A very special edition of Jazz at LACMA this week presents the fifth-annual L.A. Jazz Treasure Award to composer, arranger, and big-band leader Johnny Mandel. A National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, Mandel has worked with icons like Count Basie, Ray Charles, and Barbra Streisand throughout his career. Such genius has not gone unnoticed. Along with five Grammy Awards, Mandel received the Academy Award for "The Shadow of Your Smile," from the 1965 film The Sandpiper. He is, undoubtedly, one of the nation’s top musical talents in the jazz, pop, and film-music realms. You can see him here for free on Friday at 6 pm.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGZXMpOkoso
For even more great (read: free) music come to LACMA for classical music at Sundays Live on Sunday at 6 pm. In this week's installment, pianist Young Huh and cellist Austin Huntington perform works from Schumann, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. Both music programs are free and open to the public.
On Saturday, the Good Food Pie Contest, presented by KCRW, invites bakers from across the Southland to bring their prime pastries to the fifth-annual bake off. To judge entries, we’ve assembled L.A. top chefs and food critics, including Good Food’s Evan Kleiman, and invite the general public to taste these sweet and savory confections and meet their makers. The event begins at 2 pm in Hancock Park and tickets for pie tasting are available for free on a first-come, first-served basis.
On Sunday, Andell Family Sundays inspires children and their parents to create their own textile art in this free workshop (with museum admission), as realized in the exhibition Pinaree Sanpitak: Hanging By A Thread—on view through the end of this month. To further exercise your creative spirit, visit the Boone Children’s Gallery, which was recently named the "Best Free Art Studio for Kids" by Los Angeles magazine.
Installation view of Henri Matisse: La Gerbe, Instagram photo, © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA
Around campus, world-class works of art await your curiosity. The captivating Henri Matisee: La Gerbe draws to a close on Sunday. Discover how the celebrated artist was commissioned to create the vibrant ceramic, on view for the first time with its maquette. Around the corner in the Ahmanson Building, see one of our newest installations, Down to Earth: Modern Artists and the Land, Before Land Art, which explores the link between humans and the soil. Also on the same floor, Masterworks of Expressionist Cinema: The Golem and Its Avatars demonstrates the breadth of work from Europe that wonders about the golem, a large, powerful clay creature of Jewish folklore. Finally, delve deeper into our photographic collections with the survey of suburban forms in Little Boxes: Photography and the Suburbs and the introspective and determined work of the visual-poet Kitasono Katue in Kitasono Katue: Surrealist Poet.
Roberto Ayala