How Eaton Fire survivor and Altadena Musicians founder Brandon Jay is helping people replace their instruments and record collections: ‘It’s a great way for the community just to connect with each other’
As seen on Lyndsanity
“I never thought that my house would burn down. And I really never thought that my whole town would burn down,” says Los Angeles native and longtime Altadena resident Brandon Jay flatly, sitting in his temporary month-to-month rental home and he speaks via zoom with Musicians for Fire Relief. “It’s crazy. I know more people whose houses have burned down than people that haven’t.”
Jay and his wife Gwendolyn Sanford, renowned screen music composers who have worked on Weeds, Orange Is the New Black, The Midnighters, and 40 Watts From Nowhere, lost their home in the Eaton Fire, along with their music studio and all but two of their instruments. But almost immediately after this tragedy, Jay sprang into action, founding the organization Altadena Musicians, which helps replace musical equipment and record collections lost in any of the fires that devastated L.A. this past January.
Jay describes Altadena Musicians — as well as an app, Instrumental Giving, that launches this week — as working like “a wedding registry, where you list everything that you lost, from the smallest shaker to the biggest grand piano. … Basically, you prove that you’re impacted, and then you get signed up on with the app and you create a profile and you log everything as you think of it, adding more instruments as you remember what you lost.”