Cellist Yo-Yo Ma with, from right, Los Angeles United School District student Porche Brinker, violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, and former LAUSD student Ismerai Calcaneo. They performed at a fundraiser for the instrument repair shop that services music programs at LA public schools. Photo by Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times.
In Monday’s (4/7) Los Angeles Times, Catherine Womack writes, “In a downtown Los Angeles warehouse Sunday night … an unlikely quartet performed … At the piano, Amanda Nova, a Fairfax High School graduate and freshman at the USC Thornton School of Music. On alto sax, Theodore Roosevelt Senior High School student Ismerai Calcaneo. On violin, Palms Middle School seventh-grader Porche Brinker. And on cello, the most senior member of the group: Yo-Yo Ma. All four performers played on instruments owned and maintained by the Los Angeles Unified School District…. The ensemble came together at a fundraiser at the facility where about a dozen LAUSD employees maintain and repair the school district’s 130,000 instruments. The repair shop, its staff and the students who played with Yo-Yo Ma on Sunday were featured in the documentary short ‘The Last Repair Shop.’… The film won an Academy Award for documentary short last year…. The film’s creators saw the shop’s financial needs and launched a capital campaign … said [co-director Ben] Proudfoot … Sunday’s event … celebrated a $1-million donation from the Chuck Lorre Family Foundation, founded by the veteran TV producer … Proudfoot said 82% of LAUSD’s more than 440,000 students live below the poverty line. ‘For a family to pay $25 a month to rent a violin or take responsibility for a $2,000 tuba, it’s not going to happen for most students … We are doing whatever we can to protect this shop and to rally the community … so that L.A. can keep this beautiful, wonderful thing.’ ”
