’re both female singer-songwriters of a proto-feminist leaning. What interests me is the degree to which they embody that with a naturalness and sincerity that’s so uncontrived. It’s simple conviction. Their work activates in me some of the same response as Bach and Fauré -– music of deep integrity and immediacy, without virtuosity.”

J.S. Bach (composer): “Bach was a major character for me from Day One. I learned 'The Well-Tempered Clavier' when I was very young; at 11 I was playing it. Now I’m returning to it with deeper understanding. You’re looking at something that evolved, over time, but it’s very difficult looking at the unity of form to see it as anything but fully formed. It’s like something from Greek myth, a symbol of perfection. And it’s the rebellious and punk side of Bach I find so amazing. He had jobs where he pissed off the powers that be.”

Martha Graham (dancer/choreographer): “I’d never want to take credit for any of my core concepts, because they’re shared by Martha Graham and the world of dance. This is a legacy of teaching and artistic encouragement; I wish we had anything like one-tenth of that in my community. She said, ‘There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.’”

Organ Recital: Cameron Carpenter, Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. (323) 850-2000. Sunday, May 8, 7:30 p.m.

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-- Scott Timberg

 

Influences: Sitar player (and daughter) Anoushka Shankar

Anoushka Shankar, 29, is a sitar player and composer who grew up in London and Dehli. Daughter of sitar legend Ravi Shankar and half-sister to singer Norah Jones, Shankar became, in 2003, the youngest-ever woman nominated for a world music Grammy.

Shankar’s music begins in the classical tradition of a Hindustani instrument thought to date back to the Middle Ages, but she often cuts her sound with rock and electronica: She’s collaborated with Sting, Thievery Corporation, Herbie Hancock and Rostropovich. In 2002 she performed at a London concert in honor of George Harrison, in emulation of the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh organized by her father and the sitar-playing Beatle who helped expose the instrument to the English speaking world.

Shankar is married to Joe Wright, the English director of the films “Pride and Prejudice” and “Atonement”; the two just had a son in February. She was to appear at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Tuesday as part of “Ravi Shankar: 90th Birthday Celebration With Anoushka Shankar,” but now the concert has been postponed until Sept. 29.

Here she talks about the eclectic array of artists who’ve inspired her life and work.
 
Ravi Shankar (sitarist/composer): I know he seems an obvious choice, but the fact is no artist has influenced my work as my father has. Having taught me from my very first day playing the sitar, he's shaped my technique, style and sound. His virtuosity, creative genius and the luminous spirituality he brings to his playing are unmatched. At 91 years old, still playing and performing, he remains my greatest inspiration.

Paco de Lucia (guitarist): Like my father, Paco is considered the grandmaster of his genre and is largely responsible for the global popularity of flamenco music today. As a string player I'm very inspired by his technique. And my love of flamenco grew, so much so that last year I went to Spain to study the style, and ended up making an album which explores the great traditions of Spain and India, which will release later this year.