Matthew Duersten
A Wisconsin-born, L.A.-based freelance writer, his pieces have been included in the anthologies "Da Capo Best Music Writing" and "L.A. Now." He first entered the blogosphere in 2006 with the music site Downbeast, an offshoot of the L.A. indie-jazz label Cryptogramophone. Currently, he runs the (intermittent) music blog StompBeast while working on a book for Asahina & Wallace publishers on L.A.'s underground jazz scene.
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Amid the wave of change hitting South L.A., a man pieces together the life of one of the neighborhood's most enigmatic artists: His father.
Fifty years ago this month, Alain Leroy Locke Senior High School became the first new high school built in the central city in a half a century. Its music program would soon put the school on the map.
In the 1930s, music educator Samuel Rodney Browne broke the color barrier for Black teachers in the L.A. Unified School District.
Watts has produced generations of jazz talent. For many musicians who witnessed the 1965 riots, their decayed and burning neighborhood revealed to the rest of the world on live TV screens bore no resemblance to the cultural and racial Eden their parent...
Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz musician Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman, Jr. has died at age 85. Artbound reflects on Coleman's time in Los Angeles.