Arts & Entertainment
Musician Alper Exhibits Fine Art at Cafe Vida
Local color inspires jazz man's 'Palisades Panoramas' now on display at Antioch Street hub.
Gregory Alper has done it all musically, from recording jazz records to scoring such movies as 1999's Random Hearts and the video game WarCraft: Orcs and Humans. Now he's drawing on some local color for Palisades Panoramas, the name of his latest group of paintings as well as a companion book. The paintings will be on display through March 30 at .
The Chicago-born saxophonist, best known as the eponymous member of the Greg Alper Band (the album Fat Doggie spawned jazz-disco fusion tunes such as Hole in Your Pocket), has created art since the age of 4, when he took crayons and drew on the wall (to his parents' simultaneous delight and horror).
Among the 12 panoramas of Palisades beach scenes including sunset, sunrise and other familiar landscapes is what Alper calls a "time dimensional portrait," or self-portrait in this case, collaging images of himself amid nostalgic jazz-club imagery.
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At a Feb. 24 appearance at Village Books on Swarthmore Avenue, to promote both the book and the art show, Alper explained that his process involved taking digital photos and emailing them to a printer that transfers them onto canvases.
"What I like about this is the end of the natural cycle of the day and the beginning of night," he said of "Sunset at Sunset," a canvas based on one of his photos taken just north of Gladstone's restaurant.
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Alper recapped some of his adventures in jazz with his Greg Alper Band made up of crack musicians: the guitarist went on to play for Stan Getz and the trombonist received multiple nods from Downbeat magazine while the drummer went on to play for Spirogyra.
"It was a wonderful moment that was not to be repeated," he said of the 1978 incarnation of his group.
Alper recalled how "the saxophone was my first great love" and how it led to him also picking up the clarinet and the flute. By his late teens, he decided to try to make a go of it professionally.
"I had read in Charlie Parker's autobiography that it takes 10,000 hours to get good," Alper said. "Well, I did the math and I thought, 'I better get going'...I was already 19."
At one point, Alper described the music on his CDs as "stuff you hear on The Wave, but only better," eliciting big laughs from the 20 people in attendance.
Alper turned to teaching music and creating canvasses after growing disillusioned with film scoring and the movie industry. "It wasn't feeding my soul," he said.
Alper, who lives in Pacific Palisades with his wife, Sonja, currently teaches at Palisades Elementary through Children's Music Workshop.
The book Palisades Panoramas, which features about 50 images, is currently on sale at Village Books. Also available at the Swarthmore Avenue book nook: Alper's jazz CDs (My Time, Common Ground, and Caves of Mystery–on which Alper plays all of the instruments himself) and packets of greeting cards with combinations of his time dimensional portraits and landscapes.