“I never thought that my house would burn down. And I really never thought that my whole town would burn down,” says Los Angeles native and longtime Altadena resident Brandon Jay flatly, sitting in his temporary month-to-month rental home and he speaks via zoom with Musicians for Fire Relief. “It’s crazy. I know more people whose houses have burned down than people that haven’t.”
Jay and his wife Gwendolyn Sanford, renowned screen music composers who have worked on Weeds, Orange Is the New Black, The Midnighters, and 40 Watts From Nowhere, lost their home in the Eaton Fire, along with their music studio and all but two of their instruments. But almost immediately after this tragedy, Jay sprang into action, founding the organization Altadena Musicians, which helps replace musical equipment and record collections lost in any of the fires that devastated L.A. this past January.
Jay describes Altadena Musicians — as well as an app, Instrumental Giving, that launches this week — as working like “a wedding registry, where you list everything that you lost, from the smallest shaker to the biggest grand piano. … Basically, you prove that you’re impacted, and then you get signed up on with the app and you create a profile and you log everything as you think of it, adding more instruments as you remember what you lost.”
Additionally, anyone who wants to help can sign up and list instruments they have available for donation. “The great thing about musical instruments and musicians, it’s like, we all have extra stuff,” Jay chuckles. “So, if we reach out to those people and just connect them with people that lost everything, we get their stuff back. … And it’s a great way for the community just to connect with each other, both the donors and the recipients. We’re all about them meeting each other and talking about the story of the instrument that you lost and the story of the instrument that you’re getting, so that it helps heal that process and you can continue that story.”
Jay came up with the Altadena Musicians concept — a sort of a “BuyNothing type of experience for instruments” — after he and Sanford decided to play a show at the second annual Pasadena Neighbor Day just one week after the Eaton Fire, despite having no equipment and nowhere to rehearse. “Our heads were spinning just from everything going on, but we decided that we would go on with the show and it was a good opportunity for our friends and family to see each other,” Jay recalls. “People showed up, and they started bringing instruments. They knew that we’d lost ours, and a lot of them were exactly instruments that I lost in the fire — super-specific, random stuff.”
Jay realizes that some instruments can never truly be replaced, because “it’s not necessarily the monetary value — it’s how it comes into your possession, who gave it to you or how you saved it up for it.” He’s still “mourning the loss” of a “super-sentimental” pair of castanets gifted to him by late Muffs frontwoman Kim Shattuck, for instance. “But people were giving me the exact same kind of things, and so it just helped with the healing process. Like, I lost that stylophone that my friend Linda gave me, but my friend Theresa gave me one. It’s not exactly the same, but it just helps.”
Now Jay is paying it forward. After Altadena Musicians launched, the first instrument donation came from a good Samaritan who gave up his acoustic Martin guitar — his very first guitar, which he’d saved up for as a kid — to help someone who’d lost a similar childhood guitar to the fires. Another victim whose grandmother’s 1932 Steinway piano had burned received a replacement 100-year-old Steinway. Word of the new organization spread quickly after Jay’s old Silver Lake scene pals Weezer posted about it, and Jay smilingly recalls using $1,000 from the organization’s first week of cash donations to buy an Amoeba Music gift certificate for a local family that had lost their prized record collection, and also buying them albums by artists who’d been affected by the fires, like Dawes, Poolside, and the Postal Service.
That family, whose guitars were also replaced, later sent a “beautiful message” to Jay. “They’re in an Airbnb. [The mom] is like, ‘It’s made such a shift in our home. We didn’t realize how much we were missing our instruments.’ And now that we have them back and they’re playing, it’s just changed the dynamic of our situation.’ And their kids are more interested in music now because of the few items that they actually own and that they got their own guitars back. And so, it’s super-cool. And then in turn she was like, ‘Hey, I’d like to help what you guys are doing.’ And now she’s doing our social media!”
Altadena Musicians also arranged for a group of affected kids from Altadena’s Odyssey Charter School to see their favorite band, TV Girl, and meet Nick Valensi, a member of their other favorite band, the Strokes. “Nick came over and showed up at their rehearsal and blew up their minds and they all jammed with him. … Him just showing up and doing that made a huge difference in their lives and in this healing process,” says Jay. “People are just being so generous and helpful, and it’s hard for some people to ask for help in this situation, but really, it’s OK. Because when someone helps, when they give you an instrument or they show up and play guitar because they’re well-known, it gives them something to do. It helps them by helping you heal the situation.”
People wanting to help, or seeking help, can go to altadenamusicians.org and sign up for the registry, while the Instrumental Giving app will launch with an upcoming in-person “beautiful event” where people can bring donated instruments and records as well as get an app tutorial. “This is a strong community,” says Jay proudly. “It was a really strong community and neighbors that were thoughtful and from all walks of life prior to this, but now it’s ironclad, because we’re sharing this community traumatic experience.”
Excerpts from Brandon Jay’s interview originally aired as part of the Musicians for Fire Relief livestream benefit on March 6. Watch a replay of that entire show below, and donate or buy Musicians for Fire Relief merch here.
