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Gregory Alper: Palisades Apocalypse

By Katchie Cartwright
April 4, 2025
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Rachel Carson served us with this warning in 1962: "We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one less traveled by—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth" (Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin).

Prophetically, award-winning Los Angeles-based saxophonist, composer, producer and teacher Gregory Alper and his team began to work on the stunning "Palisades Apocalypse" on January 6, 2025, one day before the devastating Palisades Fire erupted in the Santa Monica Mountains, driven by the effects of climate change. "Serenade to the Apocalypse," the video's soundtrack, appears on his self-produced 2013 album, Caves of Mystery. Alper and scores of friends and neighbors were displaced by the fires in 2025. He dedicates the project to all of them, expressing his "gratitude to all the valiant Firefighters, National Guard, LAPD, EPA, Army Corp of Engineers, FEMA and restoration crews." His hope is that it offers "comfort while we await rebuilding" to those whose lives were upended. Alper and company's exquisite meditation is yet another reminder of the toll of human carelessness, the price of progress.

Contact Katchie Cartwright on All About Jazz.
Ethnomusicologist, singer-flutist, writer, radio host (KRTU San Antonio 91.7FM).

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