‘Last Repair Shop' for LAUSD musicians gets $1-million gift, plus a visit from Yo-Yo Ma

Los Angeles Times

07-04-2025

In a downtown Los Angeles warehouse Sunday night, a few blocks north of the 10 Freeway, an unlikely quartet performed for the first and probably only time in front of a rapt audience.
At the piano, Amanda Nova, a Fairfax High School graduate and freshman at the USC Thornton School of Music. On alto sax, Theodore Roosevelt Senior High School student Ismerai Calcaneo. On violin, Palms Middle School seventh-grader Porche Brinker. And on cello, the most senior member of the group: Yo-Yo Ma.
All four performers played on instruments owned and maintained by the Los Angeles Unified School District. (Yo-Yo Ma's Stradivarius had the night off.) As the world-renowned cellist took to the improvised stage, Ma spun his borrowed instrument around, revealing a strip of blue tape on which the school-issued instrument's number was written in black marker.
The ensemble came together at a fundraiser at the facility where about a dozen LAUSD employees maintain and repair the school district's 130,000 instruments. The repair shop, its staff and the students who played with Yo-Yo Ma on Sunday were featured in the documentary short 'The Last Repair Shop.' Co-directed by Ben Proudfoot and composer Kris Bowers (and co-distributed by L.A. Times Studios and Searchlight), the film won an Academy Award for documentary short last year.
Before their Oscar win, the film's creators saw the shop's financial needs and launched a capital campaign with a goal of raising $15 million, said Proudfoot, the chief executive of Los Feliz-based Breakwater Studios.
'Many of the folks that work in the shop now will retire in the next few years,' Proudfoot said in an interview Sunday night. 'So where will the next generation of repair technicians come from? Who will train them? And how do we make sure that this shop remains here for generations and generations to come?'
Proudfoot said 82% of LAUSD's more than 440,000 students live below the poverty line. 'For a family to pay $25 a month to rent a violin or take responsibility for a $2,000 tuba, it's not going to happen for most students, right?' he said.
'That's why we are doing whatever we can to protect this shop and to rally the community to support it so that L.A. can keep this beautiful, wonderful thing that pretty much every other city in America has cut or privatized. Like so many things in our world, musical instruments [in other school districts] have been put behind a paywall for kids.'
At the emotional core of 'The Last Repair Shop' are the stories of the dedicated technicians and the students who benefit from the free instruments. The message: Music education has the power to transform lives.
Proudfoot said the fundraising campaign has received about 1,330 gifts from individuals in 30 states so far, many of which were small donations of $10 to $25. Together, those donations add up to more than $700,000.
At Sunday's event, the campaign organizers — who include philanthropist Jerry Kohl and Juilliard President Damian Woetzel — celebrated a $1-million donation from the Chuck Lorre Family Foundation, founded by the veteran TV producer behind 'Dharma & Greg,' 'Two and a Half Men' and 'The Big Bang Theory.' A new sign that reads 'The Lorre Family Strings Department' will hang above one section of the shop.
Proudfoot said that naming opportunities for the brass, woodwind and piano shop, as well as other parts of the warehouse, are available to future donors.
Proudfoot's co-director, Bowers, was unable to attend the event because of the recent birth of his second child. In an email to The Times, he cited his personal connection to 'The Last Repair Shop.'
'I was one of the many students who depended on these instruments,' Bowers wrote. 'I'll never forget the feeling when a repaired instrument was placed back in my hands — it was as if a blocked pathway to creativity suddenly opened. I would not be the musician or composer I am without those instruments — and without this shop.'
Sunday night, 18-year-old Calcaneo reflected on the repair shop's work. She said access to a well-tuned and maintained instrument can motivate students to keep playing music — and it can change a life.
'I feel like once your instrument stops working, [students] start losing that hope and they might go to another path other than music,' Calcaneo said. 'And not only that, they might feel like their school or the system is not supporting them in their passion.'
Ahead of their performance with Ma, Calcaneo, Brinker and Nova exhibited a cool confidence.
'When I first got told I was playing with Yo-Yo Ma, I was like, wow, that's not real. That feels like a lie,' Nova said. 'And now I'm here with one of the most renowned musicians in the world.'
Brinker, the seventh-grade violinist, said she had watched videos of Ma playing cello online.
'Now that I've played with professionals before, I'm a little less scared,' she said.
'I'm not nervous,' Calcaneo said, adding later: 'We rehearsed on our own and it sounded really good. I can only imagine how good it will sound with Yo-Yo Ma!'
The quartet's performance of 'Ode to Joy' did indeed sound good. Brinker kicked it off with a tender solo rendition of the opening bars of Beethoven's theme. Ma watched her intently, smiled broadly and responded with his own elegant version of the same theme.
Ma also offered a benediction to the repair shop, playing the Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major on the same borrowed cello. He and Woetzel, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, also led the audience in an interactive performance of George Balanchine's ballet 'Serenade,' set to Tchaikovsky's 1880 Serenade for Strings in C, Op. 48.
In between performances, Ma and Woetzel chatted about why they believe music education is a public good and a human right. Offering access to free musical instruments is essential, Ma said.
'There are few things in life that are non-transactional,' Ma said. 'The young people that are getting these instruments, they will probably see the world in the year 2100. We may not see that world, but we can help make it possible that world is actually a good world.'
These performances and conversations took place against a backdrop of damaged horns, well-worn instrument cases, tools and faded photos of high school bands performing at the Rose Bowl Parade. In a mounted glass box amid the decades of accumulated musical ephemera, the documentary film's Oscar statue was also on display.
And what's next for the LAUSD cello Yo-Yo Ma played?
'It's going back to school of course,' repair shop supervisor Steve Bagmanyan said.
Thanks to the work of Bagmanyan and the rest of the repair shop staff, it soon will be back in the hands of a cello student at Florence Nightingale Middle School.