Meet Joe LoPiccolo

Photo by Neil Vance

 

Today we’d like to introduce you to Joe LoPiccolo.

Joe, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I started playing guitar when I was nine years old, but it was a bit of a false start. At the time, I was really into rock groups such as Kiss, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. My teacher really didn’t nurture that passion, so I stopped studying with him after a few months. I then switched to upright bass and clarinet for a little while and didn’t come back to the guitar until I was thirteen. Through my first three years of high school, I was extremely passionate about music and guitar, but I wasn’t really formally studying. When I moved to a new high school for my senior year, I fell in with a group of friends that were incredibly serious about music. One of these people was Rivers Cuomo, the lead singer for the band Weezer. He and our immediate group of friends changed my life by inspiring me to take my passion for the guitar to the next level and to have professional aspirations. This meant going “all in” to the near exclusion of everything else. That same year I started composing, another friend had exposed me to a guitarist and composer named Michael Hedges. Michael’s music and technique really changed my perception of what was possible on the guitar. I actually won the high school “Battle of the Bands” on solo 12 string guitar playing all original compositions. I would still have to say that was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

Immediately after graduating high school, I went with a friend to Berklee College of Music in Boston for their five-week summer program. Being there and seeing the incredibly high level of students from all over the world resulted in another epiphany regarding how much more studying I had to do. I was fortunate to be accepted at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia which was definitely another life-changing experience. I will be forever grateful to some of my mentors there such as guitarists Larry Koonse and Miroslav Tadic and David Roitstein who is the director of the Jazz Studies program and an incredible pianist and composer himself. CalArts is an intimate community of artists that really values and nurtures individual expression and originality within a multi-disciplinary collaborative environment. I graduated with my BFA in Jazz Guitar, took four years off and then returned for an MFA in Multi-Focus Guitar which had more of a classical emphasis. Since graduating in 2000, I have been teaching at my two colleges and performing over 100 times a year in various settings.

Has it been a smooth road?
I would say yes that it has been primarily smooth and I’m thankful that I’ve never had to consider another career or have a “day job”. There was a difficult period where I was obsessed with film music. I was studying orchestration intensively and I started to do some work in the industry. I did a few scores for Griffith Observatory, some student films and a little TV writing. I found this work so incredibly stressful that I realized that I wanted to return to my guitar and that I could still love and participate in film music as a listener rather than a creator.

Covid of course has also been an incredible challenge for anyone who has a career as a performer. Initially, it was odd after so many years of performing consistently to suddenly have zero gigs, it had both a financial and spiritual impact. For the first few months and for the first time in my life, I found myself not really wanting to play guitar. I suppose I enjoyed not having that pressure to maintain my “chops” and to be able to take a breath from all the driving and performing. I played piano and drums just for fun, I had the time to write more. Thankfully gigs are starting to come back (albeit very slowly), so even this pandemic has had a bit of a silver lining for me. I feel it renewed my perspective on what I value most as an artist.

Tell us about your music. What do you do, what do you specialize in, what are you known for, etc. What are you most proud of as a musician? What sets you apart from others?
In Los Angeles, there are so many incredible musicians from so many different backgrounds and we have musicians that can play across multiple genres very convincingly. We also have the influence of Hollywood and the session industry, so the requisite base skill set is very high here in LA. In the midst of this very impressive cohort, I feel that the strength that I’m most proud of is my ability and proclivity to compose and perform mostly my own music. I do this successfully even in settings that might not be considered a traditional or complementary vehicle for this. This is where I feel I may be set apart a bit from most (but of course not all) performers here in Los Angeles.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
The thing I love most about living in Los Angeles (apart from being close to family) has been my exposure to diaspora and the multicultural musical community that we have here. While I don’t aspire to master these genres authentically, the influence of being able to perform with or listen to artists that have gone really deep into their native idioms has resulted in my own music being a synthesis of all these myriad influences. I feel Los Angeles is uniquely equipped to give this multicultural experience to those of us that want to partake of and learn from it. One example would be my project that takes traditional Italian music and resets it to be reflective of these different musical perspectives. This idea may have never come to genesis had I not went to CalArts (which has a robust World Music program) or if I were in a city less heterogeneous than LA.

As far as what I don’t like about LA, it would be the traffic and the ever-increasing cost of living. These respectively result in a reduced quality of life and the fact that it can be very difficult to make a living as an artist of any medium. The number of venues that host and support live original music but also pay a decent wage has greatly diminished over the past few decades. As a result, you can very frequently see world-class performers in a background setting at a hotel or a restaurant here in Los Angeles. I’ve always felt grateful for work in any context, but it can difficult here at times balancing our desires to authentically express ourselves as artists juxtaposed with what we have to do to survive.

One last thing I would like to mention is my new solo residency every Friday and Saturday night outdoors at Bulgarini Gelato, Vino and Cucina in Altadena. It’s been interesting to see the response of the clientele to hearing live music in these turbulent times. The bass player from John Legend (Kaveh Rastegah) was there recently and said the music literally brought tears to his eyes as it was the first live music he had seen since the early days of quarantine. That meant so much to me, not only that it was coming from him, but also that live music seems to have a heightened potency and healing potential in these times.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.joelopiccolo.com
• Email: joe@joelopiccolo.com

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