Music pretty much pours out of Frank Vignola, a New York-based guitarist who brings gypsy and modern jazz together with incredible chops not lost on listeners who aren't also guitarists.

Always a guitar player's guitar player, Vignola's market basket of sideman gigs included years of steadfast support for Les Paul, accompanying the electric-guitar legend for years during his residency at Manhattan's Iridium, and a list of musical legends that includes Ringo Starr, Wynton Marsalis, Donald Fagen and Madonna.

In my mind, Frank Vignola's greatest contribution to the music world has been his constant support for gypsy jazz, playing in that style himself and spotlighting the work of others who share his love of the sounds popularized by Django Reinhardt. (See the video above of Frank playing "Tico Tico.")

Jazz is about swing. And so is Frank Vignola.

He heads West to play John Pisano's Guitar Night at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2012 at Vitello's, 4349 Tujunga Ave., Studio City. 818-769-0905. Cover is $5 -- and well worth it.

In case you don't know who John Pisano is, the L.A. based guitarist has been pretty much single-handedly keeping to jazz guitar scene alive in this city with his weekly Guitar Night series that has bounced from one club to another when needed.

Pisano is known by many for his work as Joe Pass' rhythm guitarist both in the '60s and before Pass' death in the 1990s. He's even better known for playing with Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, the blockbuster group for which Pisano wrote a few tunes that are no doubt providing nice royalty checks even today.

Pisano's two 1990s duo CDs ("Among Friends," and "Conversation Pieces") pretty much lay out why Guitar Night is so important. Few are the musicians willing to share the spotlight and help both listeners and fellow players get so much more out of the music.

Guitar Night is well-chronicled in the 2007 CD, "John Pisano's Guitar Night."

That Guitar Night has continued as venus have come and gone is a testament to Pisano's own commitment to jazz guitar music. Both the ongoing series of performances itself and Pisano are treasures that L.A. probably doesn't deserve. We are, indeed, lucky to have them both.

The 2011 L.A. Film Festival was, among other things, a feast of fine
acting. Yes, it may have started with a "Green Lantern" screening and
concluded with the so-so horror entry "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark."
But in between, practically every movie that I saw, whether fair to
fantastic overall, was enhanced by outstanding performances.
And isn't that, essentially, one of the best things a successful
festival can hope for?
"Drive" was one of the festival's higher-profile indies. Nicolas
Windig Refn won the directing award at Cannes earlier this year, and
this slickly cool study in gradually escalating brutality sure has
style to burn. It's also deeply ridiculous, but Ryan Gosling's
portrayal of a movie stunt driver who moonlights as a wheelman for
L.A. criminals counterbalances even the nuttiest moments. Through the first
half of the film, Gosling's in the imperturbable Buddha mode he perfected
for "Half-Nelson." As The Driver's situation goes steadily south in
the stretch, however, cracks appear in his "Le Samourai" facade. They then become fissures. It's a marvel of pitch control as impressive as the
protagonist's driving skills, in a movie that misuses some other
prime talent (Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston) - although Albert
Brooks' turn as a film producer gone to the dark side [insert your
own oxymoron joke here] is a total gas.
"Tyrannosaur" is almost an unintentional a parody of British miserablism movies, but its ensemble's powerful commitment to horrid behavior makes it a sterling example instead. Scottish actor Peter Mullan plays a widower so filled with rage, he drunkenly kicks his own dog to death in the first few scenes. He's moved to
some kind of tenderness, though, after meeting a religious woman (Olivia
Colman) whose husband (master wretch Eddie Marsan, the seething
driving instructor from Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky") makes Mullan's
character look like St. Francis. It's the feature writing and directing
debut of actor,Paddy Considine, who can currently be seen in an
altogether lighter Brit film, the winsome coming-of-age comedy
"Submarine." He makes sure "Tyrannosaur" showcases his colleagues'
full range of skills and depths of sensitivity, and by doing so makes
"Tyrannosaur's" grim goings-on altogether exhilarating.
"How to Cheat" won LAFF's best performance award for its
principles, Kent Osborne, Amanda Street and writer-director Amber
Sealey. Well-earned and pretty good for an initially insufferable,
micro-budget indie about a Silver Lake couple whose marriage has
become strained by their failure to have a baby. Though mostly told
from the mopey husband's point of view, the narrative gets happily
hijacked by the unpredictable behavior of his mistress (Street) and
wife (Sealey) as his awkward foray into infidelity leads to surprising and not always convincing, but often enough emotionally breathtaking, behavior.
The French "Tomboy" is another oddball drama made special by
outstanding playacting. In this case, it's two children - barely
tween Zoe Heran and the much younger Malonn Levana - who create an
astonishing psychological jungle gym to skitter upon. When their family moves to a
leafy southern town one summer, Heran's shorthaired Laure takes the opportunity to
introduce herself as a boy so she can horse around with the rambunctious
local fellas. As Laure's deception grows, and grows more perilous, her
adorable and adoring little sister Jeanne (Levana) gets giddily roped
into the game. "Tomboy" may not make a universal statement about
childhood, but it's good at showing kids having fun in ways parents
can't begin to imagine.
"The Destiny of Lesser Animals" works a wholly different but equally neat neat deception. On the surface, it's the story of a Ghanaian cop, desperate to return to the
New York from whence he was deported, on the trail of a thief who
stole his crucial fake passport. As the story unfolds, however, the
film becomes nothing less than a dialectical examination of
post-colonial Africa's unfulfilled promise. Yao B. Nunoo affectingly
charts the detective's growing understanding that getting the hell
out of there may not be the best the thing he can do for his country
or himself.
Are you ready for Iraqsploitation? Or is that Iraxploitation?
Whichever, it's coming next week a theater near you, and it's called "The
Devil's Double." The kinda true story of an army veteran
who's forced to serve as Saddam's psycho son, Uday Hussein's, lookalike
decoy, this slick Lee Tamahori film does not skimp on the decadence
and violence. By the time Uday's sixth or seventh, apparently nightly
orgy ends inevitably ends in gunfire, even the most id-driven
filmgoers will probably have had their fill, and there'll still be a
lot more to go. The thing is most surely redeemed, though, by Dominic
Cooper's twin turn as the maniac princeling and his fundamentally
decent doppelganger - and by the fact that, although the movie's
leads are English and French (Ludivine Sagnier is the Uday consort
who prefers the Double's company), it provides a dozen decent roles
for Arab actors.
Speaking of Sagnier, she's the best thing about "Love Crime," a
French corporate thriller that otherwise unengagingly turns into a
perfect murder scenario. Sagnier is a smart but passive assistant to
the amoral head (Kristin Scott Thomas, having a wicked good time) of
a big multinational's Paris office. As the boss exploits and
manipulates her to the breaking point, Sagnier employs all her actorly skills to show us her character has learned well. Too bad the lessons in the late Alain Corneau's
final feature aren't nearly as intriguing as they ought to be.
I'm not sure acting is "The Yellow Sea's" strongest point, but I will
praise the cast of this insane Korean crime thriller for its
collective stamina. The convoluted tale of an ethnic Korean from
Manchuria, in Seoul to fulfill a hit contract and hunt for his
long-gone wife, Na Hong-jin's lengthy thriller has so many chases,
fights and brutal encounters, you marvel that anyone is still
ambulatory, like, an hour before the end, let alone by the film's extended set of ghastly climaxes. Over-the-top by even South Korea's extreme standards,
this is hardly the artful kind of mayhem we associate with the work
of Park Chan-wook and other masters of this impressive national
cinema. But it does fulfill its bloody promise in an exhaustively
satisfying way.
Miranda July is a filmmaker/actor about whose gifts many find
dubious. "The Future," follow-up to her funky quirkfest "Me and You
and Everyone We Know," makes "How to Cheat" seem like a work of
Shakespearean rigor - initially, anyway. She and Hamish Linklater
play a couple of particularly mumbly Silver/Echo/E-Holly slackers who
use their impending adoption of an injured cat (that talks!) as an
excuse to behave even more irresponsibly. But as she pursues an
extra-cohabital affair and he perfects his ability to stop time (!),
these immature whiners' souls become rich and poignantly exposed. As
for the cat . . . well, it's worth seeing for yourself when the movie
opens commercially next week.
This weekend, though, you'll want to rush out to any theater playing
"Another Earth." The LAFF (and Sundance) darling was picked up for
distribution by Fox Searchlight; it's a redemption tale so lovely and
touching that releasing it through one of his divisions could
actually lends Rupert Murdoch a bit of much-needed absolution.
As a parallel world is discovered moving closer to our own planet, a
young astronomy nerd (co-writer Brit Marling) and a traumatized composer (William Mapother) enter each other's damaged orbits. Mike Cahill's film could be your standard relationship indie if not for the expertly deployed sci fi metaphor, a perfectly disorienting electronic score by Fall on Your Sword - and two of the most compelling performances of the year.
I also thought "Another Earth" had the best final shot of any movie this year until, on the last day of the festival, I saw "Higher Ground." Actress Vera Farmiga's directing debut may not be the most visually arresting piece, but much like an Ozu film, its
unfussy form focuses us on the characters' issues and relationships
in an unusually immersive way. Based on Carolyn Briggs' memoir about
her journey through fundamentalist Christianity during the latter
third of the 20th Century, "Ground" is a marvel of exquisite tone
control. Helmer/star Farmiga expertly sidesteps multiple
opportunities to emotionally vulgarize the material, subtly and with
thorough conviction keeping the focus on one woman's crisis of faith
through to that very last shot, an image so powerful and true it
brought me to tears for the first time in a theater since - oh, I
don't know, "Sophie's Choice"?
That may not have been a conventionally celebratory way to end
something called a festival, but I daresay nothing could have been better.
"Higher Ground" is scheduled for commercial release in late August.

Fans of medieval mayhem should have a field day at "Ironclad." There's hacking and torture aplenty; the low-budget, high-production value effort even built its own trebuchet, the first one of the ancient catapults manufactured, they say, since they went out of service sometime around the War of the Roses.
History buffs will likely also be engaged by this little-known slice of 13th Century politics. Not thrilled at having been forced to sign the Magna Carta, King John (Paul Giamatti, having frothing-at-the-mouth fun) leads a legion of Danish mercenaries against the barons who imposed the document. Main action takes place in and around the siege of Rochester Castle, where a handful of anti-royalist holdouts fight to delay the king's forces until a French army can land and catch up.
"Ironclad" is hardly a perfect film. Whenever a big action scene starts, director Jonathan English goes all step-printed quick-cut, which is annoying and ugly. The hothouse romance between the lady of the manor (Kate Mara) and a celibate Knight Templar (James Purefoy) gets pretty campy pretty quick. But the film nicely captures the confused feudal loyalties and conflicting self-interests that somehow enabled the first baby steps of Western democracy. Like that eventuality, "Ironclad" is a good thing, despite its flaws.

For awhile there, The Names of Love's agenda seems to be all about getting a French girl out of her clothes. Actress Sara Forestier is so adorable, that's amusing for awhile, but just when you're ready to ask how much director Michel Leclerc thinks he can get
away with, this sophisticated sex farce evolves into a rich and moving treatise on what it's meant to be French for the last 75 years.
As Forestier's half-North African Bahia takes political commitment to an unusual degree - she seduces right wingers of various stripes in a harebrained effort to convert them to her more liberal views - Arthur (Jacques Gamblin), the older, half-Jewish
scientist who's the closest thing to her real boyfriend, comes to terms with a lifetime's worth of avoided epiphanies.
Every skeleton in the collective Gallic closet - Nazi collaboration, the Algerian and Vietnamese debacles, cultural revolutions and their failure, the place that that whole "thank heaven for little girls" attitude comes from -and much more gets addressed and woven into the very real growth the odd couple undergoes. The political is made personal, and how, often via high risk narrative and cinematic tricks that succeed
beyond any reasonable exppectations.
Bahia's anti-racist screwing around hits an ironic wall when she targets a radical Muslim, Arthur figures out a way to combat the memory of the Holocaust with whipped
cream. I already hear some people screaming about how inappropriate and offensive the whole thing sounds. But history and human nature are nothing if not inappropriate and offensive, and Leclerc celebrates the goodness (or, at least, the naked joy) we can all get out of life anyway.

Joe Pass isn't so much an acquired taste as a player whose instrument seemed to pour out standards and bebop lines. The more you know the tunes, the more you "get" the bebop idiom, the more you'll understand, enjoy and appreciate the music of this pioneering instrumental genius.

It isn't as if Joe Pass was the first jazz guitarist to walk out on a stage and play without accompaniment. He just took it much further than anybody before (and few since).

Curt Smith struggled to keep his singing voice distinct and his throat clear during his performance at the Whitefire Theater in Sherman Oaks Thursday night, at one point resorting to several shots of throat spray to soothe his vocal chords.
Fortunately for the audience and for Smith, he didn't have to sing loud. The Whitefire only has 84 seats.

To say the show was intimate is a massive understatement. It's more like having lunch with Jack Nicholson or sitting next to Magic Johnson on a plane.

It's a bit like having U2 playing in your living room.

Perhaps sensing the extraordinary venue and unforgettable circumstances, the room was respectful, absorbed and dead silent from the moment the band took the stage.

It doesn't seem that long ago that the English pop rock band Tears for Fears were producing multi-platinum-selling records and packing stadiums world-wide.
But as we all know, nothing lasts forever and the band's co-founders Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith parted ways in 1989.

Orzabal continued to record and tour through the 1990s using the Tears For Fears name and although the duo reunited and released a record of new material in 2004, the level of success TFF achieved in the 80s wouldn't be reached again.

Smith moved to New York in 1991 and later to Los Angeles where he now lives in the San Fernando Valley.
Since moving to the Valley Smith has played residency shows at the Cactus Lounge at The Standard Hollywood in West Hollywood and is now nearly halfway through a six-show engagement at the Whitefire.

The show, dubbed "An Evening of Music and Sarcasm" draws mainly from Smith's solo records and includes a sprinkling of TFF favorites, a couple of covers and, plenty of sarcasm.

Between songs Smith jokes, tells stories banters about songwriting and talks about the meaning of the lyrics most of which come from his life experiences, his parents, his childhood and his friends.

The show's first set opened with Smith playing a solo, acoustic version of "Drive," the much-covered Cars hit from, surprise, 1984. That was followed by several songs from Smith's solo work including his album "Halfway Pleased" and "Mayfield."

The second set included more Smith solo songs, a sweet cover of Coldplay's "Yellow" and ended with a soft, melodic version of "Mad World" from TFF's first album.

The band consisted of longtime collaborator Charlton Pettus on guitar, sequencers and various MacBook Pro applications, Doug Petty on keyboards and squeezebox and Jamie Wollam who played a cajon, a kind of box drum, thing.

The acoustics at the Whitefire, typically used for live theater, are surprisingly good and the sound coming from the stage was clean and authentic.

Smith will play four more nights at the Whitefire including Thursday, April 28 and Wednesday May 18, 25 and June 1, all at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 general admission and are available online only at eventbrite.com/.

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She's not just the host of Bravo's hit series, "Tabatha's Salon Takeover." Tabatha Coffey is a best-selling author.

Tonight the tressed-to-kill queen of salon transformations will be at Barnes & Noble at The Grove (189 The Grove Drive, Los Angeles) signing copies of her memoir, "It's Not Really About the Hair."

The event starts at 7 p.m.