The first thing that caught Bernard Kinsey’s attention was a letter that a friend had found in his aunt’s attic. A slave document, as Kinsey now refers to it, the letter is about an enslaved African American man. ‘Holding it in my hand led me to want to find out more about the man,’ Kinsey says.   That was 15 years ago. Kinsey and his wife, Shirley, already had an art collection of paintings, sculpture, textiles and masks they found on their far and wide travels. But the letter set the Kinseys on a different kind of journey.   ’For the past 20 years our focus has been on discovering the stories of African Americans,’ Bernard says. The more than 100 historical records, rare books, letters, artifacts and images the Kinseys have acquired since then are tangible evidence of the people these items represent. ‘We have the stories and the collection to document them,’ Bernard says.   This week in Washington, D.C., ‘The Kinsey Collection: Shared Treasures of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey’ will be unveiled at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. The collection has been away from the couple’s home in Pacific Palisades since 2006. The Smithsonian is the last stop on an extensive tour.   ’It’s pretty amazing,’ Bernard says. ‘What was in our wine cellar is now in the main gallery of the most visited museum in the world.’ He estimates that 2.5 million people will see the collection before it closes on May 1, 2011.   The Kinsey collection of African American art and artifacts ranges across some 500 years and includes works by many contemporary black artists. But the heart of it explores the African American experience in the 17th and 18th centuries.   It is not always an easy history to look at, but the Kinseys have uncovered bright rays of hope and inspiration. ‘Find out about your ancestors and it empowers you,’ Shirley says.   One of their major holdings is a book of poems by Phyllis Wheatley dated 1773, a first edition of the first book published by a former U.S. slave. Her references to God, religion and Greek mythology show Wheatley to be a devout and educated woman.   Several letters in the collection are particularly moving. In one, dated 1854, a white master regrets having to sell his 17-year-old chambermaid, Frances Crawford, and separate her from the rest of her family so that he can buy horses and build a stable.   The Kinseys tell such stories in the presentations they make at museums where their collection is exhibited. It is called, ‘What You Didn’t Learn in High School History,’ and it shows the range of human experiences that their holdings represent.   ’We don’t beat anybody up,’ Bernard says of the presentation, ‘but we don’t sugar-coat anything either. People take to it. At the core, we all want to know where we came from.’   Shackles from the mid-1800s tell one piece of the story. A book titled ‘A Gentleman of Color’ (2002) by Julie Winch tells a far less familiar piece of it. She writes about business entrepreneur James Forten, an African American born free in 1765 who owned a sail-making factory in Philadelphia. His workforce was a mix of black and white men with blacks supervising whites in some cases.   ’We’ve uncovered many stories of accomplishment,’ Kinsey says. ‘They show how our people overcame, not how they struggled.’   Building their extraordinary collection has had a permanent effect on the Kinseys. ‘It has transformed me,’ says Bernard, who is constantly reading and researching African American history. ‘We know so much more about our people than we did. We know who more of them are, how they lived, who they had for friends. There is no going back.’   Shirley Kinsey encourages school children to become the family historian. She started with their son, Khalil, a hip-hop artist in his young thirties.   ’Khalil had a ‘family history’ project to do when he was in third grade,’ she recalls. ‘We began delving into our family history and then expanded into our collective history.’   From then on, she made sure that Khalil’s history reports were about African Americans. ‘He asked why and I told him. ‘You need to know, and you need to tell other people so they’ll know,’ ‘ Shirley says.   While most of their collection is on tour, the Kinseys keep a few things close at hand. In the small room that used to be their wine cellar, Bernard takes a daguerreotype from its paper sleeve and looks at the image of a black Confederate soldier dressed in uniform. During the Civil War, this African American fought on the side that defended slavery.   ’A lot of people think there were no black Confederate soldiers,’ Bernard says, ‘but there were about 5,000.’   An oversize portfolio on display in the room flows with graceful handwriting. It is an inventory for an estate sale in 1604, beautiful to look at, bitter to read. Hundreds of nameless people are listed among the possessions, each identified by some distinctive physical marking. ‘Left arm rather crooked,’ one entry notes.   The Kinseys don’t dwell on their own personal stories of setback and victory, but things come up in conversation. They met in 1963 when they were both students at Florida A&M, the historically black university in Tallahassee. Shirley had just been released from jail, where she spent three days. She and other students had been arrested at a protest demonstration where they demanded that African Americans be allowed to sit on the first floor in movie theaters and eat at the lunch counter in Woolworth’s.   Bernard was at the jail with a campus group assisting people who had been arrested.   They met and four years later they married and moved to Los Angeles. A few years after that Bernard joined the Xerox Corporation. He worked there for 20 years and became a vice president before he left the company to launch his own consulting business. Shirley taught school in Compton and worked in training and development for Xerox.   They have always been active in the community. After the Los Angeles riots of 1992 Bernard was co-chair of ‘ReBuild L.A.’ and helped generate close to $400 million in investments for parts of the city in the greatest need of revitalization. The couple has been widely recognized for their philanthropic contributions.   The Kinseys were born before the desegregation movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when it was still legal to deny blacks access to public facilities. ‘Fifty years after African Americans were still essentially enslaved, we’re here. The more we make our people’s story known, the better off everybody will be.’

A wonderful array of handcrafted items will be on sale at the annual Country Bazaar on Thursday and Friday, October 21-22, at the Methodist Church, 801 Via de la Paz. The women of the church have been working for months to produce unique gifts and Christmas decorations.   An exquisite hand-crafted, cross-stitched quilt will be featured in the opportunity drawing, and a number of fine quilts and special items will be on the silent auction tables. The collectibles table will feature both antiques and jewelry.   Early-bird shoppers can come on Thursday, October 21 from 7 to 9 p.m. for $5 admission, which includes a selection of desserts and a beverage.   The Bazaar is open on Friday, October 22 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. with no admission charge. This day also features a gourmet luncheon for $15. It has gained such acclaim that there are two seatings this year: 11:15 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. For reservations (required) call 310-459-0334.   Proceeds from the bazaar help to support the church’s various philanthropies, including the Westside Food Bank, Treasure Island, an afterschool program for children, OPCC, the Homer Toberman House settlement house in San Pedro, and Heifer International.

Peter Golub’s protean interest in film, theater and music composition describes a man who admits to one character flaw: an inability to rule things out. So, along with nursing along film scores and a musical theater piece, Golub, a Pacific Palisades resident, spent the last four months composing a commissioned work for the opening concert by Chamber Music Palisades on October 19. His schizophrenic passion for both dramatic and concert music emerged early. Following a familiar route for accomplished musicians, the New York native, whose parents each played an instrument, started piano lessons at 6. In high school, he discovered drama and formed a troupe with a group of classmates who tackled plays by Pinter, Ionesco and Beckett.   Golub studied composition at Bennington College and later earned a doctorate at the Yale School of Music, where he was encouraged by the revered composer Toru Takemitsu to explore different forms of music and, more importantly, to rejoice in his multiple interests. Takemitsu, who was a visiting professor at Yale in the mid 1970s, also followed his artistic impulse in nonmusical art forms’painting, poetry, theater and film’and became a lifelong inspiration for his student.   ’He was really a down-to-earth guy, who was fun, loved jazz and encouraged us not to followed the modern European music [atonal] that was dominating music schools at the time,’ Golub says. ‘He advised us not to make music overcomplicated, and he didn’t see a dilemma over choosing film or theater.’   Golub followed his interest in dramatic music, finding an exciting niche in the New York theater world. He composed scores and worked with some of the most energetic and influential directors. He collaborated on several productions at La Mama, the experimental theater on the lower East Side, which Ellen Stewart founded in 1961 on the principle of developing new work, particularly musical collaborations. For 10 years, he was composer-in-residence at the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Charles Ludlam’s brainchild, playfully mixing theatrical traditions and the avant-garde. In 1987, the New York theater world was heaped in tragedy when two giant talents Michael Bennett and Charles Ludlam died. Ludlam had been planning to direct Shakespeare’s ‘Titus Andronicus’ for Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park. Despite his overwhelming grief, Papp, mourning the death of his friends and his own son, was more committed than ever to his enterprise. ‘Joe felt that he had to go on. His own son was dying, but he was a real fighter,’ Golub recalls.   With Ludlam’s death, Papp decided that he would direct ‘Henry IV, Part I’ himself and turned to Golub to write the music.   ’It was eventful working with Joe; nobody knew as much about Shakespeare as he,’ says Golub, while acknowledging Papp’s famed irascibility. ‘But I think his frustration came as a result of his difficulty in communicating his vision of how a scene should be played. Joe was good to writers and directors, giving young talent a chance.’   Golub’s New York period came to an end in 1996, when he arrived at a professional crossroads. He had been teaching composition both at Bennington and Reed, and was debating whether to stay in academia.   He had done a bit of film work in New York, so he took the leap to Los Angeles, moving with his wife Cristina and their son Phillip to the Marquez neighborhood. (Cristina plays piano and has recently taken up the cello. Phillip, now a senior at Crossroads, is following his own musical adventures in jazz, classical and composition. His humorous windwood quintet ‘Wood ‘n’ You’ debuted at Chamber Music Palisades in June. His younger brother Alejandro, 5, has started piano lessons with Palisadian Mary Ann Cummins.)   Over the last decade, Golub’s primary focus has been on film music. He has scored both fiction, such as ‘Frozen River’ and ‘American Gun,’ as well as documentaries, including ‘Wordplay,’ and ‘I.O.U.S.A.’ He is also wrote the score for the documentary ‘Countdown to Zero,’ about the escalating nuclear arms race. For last dozen years, he has also been the director of the Sundance Film Music Program, where he runs the yearly composers lab, an intensive, two-week workshop for aspiring film composers.   ’I like collaborative work on film,’ Golub says. ‘Each film calls for something from you that you might not have written on your own.’ But having said that, he admits that the process is intense and time- consuming. ‘In film, you have to please the director, and the way it is nowadays, you have to make a mockup of the score, because the director doesn’t read music. If successful, the composer-director relationship continues to grow to the point where you develop a vocabulary and a trust factor after you’ve been on a couple of dates together.’   In film, Golub is not the boss. Not so in a chamber piece. ‘You’re the director,’ he says. For the Chamber Music Palisades piece, he says that he flourished in the freedom. ‘Dee [Stevens] said ‘Write whatever you want,’ so I decided to write a piece for oboe and strings. I had always had this wish to write for the oboe,’ He notes that there is nothing in the literature that he knows of that uses this grouping.   The Quintet for Oboe, String Trio and Piano consists of three movements, the first two of which have the quality of moving from one kind of music to another, faster, slower, while the third is in the elegy mode.   ’When I’m writing, I listen to a lot of music, in this case Shostakovich, Britten, Prokofiev, but then I let the material lead me. I actually don’t know exactly what I’m doing. There’s this notion of anxiety of influences where you intentionally work against your training, and I think that in my case I was steering away from being overly formalistic. This piece is more intuitive; there are tonal elements, but the harmony comes and goes and there is also rhythm, pulse and melody. I believe in all that.’   Golub says that it was by playing chamber music that got him started writing. He continues to be impressed with the many chamber groups in Los Angeles. ‘I am impressed with the manner in which Dee Stevens and Susan Greenberg program the classical literature in with the commissioned work.’

Chamber Music Palisades (CMP), launches its 14th season with the world premiere of Peter Golub’s Quintet for Oboe, String Trio and Piano, dual birthday tributes to Robert Schumann and Samuel Barber, and Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera’s ‘Impressiones de la Puna’ for flute and strings on Tuesday, October 19 at 8 p.m., at St. Matthews Church, 1031 Bienveneda.   The Lyris String Quartet’featuring Alyssa Park, violin, Shalini Vijayan, violin, Luke Maurer, viola, and Timothy Loo, cello’makes its series debut, performing with Anne Marie Gabriele, oboist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and CMP Co-Founders/Co-Artistic Directors Susan Greenberg, flute, and Delores Stevens, piano.’   KUSC announcer Alan Chapman provides commentary at each concert.   Opening with the Ginastera piece, CMP also offers birthday tributes to two classical music legends born 100 years apart in different corners of the world.’ Greenberg and Stevens present Barber’s ‘Songs for Flute and Piano’ to honor the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, who was born March 9, 1910.’ Celebrating the life and work of Schumann, born in Germany a century earlier on June 8, 1810, Stevens and the Lyris String Quartet perform Schumann’s ‘Piano Quintet, Op. 44.’   Golub’s ‘Quintet for Oboe, String Trio and Piano,’ commissioned by CMP, is the latest work in the eminent concert, ballet, film and stage composer’s considerable list of credits.'(See adjacent story.)   Series subscriptions are $90; single tickets are $30 at the door (students with ID are free). For tickets or a season brochure, call 310-463-4388 or visit www.cmpalisades.org.