JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
If you've heard music from the hit show "Orange Is The New Black," you've heard the work of husband and wife TV composers Brandon Jay and Gwendolyn Sanford.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I DON'T NEED YOUR CORNBREAD")
GWENDOLYN SANFORD, BRANDON JAY AND SCOTT DOHERTY: (Vocalizing).
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Last year, they were among the many who lost their homes in the Palisades and Eaton Canyon fires that ripped through the greater Los Angeles area.
BRANDON JAY: We managed to save my wife's acoustic guitar and one of my electric guitars.
CHANG: But Brandon Jay says they sadly lost hundreds of other instruments. And it made him think about other musicians in the area, which brings us to this week's edition of Here to Help, our series focused on service and community.
JAY: A week after the fire, I did a Facebook post talking about the value of instruments, and I mentioned just a handful of instruments that were special to us that we lost. I talked about them in that, like, the value of instruments isn't necessarily the monetary value, but it's, like, the sentimental and the emotional value that you have attached to them and the stories behind them that make them special, and that I wanted to replace them with ones that I got from friends.
SUMMERS: A week later, Jay and his wife played a local community event in Pasadena. Friends, acquaintances and even people he hadn't seen in years showed up with instruments, some of them identical to the ones they'd lost in the fire.
CHANG: That event would give Jay the idea to launch several projects to give back to the musical community. First, there's Altadena Musicians, a registry for artists to sign up for help replacing their lost gear and to exchange stories.
JAY: And it just kind of snowballed from there, and we got a website up and running pretty quickly at the end of January. And so people would reach out and, like, share these stories of what they lost.
SUMMERS: The organization also created an app that helps streamline the instrument donation process, and a free record store where music lovers can begin to replace record collections that may have been lost in fires, too, which Jay says can feel like a bigger hit than losing instruments.
JAY: Because it's something that you collect over, like, your whole lifetime, and, like, you start when you're young with your first album that you saved up for or you got for Christmas or whatever. And you remember those - all the memories, and so many people lost that. They lost that lifelong thing. And we can just keep this going and start to, like, help people start to replace their instruments and their record collections and just be like this musical hub for the community, for people to get together and see each other and stay connected.
SUMMERS: Altadena Musicians has also raised enough money to launch a physical space for live music performances, rehearsals, recording and instrument repairs.
CHANG: Brandon Jay says even though it's been a year since the fires, he hopes this effort can help artists who are coping with their losses for a long time to come.
JAY: I just want it to be, like, an ongoing situation. Because for so many people, they're not ready yet. Like, I'm not ready yet to have everything that I lost. Like, they have limited space where they are, or they're just, like, emotionally not ready. And then, like, a couple years from now, when they are ready, I wanted it to be available to them so that they wouldn't have to worry about that expense.
CHANG: For more stories about volunteerism, check out npr.org/heretohelp. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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