Josh Kun and Van Dyke Parks discuss and sign Songs in the Key of Los Angeles: Sheet Music from the Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, 4 p.m. on Sunday, December 1 at Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90069.
Culled from the Southern California Sheet Music Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, this unprecedented anthology tells the story of Los Angeles through its songs. Featuring the elaborately designed covers of more than one hundred pieces of vintage sheet music, Songs in the Key of Los Angeles spans 1859 to 1959, offering a rare musical window into Southern California history—from mythic Missions to infinite oranges, from rumbling railroads to romantic Ramona . . . and there’s Hollywood history, too, harmoniously noted by its music and film industries. Inside you’ll find California lullabies and Los Angeles waltzes, sunshine rags and sunset serenades, the emergence of West Coast jazz and the legacy of Mexican folk traditions, all accompanied by an essay from the collection’s curator and native Angeleno Josh Kun. Additional arrangements from musicians Van Dyke Parks and Stew, plus a chorus of critics and historians, come together to bring these extraordinary city songs back to life, ready for a new generation of city dwellers.
Josh Kun is a professor and director of The Popular Music Project at USC Annenberg's The Norman Lear Center and is a cofounder of the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, a non-profit organization dedicated to excavating lost treasures of Jewish-American music. Kun is the author of Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (UC Press) which won a 2006 American Book Award.
Van Dyke Parks is a composer, arranger, producer, musician, and singer, who has released six albums of solo material. A longtime collaborator with Brian Wilson, he wrote lyrics for the classic Beach Boys album "Smile," and has also worked with artists such as Phil Ochs, Harry Nilsson, and Rufus Wainwright.
For more information on the event contact info@booksoup.com or call 310-659-3110. For more information on the book visit http://www.angelcitypress.com/skla.html.
