The Los Angeles League of Musicians

LA LOM pay tribute to LA – and the world – on their latest album.

“Sorry,” says Zac Sokolow, apologizing for the connection issues and cave-like lighting on a Zoom call. “We’re in our van. It’s a travel day between Berlin and…”

He looks out the window, but can’t see much in the dark, it being nighttime there.

“We’re in Germany, heading somewhere to...”

“To Aachen,” chimes in Jake Faulkner, sitting to Sokolow’s left in the van’s middle passenger seat. Behind them is Nicholas Baker, leaning forward from the way-back seat. 

“Aachen, yeah,” Sokolow says. “On our way to Paris for Pitchfork.”

Together they are the Los Angeles League of Musicians – LA LOM – a trio of Sokolow on guitar, Faulkner on bass and Baker on drums and percussion. It’s one thing that they’re on a seven-hour drive across northern Germany, having played a club gig in the country’s capital the night before and with another comparable drive to Paris the next day to play at the French edition of the hip music festival.

That they’re doing this with instrumentals built largely around cumbia, bolero, Peruvian chicha, and other sounds from Latin America is another thing entirely.

“This is our first international tour,” Sokolow says. “We just started out in Mexico City and then played in Miami and flew straight to Europe. And it’s pretty cool for us to see these venues selling out in these countries we’ve never played in. People are really into the music and dancing and stuff and know a lot of our original songs. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”

How do people in Europe know the material of a band like this from LA, that only recently released its first album, titled simply The Los Angeles League of Musicians?

Sokolow and Faulkner point to the guy behind them. “A lot of social media,” Faulkner says.

“Nick really led the way on this,” Sokolow adds. “He made sure that videos were an important part of this project, knowing the value of social media.”

Which brings us to another vehicle, a decidedly different ride than the Euro-tour van: a ‘72 Chevy Monte Carlo. That’s what Sokolow pulls up in at the start of a video for a song that, as it happens, is called “‘72 Monte Carlo.” He puts it in park, hops out, saunters a few steps to join Faulkner, Baker, and guest Joshy Soul (on Farfisa organ), who are already putting down a sinuous, loping groove. 

He picks up a Vintage White Fender Vintera II ‘70s Jaguar, pulls the strap over his head and jumps in with a series of alternately fluid and stinging, reverb-laden licks. It was all played and filmed live, in one take. (Not to mention that they’re all dressed smartly in matching bronze shirts and black slacks.)

“Yeah, that’s a normal day for us,” says Faulkner, laughing. 

Joking aside, that V8-powered muscle car is a fitting chariot for the album’s impressionistic tour of LA. First stop: “Angel’s Point,” the opening track referencing a spot in Elysian Park near Dodger Stadium.

“It’s kind of a viewpoint,” Sokolow says, literally, but perhaps also figuratively in regards to an Angeleno mindset. “It’s a really romantic place where you can see all the city, the [downtown] skyline and Dodger Stadium, and it’s one of my favorite places. That song to me really sounds like the streets of LA a lot. We put this organ on that track that kind of has the tone of the organ at Dodger Stadium. When you’re up there, you can kind of hear the organ playing off in the distance. It has that vibe to me.”

That vibe weaves through the album, with many of the song titles referencing cities, streets, or neighborhoods, like pages flipping in an old Thomas Guide map-book that was standard in every SoCal car pre-Google Maps. There’s “Figueroa” (both a major street and the name of producer Elliot Bergman’s studio, where most of the album was made), “Maravilla” (found in East LA), “El Sereno,” “Lorena” (a street in Boyle Heights), “Ghosts of Gardena,” “Moonlight Over Montebello.” A new single not on the album is “La Tijera” (out today, November 22), a street known to locals as a shortcut to LAX to avoid freeway traffic. 

The LA LOM story, though, started in a different setting: the heart of Hollywood. In 2018, Baker got a regular gig at the historic Roosevelt Hotel, right across the street from the famed Grauman’s Theatre complex – home to countless glitzy premieres and the concrete handprints, footprints, and signatures of generations of stars. The drummer contacted Faulkner, a friend from college at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) outside of LA. The bassist, in turn brought in Sokolow, a friend and frequent musical partner since they met some 20 years ago as teens working and teaching at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, the key folk music store and concert venue in Santa Monica. (Sokolow’s father, Fred, a long-time mainstay multi-instrumentalist in the California folk and bluegrass world, has taught there for decades.)

“The basic idea when we first started was to figure out a way to play really serious music and get paid to do it,” Faulkner says, the three of them laughing. “Luckily, they gave us the opportunity, ‘cause they heard we weren’t terrible, to work four or five nights a week and it gave us time and space to really figure out our sound.”

Much of the time, they played three-hour evening or night-time sets in the Roosevelt’s ornate Art Deco lobby. Other times they’d be pool-side – a Hollywood party scene some nights – or booked for special events the hotel hosted.

“We would get all types of people,” Faulkner says. “We’d get everybody from tourists to celebrity sightings from the premieres across the street.”

“There was something after the Oscars that we did one time,” Sokolow adds.

Sometimes people listened closely, other times not so much. “We took advantage of both situations,” Faulkner says. “If no one’s listening, that really gives us the chance to run through the same song four times in a row. And if they are listening, we can play it once and see if it translates at all.”

The people who were listening played a role in how the LA LOM sound evolved.

“We started it out by doing a lot of kind of doo-wop and then quickly we started doing boleros,” Faulkner continues. “Nick brought his congas instead of a drum kit and we just switched to what we knew how to play from that. And from there it turned pretty quickly into cumbia, because that’s what people would be requesting from us.”

While they play with expertise, the spirit comes from their own backgrounds. “I grew up playing with my dad, playing a lot of bluegrass and old-time music,” says Sokolow, raised going between beachside Venice and Gardena a bit to the south. And if you Google him, you’ll likely see pictures of him with a banjo, not an electric guitar, and links to two albums he made in recent years of old-time folk music.

Faulkner, who lives in Los Feliz on the east side of Hollywood near Griffith Park, shares some of those roots: “I grew up listening to a lot of old folk and blues and I had some really strong music mentors. The late music producer Hal Wilner was my godfather. So he gave me all the weird records I could get my hands on. And I really early on met Zac and that was a journey through American music and folk music from all over the world.” Faulkner also furthered his folk grounding by serving as bassist and producer for the latter-day version of the Kingston Trio.

In fact, after their McCabe’s years, they worked together in rockabilly combos and other rootsy ensembles. The strongest grounding in the Latin music world comes from San Fernando Valley native Baker, whose grandmother was from Mexico.

“My grandma would play all that stuff for me,” Baker says. “That’s how I got my start in Latin music in general, and then also I met my mentor, this man named Roberto Miranda. He was a bassist, but he’s Afro-Cuban, and he grew up playing all the percussion. So he taught me all that. When we met, we were just finding the music that we sort of had in common, that we knew, and immediately started making up a lot of stuff too. We had three hours to fill every night, so it pretty quickly turned into our own material. And my dad played a lot of ‘70s kind of psychedelic rock. So it kind of makes sense what we’re doing right now. Not that I really think about it.”

The common ground of all this, Sokolow says, is in strong, intriguing melodic lines – threads that lead not just into LA LOM’s Latin music core, but far beyond to other global connections. Faulkner cites the song “Espejismo,” which means mirage. 

“The intro to that reminds me of some of the old Italian or Spanish 78s,” he says. “Zac and I, along with some other guys in town, used to play a lot of late 19th century, early 20th century mazurkas and polkas and waltzes on mandolin and acoustic guitars, and I’d be chopping on the upright bass. And then it goes into this thing that’s sort of inspired by a lot of Ethiopian jazz stuff, which is something we’ve listened to together a lot.”

Adds Sokolow, “Back when we were playing at the Roosevelt we were covering a lot of that. There are sections on that song that are kind of going to cumbia a little bit, and even some chord changes on there that are similar to this Romanian and Eastern European music I play a lot with friends. There’s this group called the Blasting Company, they’re kind of legends in LA, really versatile musicians that I’ve played in groups with that I learned a lot of that Eastern European music from. That song mixes a lot of these different elements.”

All of these influences figure into the landscape of The Los Angeles League of Musicians, which was released by venerable Verve Records, where the trio joined a roster running from Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, and Wes Montgomery to Jon Batiste, Samara Joy, and Tank & the Bangas. 

Some of the musical portraits are explicit, representing experiences tied to the cited locales. Others are more allusive, emotional. Among the former is “Moonlight Over Montebello,” with its dreamy haze recalling the instrumental brothers duo Santo & Johnny’s 1959 hit  “Sleep Walk.” 

“That one’s really special to us,” says Faulkner. “We have some friends in Montebello who own a little space called Cuarto Central and they’ve been really kind to us and given us a place to play. So we wrote that after one of our performances there.”

“It’s a really cool space, a little art gallery space where they’ll have concerts and people just love to dance there,” Sokolow says. “Which is our favorite kind of audience to play for, when you’re in a little room and it gets all hot in there and it’s filled with dancers who are sweating and dancing right up next to the band.”

Among the latter is “Lorena.”

“It’s a street in East LA where we made a lot of our videos and recorded, but it’s also a girl’s name,” Sokolow says “It brings up images of that too.”

“We were just talking about this recently,” says Faulkner, as they roll through the German night. “I was thinking that it feels like if it reminds you of your first love, we don’t want to talk about what happened in it, but if it feels that way, that’s what we’re going after. If we’re succeeding with that, then that’s the right feeling. The music has a lot of nostalgic feelings to it. I think it reminds us of the city of LA a lot. It’s an homage to the city.”

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Lead Image: LA LOM by Zane Rubin.