Redwood City is a town of contrasts. This oldest of jurisdictions on the San Francisco peninsula has among its distinguishing characteristics that it is only deep water port in the Bay Area. On any given day, cranes and ships are in view as tons of commodities in liquid and solid form are being unloaded and loaded. To add to this image, a nearby recycling plant and concrete plant spew smoke and steam reminiscent of the big industrial cities of long ago.
But, as is the case with many bedroom communities in Silicon Valley, Redwood City has become home to a bevy of high tech companies, including Oracle, Equinix, Silver Springs Networks, Electronic Arts, Shutterfly and Box, among other notable brand names.
And, to expand the juxtaposition of old and new tech is another business that is an integral part of the California economy. Amid the industrial-looking grid of streets just south of a revitalized, robust downtown, lies this most unlikely enterprise: a winery.
To be sure, there is not a grape vine within a mile of this little building occupied by La Honda Winery, which takes its name from the nearby town in the foothills (where many a vine can be seen on neighboring hillsides).
But La Honda Winery is a very unique business. Partnering with its sister company, Post & Trellis, the two businesses cultivate and harvest grapes grown in a variety of locations throughout the Bay Area peninsula. And these sites can be anything from a revitalized vineyard to a residential front yard.
We stopped in on La Honda Winery during a recent weekend and the tasting room was bustling. We chatted with the amiable owner, David Page, for just a moment, as he juggled pourings, the cash register (well, an iPad with Square) and all the other things a manager of a successful winery must deal with on any given day.
We sampled the roster of wines on the menu and took quite a liking to the Chardonnay, which we paired with Neil Young’s Heart of Gold.
It was just a line in the chorus that echoed the name of the tallest trees in the world that gave us the idea. But we think it works well.
By the way, we are playing in Redwood City on July 1 at Angelica’s. We’d love to see you there. More information can be found at:
Jan 2007: The cast of “Culture Sparkles” post-show at the Indira Ghandi Institute (Réduit, Mauritius).
Rejection does not feel good, so we avoid it. We avoid asking questions unless we feel confident about the answer being in our favour. Does this qualify as calculated risk or is this simply irrational? If you have a 50% chance of getting a yes, that’s a lot better than 100% of getting a no, which are your odds if you don’t ask the question! This is a story about how I learned to ask the question.
When I was 16, I created a music club in my school. We were an all-girls elite academic school with no music program so I started teaching guitar and dance to my schoolmates for free. I wanted to share this passion for music with as many people as I could. The next year, I wanted to put together a show. Not a concert, but something a bit closer to a musical, with dancing, singing, a bit of acting and a storyline. Maybe it could be a benefit concert for the school or for a charity. Here are some of the reactions I got:
“We’re known for being bookworms here, not dancers and musicians! We will be ridiculed!” — my music club facilitator.
“What if nobody comes? I’m not sure we can do this. If it fails, we’ll look like fools. I doubt the rector would approve it.” — many other teachers.
Frustrated, I went to the rector’s office. I told her about the club, about the classes I’ve been teaching over the summer holidays and the show that my 22 friends and I put together. She watched patiently as I went on. I couldn’t tell if she was on board or not, but she looked amused. Then she said:
“This would fit quite well with the new initiative that the Ministry of Education is rolling out in an effort to make our students more well-rounded. Let’s do it.”
Suddenly, everybody was on board. Naysayers were now proud supporters. Every time I met with the rector, she had some more exciting news. Our venue got upgraded from the school hall to the Indira Ghandi Institute, a theatre seating 700, with fully equipped stage and green rooms. People from the conservatory were invited. The Minister of Education was invited. We got the greenlight to sell tickets. Somebody took care of the sound and lighting, somebody would be filming it.
We sold out! It was the first show open to the public that our school had ever produced and it was sold out to a cheering crowd, over 700 people strong. It was standing room only and we got a standing ovation at the end. The Minister was in attendance and stayed throughout the show. What started out as a long shot turned out to be a resounding success.
I was the lead choreographer, set designer, dancer, singer, coordinator of the 22 other high school girls on stage, many of whom were performing for an audience for the very first time. I felt truly honored to have been the driving force behind their first performance. The stage is an experience that I think everybody should try at least once. I’d say this show was my first taste of leadership and entrepreneurship. I loved every minute of it. My first gig as a producer was a success, but one that would not have seen the light of day if I had stopped at the first no!
After that, I made a conscious decision to ask the question instead of assuming the answer.
Here are a few other questions I thought would be answered by “no” but resulted in a yes. Hint: 23rd Hour resulted from one of those questions!
Mom, Dad, can I record an EP?
Will anyone pay money to see me perform?
Can I play you a song?
Wanna play a show together?
Mom, Dad, are you ok with me moving California, despite the fact that I don’t know anybody there and have had serious health problems?
Hi George, I’m Sherry, I loved your set. Do you ever collaborate, and if so, would you like to collaborate with me?
Are you up for busking?
It’s 3am and we just finished busking and jamming all day but I’m not done playing. Are you up for more?
We’ve played all day and all night. Want to start writing a song?
Can we have our album launch at your venue even though we’ve never played your town?
Would you follow me on Spotify?
Would you like to have me as a guest on your blog/podcast?
Would you publish our story to CD Baby’s DIY Musician blog?
Would you publish our story on Hypebot?
Can we come play live for your radio show?
Can we have a radio show?
BTW, we do have a radio show! It’s called “Bay Area Musician”. The show highlights the San Francisco Bay Area’s music and musicians, their insights, their journey, and their opinions on what we can do to ensure a bright future for the Bay Area music scene. The goal is to get listeners and musicians excited about the local scene and inspire the local community to seek out and support local/live music.
If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, tune in on Fridays 4–5pm on KZSU 90.1 FM. For those of you online, stream it live at http://kzsu.stanford.edu/live
In the age of information overload, we can no longer wait for somebody to hand-pick us. So many opportunities were granted to us because we found a fit and we asked to be considered. What questions should you be asking instead of assuming “no” for an answer?
PS: If you’re in the SF Bay Area, we will be playing at Angelicas in Redwood City on Canada Day! That’s July 1st. If you’d love to see great live music that comes with gourmet food, a good wine selection, table seating, a relaxing ambiance, and a volume that won’t blast your ears, you need to get your tickets now! 23rd Hour at Angelicas is the show that will make you fall in love with live music all over again. Make it a date or a girls night out. We promise you won’t regret it.
Ryan Kairalla is an entertainment lawyer, writer, podcaster and teacher. His Break the Business Podcast is a show for indie artists and the people who love and support them. It is a fun and informative discussion of entertainment law (for non-lawyers), independent artists, and popular culture.
Our conversation with Ryan was filled with marketing tips, and covered a bit of our backstory. We talked about:
How George changed his mind about never being in a band again
How we both used interests outside of music to promote ourselves
How aligning our goals with a cause can help us reach new audiences
And more!
Listen here:
Also, if you’re interested in learning more about the music business and the legal intricacies that come with it, check out the book:
A few weeks before our album launch, I started seeing ads for Bree Noble’s “Women of Substance Radio” and “Female Musician Academy”. Eventually, I also found her Female Entrepreneur Musician podcast. After binge-listening to CDBaby’s DIY Musician podcasts for weeks, I was happy to have new material to listen to. I enjoyed listening to all the accomplished guests on her show, sharing tips and tricks and tools that help them get through this crazy journey.
Then the album dropped. Unbeknownst to us, we would be featured on iTunes and next thing you know, we’re running with it. Soon after, I was invited to chat with Bree on her podcast about what strategies have worked for us. It was a real pleasure to share this conversation and I heard that Bree’s gotten good feedback about the episode, so I thought I’d repost it.
The suburbs surrounding San Jose, CA blur seamlessly together, with their cookie-cutter high-tech office parks, nondescript apartments, condos and generic single-family homes. The streets and avenues look pretty much the same, too.
We chat with Big Dog Vineyards wine maker Mark Campagnolan and Daisy
You don’t really know when you’ve left one town and entered another. Milpitas, just north of San Jose, qualifies on all those counts. It’s squeezed in between I-880 and I-680 — in one of the country’s most congested areas — yet that’s about it for personality.
But head due east of town and within literally minutes you are traversing little country roads that snake up through the foothills of the Diablo Range (which separates the Bay Area from the massive San Joaquin Valley).
Silicon Valley is just below the bucolic hills of the only winery in Milpitas
After a few miles and a climb up to about 1,200 feet, you are a world away from the Bay Area. Amid rolling hills and ranches with grazing cattle, llamas and horses, you will discover Big Dog Vineyards. Greeting all new visitors, not surprisingly, is the establishment’s mascot, Daisy, who happens to be calmest, coolest and most cordial Great Dane you’re likely to meet.
Inside the winery’s tasting room, the place is bustling. But owner Mark Campagnolan possesses the same cool, calm demeanor as Daisy (or maybe it’s vice versa), as he takes time out of his busy schedule to show us around the place and fill us in on the winery’s history.
The family-owned, boutique winery opened in 2009, 12 years after they had planted their first vines. With about 5 acres in Cabernet Sauvignon and Cab Franc, they bottle and sell everything they produce.
“We originally thought we would plant 5 and see how it goes. And then we had an opportunity to plant another 10 or 15. And after planting 5, it was so much work (and a lot of fun) we thought, ‘nah, we’re OK with 5,’” he says, with a chuckle.
The soil and climate, he noted, are perfect for the Cabs that they grow.
“Nature decides,” said Mark. “We did soils and weather analysis and it turns out we’re just perfect for Cabernet Sauvignon and Cab Franc. “
But, like most vineyards, these days, there is a vast cooperative of growers who work their land for what is most suitable and source from others for the grapes that grow better in different micro-climates. With a sister winery in the cooler Santa Cruz Mountains, Big Dog has an ample supply of grapes for Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Merlot. They also blend the best of the two mountain ranges with their brand-named Montage, a blend of the Merlot, Cab Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. They are still experimenting with this blend, so each year is unique.
The sister vineyard “is at the, same elevation, but it looks out over the Monterey Bay,” notes Mark. “That ocean influence is better for cooler climate variety like Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.”
We described to Mark our concept of pairing wine with music. He likes the idea, but has his own concept of pairing music: with a day.
“I always think of music in terms of moods that pretty much align with the time of day. My progression would be going from lighter and easier, maybe even some classical in the morning, then to something easy but with a little rhythm, maybe some jazz. And by afternoon or certainly by evening, something with a little bit of energy.”
We’re pretty sure that energized music at the end of the day will also pair nicely with Big Dog’s estate-growned Cabs.
Big Dog Vineyards was originally published in WineWednesday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
On this show we take a virtual drive around the Bay Area in counter clockwise fashion.
We begin in Oakland with Tower of Power, legends in the world of soul and funk. Their piece Soul Vaccination kicks things off with a big bang. Mosey on up to Berkeley with the Counting Crows and their first hit, Round Here.
Take the San Rafael bridge over to Marin County and the town of San Rafael to hear David Grisman get things back into high speed with his Dawgy Mountain Breakdown. Let’s hope the traffic isn’t too bad traversing the Golden Gate Bridge as Green Day blast out their tribute to a friend, titled J.A.R.
The Grateful Dead get into the groove with Sugar Magnolia.
And then the Kronos Quartet get serious with Aaj Ki Raat (Tonight is the Night). And then we really mellow out with Girl From Ipanema and Autumn Leaves, performed by none other than Vince Guaraldi, better known for composing most of the music to the iconic Peanuts and Charlie Brown TV specials.
Michael Hedges takes over on the guitar with two of his original works, Ritual Dance and Because It’s There.
Now, on to San Jose, where Smash Mouth does their best impression of reggae with Road Man, and the ever fresh Doobie Brothers give us Listen to the Music.
And that pretty much completes our swing around the Area, a region rich with music. This little tour provides just a glimpse. Hope you enjoyed it.
When hearing the term “Bay Area Music” you might be likely to think of Santana, Michael Franti, Counting Crows, Green Day, Doobie Brothers. Fun tunes, groovy bands.
This week, we take a look at some more “serious” music from the Bay Area.
We start with East Bay resident (and East Coast emigrant) John Adams, perhaps the pre-eminent contemporary classical composer in the Bay Area, best known for revitalizing modern opera with his work “Nixon in China.” Adam’s featured piece this week is “Phrygian Gates,” one of his very earliest compositions. Its title is a play on words, but not of the kingdom of Phrygia from Greek mythology (think Midas who turned things to gold).
It is instead a twist on what are known as modes in music, and the piece bounces between the Phrygian and Lydian degrees of scale. “Gates” in this context, is a reference to a term used in early electronic synthesizers (signifying on/off) that seems quite quaint now.
Next up is Carla Bley, who like Adams, is revered. Born in Oakland, Bley might have passed Adams on his journey west as she traveled east. She makes her home in upstate New York. But hey, she still qualifies as a Bay Area citizen since her musical education began at home in the East Bay.
Bley’s piece is the “Hotel Overture” to her jazz opera “Escalator Over the Hill.” This ambitious opus is to jazz and opera as important as “Nixon in China.”
Bley, by the way, just turned 81 this month. And another fun fact: she is married to the renowned bassist Steve Swallow. They have toured together as a duet for years.
We bounce back to the “classical” world — sort of — with Darius Milhaud. The French composer moved to Oakland to teach at Mills College in 1941. Before arriving, however, he toured New York and specifically Harlem, where he became enamored of jazz. Somewhere along the way, he also took a liking to Brazilian samba music, which you can hear in the third movement of this work titled “Scaramouche.”
Dave Brubeck probably needs little introduction. The Concord, CA native was the biggest jazz star of his generation and made this American musical genre something of a household name with his platinum-selling work “Time Out.”
We hear “Blue Rondo a la Turk” from this album. Blue Rondo is in 9/8 time. And, in fact, all the compositions on Time Out are in unusual time signatures. (Perhaps the best known is “Take Five.”) Brubeck was a student of Milhaud’s so we come full circle back from the classical world to the jazz world.
And finally, we hear from Lady Gaga.
Wait, you say, Lady Gaga is hardly in the realm of these composers and she is a New Yorker through and through. All very true. But what we have here is the Friction Quartet, a contemporary group with ties to the Bay Area, treating us to their take on Lady Gaga’s pop tune “Bad Romance.”
The four players in Friction are all graduates of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and are keen to use their talents to create a type of music alchemy, converting any composition — pop, rock or otherwise — into an arrangement more reminiscent of Ravel than America’s Top 40.
So there you have it. It may be “serious music,” but it sure is a lot of fun to hear, and you can do so by clicking on the playlist here.
Let’s get serious was originally published in BayAreaMusician on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Read our 6 tips to amplify your success on CD Baby’s DIY Musician Blog by clicking here
Our CD Baby guest blog was originally published in SmartMusicianGuide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Our Hypebot guest blog was originally published in SmartMusicianGuide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Our little hatchback chugged up the steep grade of the crumbling road in the foothills of Cupertino, CA. We rounded yet another hairpin turn, where we were saluted by some airborne creature the size of a turkey taking flight directly in front of our windshield. Good thing we were moving at a snail’s pace or we might have hit it.
As we know, turkeys have long since lost their ability to take flight. This bird, we would learn, was il Pavone, a peacock, and the official mascot of the Picchetti Brothers Winery.
It seems that the fraternal siblings who founded this establishment decided to bring two things with them when they emigrated from Italy to California: grapevines and the aforementioned, colorful feathered friends.
The winery is one of California’s oldest and has a rich history. And it is in a rather unusual setting. The property was acquired by the Monte Bello Open Space Preserve, part of a vast network of hiking trails and natural wilderness throughout the Bay Area. The winery is still privately run, but as part of the preserve, you can hike in the hills to your wine tasting.
Our wine steward, Andrew, was helpful and knowledgeable about Picchetti’s wines and the vintner’s history
It was a blustery afternoon when we arrived and so we were thankful to arrived by motorized vehicle and to have the warmth of the tasting room in which to sample a glass or two of Picchetti’s refreshments. The place was bustling; not one table was empty.
We mosied on up to the one bare spot we could find and met Andrew, a friendly and enthusiastic wine steward. He filled us in on the history of the place and provided a sampling tour of the winery’s offerings. They range from a Chardonnay and the White “Pavone” blend to a variety of reds, including a Pinot Noir, a Sangiovese, a Zinfandel and, of course, a Cabernet Sauvignon.
Hiking trails around the winery
These are topped off by both a white and red port, providing you with a complete meal’s worth of beverages from appetizers through to dessert. (The red port certainly helped to shake off a bit of the outside chill.)
Picchetti is one of the oldest wineries in California
All of the wines are either grown on the premise or sourced locally. The Sangiovese grapes, for instance, were picked in nearby Morgan Hill. It was a nice comparison to the Sangiovese we had sampled the week before from Vino Noceto, up in the foothills of the Sierra Madre in Amador County. Both worked equally well.
We decided to pair the Pavone White Table Wine with a song for this week’s episode. And given the blustery day on which we sampled this vintage, we decided on Bill Wither’s classic “Ain’t No Sunshine.”
For Bay Area wine enthusiasts, you can’t go wrong with Picchetti. Especially for those of us in the South Bay, it’s just a short hop for a wine tasting, convenient if you’re not in the mood or don’t have the time for the trek to Sonoma or Napa.
Just keep an eye out for il Pavone on the drive up.
Summary
We love writing! Not just songs, but also little anecdotes, stories, reflections that hopefully provide a glimpse into our quirky artistic path. Somehow these unlikely bedfellows, two "perfect strangers" from across the globe found each other in California and turned out to be artistic soulmates.
