This week’s Feel-Good Friday is about the art of music and the art of repair. There is a power to giving music, whether it be through song, instrumentation, or maintaining and restoring instruments.
I love documentaries, and the well-done ones, whether feature or short, are hard to come by. I happened upon a really well done one, which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short. Directed by Kris Bowers and Ben Proudfoot, “The Last Repair Shop” tells the story of the heroes in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) who provide music and music maintenance to student instruments. The LAUSD shop has been in operation since 1959, and LAUSD is one of the few remaining school districts in the entire nation that does this. Hence, the title.
The documentary featured only four of the 12 technicians who maintain and repair the more than 130,000 musical instruments used by…
