Barry Smolin | |
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| Background information | |
| Also known as | Mr. Smolin |
| Born | April 20, 1961 |
| Origin | Los Angeles, California |
Barry Smolin (born April 20, 1961), also known as Mr. Smolin, is an American radio host, teacher, composer, and writer. He last taught at Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles, and was a longtime radio host on L.A. area public radio station KPFK.
From 1995 to 2012, Smolin was the host of The Music Never Stops, a psychedelic radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles, California [1] for which Smolin won the first ever Jammy Award for "Best Radio Show" in 2000. [2] Smolin's program was also nominated for an LA Weekly Music Award in 2004 in the "Best Radio Show" category. [3] The Music Never Stops began as a program featuring live recordings of the Grateful Dead, but after the death of Jerry Garcia; Smolin expanded the scope of the show to include contemporary jam-rock and miscellaneous psychedelia, paying special attention to music being made by musicians in Los Angeles. The program has been covered in Relix magazine [4] and Jambands.com.
Smolin was host of the program Head Room on KPFK, [5] heard on Sunday nights from 8–10. His last show on KPFK aired on April 25, 2021.
Smolin's teaching career has been featured in articles in Time [6] and the Los Angeles Times , [7] as well as in the Larchmont Chronicle , [8] and the Library Foundation of L.A.'s "My Moby-Dick" tribute. [9] [10] From 1987 to 1992, Smolin taught English at Fairfax High School (the school Smolin himself graduated from in 1978) in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Since leaving Fairfax in 1992, he was on the faculty at Alexander Hamilton High School, teaching English in the Hamilton Humanities Magnet program until 2021.
As a songwriter, Smolin has composed music for the Showtime television series Weeds , with his song "The Earth Keeps Turning On" appearing in Season 3's Episode 7, entitled "He Taught Me How to Drive By" [11] as well as on the Weeds Season 3 soundtrack album. Under the performance moniker Mr. Smolin he has released four albums, At Apogee (2004) and The Crumbling Empire of White People (2007) (both produced by Tony Award-winning composer/dramatist Stew), a Los Angeles song cycle entitled Bring Back The Real Don Steele (2009), [12] and a collaboration with Double Naught Spy Car entitled Heaven's Not High (2013). In 2015, Smolin released two singles: "Fairfax High School", about his alma mater, and "The Man I Met Once".
Since 2016, Smolin has primarily composed experimental pieces, both instrumental and spoken word. With Double Naught Spy Car, he set chapter 1 of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to music as part of the Waywords and Meansigns project, [13] which was released in 2016 as was an album of the project's instrumental tracks called That Tragoady Thundersday. In September 2017, he released an instrumental album entitled The Sooterkin Library, a trio project that Smolin describes as "12-tone avant-freak mongrel psycho-tonk". [14]
Smolin is the author of two novellas: Narcissus in the Dark (2012), [15] whose narrator is God sentenced to eternity in a dungeon and whose consciousness thinks new universes into being while sorting through the detritus of his troubled past, and the experimental prose project Wake Up in the Dreamhouse, [16] composed one sentence at a time on Twitter. In May 2011, Smolin released a volume of selected poetry covering 1988 to 2010 entitled Always Be Madly in Love. [17] His most recent fiction project is a trilogy entitled The Miranda Complex, Volume 1 of which was published in 2016 [18] with Volume 2 following in 2017, [19] and the concluding Volume 3 in 2018. [20] The Miranda Complex chronicles the unconsummated romantic relationship between Lance Atlas and Miranda Savitch, two teenagers in 1970s Los Angeles.
Philip Baine Austin was an American comedian and writer, best known as a member of the Firesign Theatre.
Finnegans Wake is a novel by the Irish writer James Joyce. It is known for its allusive and experimental style and its reputation as one of the most difficult works in literature. In 1924, it began to appear in installments under the title "fragments from Work in Progress". The final title was only revealed when the book was published on 4 May 1939.
Michael David Watt is an American bassist, vocalist and songwriter. He co-founded and played bass guitar for the rock bands Minutemen (1980–1985), Dos (1985–present), and Firehose (1986–1994). He began a solo career with the 1995 album Ball-Hog or Tugboat? and has since released three additional solo albums, most recently in 2010 with Hyphenated-man. He is also the frontman for the supergroup Big Walnuts Yonder (2008–present), a member of the art rock group Banyan (1997–present) and is involved with several other musical projects. From 2003 until 2013, he was the bass guitarist for The Stooges.
Johnny Otis ; December 28, 1921 – January 17, 2012) was a Greek American singer, musician, composer, bandleader, record producer, and talent scout. He was a seminal influence on American R&B and rock and roll. He discovered numerous artists early in their careers who went on to become highly successful in their own right, including Little Esther Phillips, Etta James, Alan O'Day, Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Ace, Jackie Wilson, Little Willie John, Hank Ballard, and The Robins, Sugar Pie Desanto, among many others. Otis has been called the "Godfather of Rhythm and Blues".
Raymond Daniel Manzarek Jr. was an American keyboardist. He is best known as a member of the rock band The Doors, co-founding the group in 1965 with fellow UCLA Film School graduate Jim Morrison. Manzarek is credited for his innovative playing and abilities on organ-style keyboard instruments.
KPFK is a listener-sponsored radio station based in North Hollywood, California, which serves Southern California. It was the second of five stations in the non-commercial, listener-sponsored Pacifica Radio network.
Fairfax High School is a Los Angeles Unified School District high school located in Los Angeles, California, near the border of West Hollywood in the Fairfax District. The school is located on a 24.2-acre (98,000 m2) campus at the intersection of Fairfax Avenue and Melrose Avenue, north of the CBS studios, right at the heart of the Thirty Mile Zone.
Alexander Hamilton High School, also known as just Hamilton High School is a public high school in the Castle Heights neighborhood within the Westside of Los Angeles, California, United States. It is in the Los Angeles Unified School District. It was established in 1931.
XHLNC-FM is a noncommercial radio station in Tecate, Baja California, Mexico, on 104.9 FM. It broadcasts to the San Diego–Tijuana metropolitan area from a transmitter on Cerro Bola. XHLNC-FM airs a Regional Mexican format and is branded as La Número Uno.
Kinski is an American rock band from Seattle, Washington. They have released eight albums, a number of split albums and EP.
Gerald Barry is an Irish composer.
David Kahne is an American record producer, musician, composer, and former record company executive.
Lin-Manuel Miranda is an American songwriter, actor, singer, filmmaker, rapper, and librettist. He created the Broadway musicals In the Heights (2005) and Hamilton (2015), and the soundtracks for the animated films Moana (2016), Vivo, and Encanto. He has received numerous accolades including a Pulitzer Prize, three Tony Awards, two Laurence Olivier Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and five Grammy Awards, along with nominations for two Academy Awards. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2018.
Lewis & Clarke is the pen name of American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, and composer Lou Rogai. The name references the fellowship and correspondence between C. S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke, not the 19th-century explorers. Lewis & Clarke has released three studio albums, Bare Bones and Branches, Blasts of Holy Birth, and Triumvirate, as well as several singles and EPs. The moniker is also a metaphor for journey on many levels and the music has been described as art-pop or avant-folk. Rogai is the founder of La Société Expéditionnaire, a record label dedicated to creating "beautiful sounding records and tangible musical artifacts".
Hayden Chisholm is a saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist from New Zealand. He performs jazz, improvised music, and contemporary classical music.
Waywords and Meansigns: Recreating Finnegans Wake [in its whole wholume] is an international project setting James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake to music. Waywords and Meansigns has released two editions of audio, each offering an unabridged musical adaptation of Joyce's book. A third edition, featuring over 100 artists and performing much shorter passages of the book, debuted May 4, 2017.
The Waywords and Meansigns Opendoor Edition debuted in 2017 as a part of the Waywords and Meansigns project, setting James Joyce's Finnegans Wake to music. The Opendoor Edition features over 100 artists and musicians performing unabridged passages of Finnegans Wake. An open edition participants are invited to contribute to the Opendoor Edition on an ongoing basis. The edition first premiered on May 4, 2017.
Christina Linhardt is a German-American singer, actor, and director, best known for her roles in the production of the film Guantanamo Circus, and as the former fiancée of Prince Daniel of Saxony.
Keith Barry known professionally as Tree, is an American musician and multi-instrumentalist. He is best known as a past touring member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and for having appeared on several albums released by the band. He is also a member of the funk band Mandrill. He has collaborated with groups including Gov't Mule and Thelonious Monster. Tree is the co-founder and former dean of the Silverlake Conservatory of Music.
Gerry Fialka is an American experimental filmmaker, curator, lecturer, interviewer, and writer. He lectures and leads workshops on experimental film, avant-garde music and art, subversive social media, books by James Joyce, and Marshall McLuhan’s media theory. He was Frank Zappa’s archivist and production assistant for ten years, and also worked for George Carlin. LA Weekly has described Fialka as a “cultural revolutionary”.
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