Welcome to the Larry Wolff Blog!

Here's a little (well a lot) about me:

After taking up flute and saxophone while atttending Rexford High school, I went on to Los Angeles City College to study theory and play in the Jazz and Concert bands there. That was in 1964 or 1965 when Woody James took us to Chicago to play at the National Association of Jazz Educators Convention.  I played 2nd alto, Jeff Clayton was on lead alto, Jim Sharpe on baritone sax and guys like Bob Chadwick and Joe Rotondi on piano, David Diggs drums with guest artist Louis Bellson (who was married to Pearl Bailey at the time).  Our band kicked ass, all the other bands sounded like marching bands by comparison.

Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances trying to avoid the draft, I found myself at Chapman College in Orange, CA.  There I had the opportunity to study flute with some fine private teachers and played in the school’s Collegium Musicum while studying Art, Art History, Sociology (a big eye-opener!) and participating in combined drama and music programs.  On one occasion we nearly got our faculty advisor, Dr. Haldeman , with a PhD. In Musicology, fired when I got carried away using the “echoplex” to create a wall of electronic sounds for a performance staged by the drama students.  Everybody thought it sounded really cool, except the school administrators—fortunately, our faculty advisor had already earned tenure by then.
While I was still living in the school’s dormitory, I was sneaking out at night to play with local soul, R & B, and rock bands in the Garden Grove area.  As I met more musicians, I began gigging around doing frat parties, private affairs, and a host of lounge gigs.  Finally after 2 semesters, my faculty advisor encouraged me to apply to CalArts (California Institute of the Arts), which was then located in downtown Los Angeles.

To gain admission to CalArts, I had to audition with the music department playing classical flute, Bach Sonata No. 3, and was then accepted as a flute major.  While CalArts was still located in downtown L.A., we had a jazz band directed by William Fritz, who had been with Stan Kenton’s band and taught arranging from the William Russo book.  When CalArts was building the Valencia campus, we were moved to an interim campus, a former nunnery called Villa Cabrini.  This place was a beautiful old monastery that had a courtyard pool and fountains.  It was there that our music teacher, in a class called “contemporary rhythms”, got the idea to have all of his students chant rhythmic exercises based on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.  It worked the class into such a fervor, that we all stripped naked and jumped into the swimming pool.  On another occasion, the woodwind quintet of which I was a member, while playing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, decided to march through the campus and then across the street into the Mayfair Market keeping up the theme for public amusement.

While at Villa Cabrini, I wrote a piece for flute, oboe and trombone and arranged to have it performed and recorded.  On the way to the recording session, the percussion teacher, John Bergamo, stuck his head out of his classroom as I went by and asked “hey, man, want to smoke some hash?”  Needless to say, I became incapable of rendering my own music—a most embarrassing experience!

When the new campus in Valencia was completed, a rather illustrious faculty assembled there.  Mel Powell was hired as the Dean of the School of Music, Morton Subotnick started an electronic music department, Hari Har Rao and Ravi Shankar headed up the Indian music department, Nicholas Englender was head of the World Music department, and Sandy MacKendrick headed up the Film department.  It was at Valencia that Mel Powell got up and announced to us students “the curriculum simply cannot sanction American ethnic music” (i.e. Jazz)—this though he had been a prominent jazz pianist in the 30’s and 40’s and had played both with Benny Goodman and Charlie Parker.  Thereafter, when any of us wanted to play jazz, we had to do it undercover.

Soon after I’d enrolled at CalArts as a flute major, I was approached by a film student and asked to write a score for his student film.  The notion was quite appealing to me and I eventually petitioned to change my major to music composition, the subject in which I earned my BFA in 1971.  I went on to score a number of student films, two of which won Best Score awards in the Broadway Cinemedia Competition.  By the time I graduated from CalArts, I had a respectable collection of samples of my work and my first professional referral as a composer of film music.  I elected not to continue studying for a master’s degree, opting instead to go to work for Bosustow Productions, an animation company in Santa Monica whose founder was on of the creators of Mr. Magoo.  I also had the opportunity to work with a wonderful director, Sam Weiss, who had a great love of music (especially jazz) and was a trumpet and piano player as well.  Sam Weiss and I became lifelong friends and collaborators.  We started out doing educational films, based on material such as Grimm’s Fairytales, various children’s books and other interesting sources, like The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving.  Eventually Bosustow Productions developed major business clients such as Ohio Bell Telephone and Occidental Petroleum.  They also did some network television projects, called “After School Specials” for CBS on which I was the principal composer.

Through my professional contacts, I was next hired on with Southern California Edison company (SCE) which, at that time had their own “in-house” film production unit.  There I was assigned to many projects concerning water conservation, energy efficient homes, electric cars and the company charity, United Way.  It was a lucrative position as a staff composer where I managed to negotiate to keep the publishing and writer rights to all of my music-for-hire.  This work lead to other opportunities writing music for G. Heilman Brewing Co., for radio broadcast commercials for such products as Colt 45 Malt Liquor and Mickey’s Big Mouth Beer and others.

In 1987, I was approached by a record company to make a number of albums in the new rap music idiom, a group we called “Larry Wolff and the Streetbeaters”.  They had heard the Colt45 commercials and liked the music.  This was back in the day when what is now known as “Hip-Hop” or “Trance” music was just becoming popular, then sometimes referred to as “break-dance” music.
After producing four of these albums I was contacted by Harmony-Gold Productions of Hollywood to score music for 26 episodes of a Disney Channel T.V. series entitled “World of Horses.”  This was a wonderful project as each episode was set in a different part of the world and the producers wanted symphonic music based on indigenous music of each country.  Since there was no symphony at my disposal, nor was there an adequate budget to retain one, all the music was done in my studio using the synthesizers and samplers I’d assembled by that time.  The music of this series was nominated for a music award sponsored by the National Academy of Cable Programming at their 13th annual Ace Awards.  I enjoyed a long association with Harmony-Gold Productions, including scoring for two feature films based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World”.

After that I was approached by Killer Tracks, a well-known worldwide music library with an offer to sign a seven-year contract as part of their stable of composers.  On our first meeting, Sam Trust, the CEO called me into his office to tell me “when I listened to your sample reel, at first I thought you were black.  Then when I listened further, I thought maybe you were Russian!”  At Killer, we writers created music for many categories—industrial, seasonal or holiday music, corporate, dramatic, comic, television and news programs, including music for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona.  The Killer Track gig proved to be steady and lucrative, where I was privileged to work with both a talented group of composers as well as some great studio musicians.  The ultimate pay-off was an opportunity to conduct some of my Killer Track commissioned scores in London, England at the famed Abbey Road Studios in 1994.

During this period, I continued to play in a number of bands around L.A., some of which would then be described as “fusion” bands attempting to combine Funk, Rock and Jazz into a new sound.  Today I am actively playing jazz, in both big band ensembles and small groups.  Examples of my music are posted to this website for those who are interested in checking it out.