ReCurrent

Before the Supremes, before Berry Gordy, a Los Angeles record label run out of a garage was shaping the future of American music.Founded by Dootsie Williams in the early 1950s, Dootone Records became a hub of innovation—recording doo-wop, jazz, and the first Black comedy albums that would influence generations. But while the physical site of Dootone has nearly vanished, its intangible heritage—the voices, rhythms, and entrepreneurial spirit it carried—still reverberates through today’s culture. Through interviews with historian Robert Petersen and Getty preservationist Rita Cofield, this episode explores what it means to preserve sound as history: how a song like “Earth Angel” can outlast the walls that once contained it, and why the legacy of Dootone still matters today.Join Jaime as he retraces Dootone’s path with Robert Petersen and Rita Cofield—following the threads from a Central Avenue porch to playlists today and uncovering how keeping these sounds in circulation keeps Dootone’s legacy alive.Special thanks to Rita Cofield and Robert Petersen (https://hiddenhistoryla.com/).

Jaime Roque follows a lost concert that almost never happened—and the homemade tape that kept it alive.The story begins in 1968 with a teenager who can’t get into jazz clubs and decides to bring Thelonious Monk to his public-school auditorium instead. Tickets lag in mostly-white Palo Alto, so he turns to nearby East Palo Alto and invites neighbors who actually know the music. On a rainy Sunday, a school janitor tunes the piano, sets up a reel-to-reel, and hits record. The concert fills. The night is calm. Then the tape disappears into a box for decades.From there, the episode tracks how a forgotten spool becomes a record the world can hear. Jaime visits the GRI at the Getty to see how fragile tapes are assessed, cleaned, and safely played back—how cleaning cloths, aging machines, and careful hands can turn a closet keepsake into public memory. And with a jazz scholar’s ear, he listens for why this set matters: the character of Monk’s touch that night and how a public-school stage becomes a time capsule.Jaime asks what it takes to keep culture from slipping away—and how one Sunday afternoon can carry forward, beautifully, half a century later.Special thanks to Danny Scher (https://dansun.com/), Dr. Ron McCurdy (https://music.usc.edu/ronald-c-mccurdy/), Jonathan Furnanski, and Thelonius Monk.

A community photo classroom opens the door to a different way of entering a museum.Inside Las Fotos Project—part classroom, part studio, all community—young photographers use images to say who they are. A new collaboration connects their voices to a landmark exhibition on migration, memory, and identity. The takeaway isn’t a style—it’s a method: meaning first, then the vessel.Back in the studio, that spark becomes an independent study. Students dig into family archives, kinship, place, and displacement—choosing forms that can hold what they need to say. Then we meet Wendy—a participant and student in the independent study—who builds a soft pink tent you crawl into, images overhead inviting you to look up and remember: her story, and maybe your own. The cohort carries their work into a neighborhood gallery, where strangers step closer and the vulnerability of being seen turns into applause.Follow Jaime as he traces how a museum show doesn’t end at closing time. It travels—through classrooms, archives, and city blocks—linking one Los Angeles from community space to museum.Special thanks to Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, John Giurini, Las Fotos Project (https://www.lasfotosproject.org/), Christian Morales, Arlene Mejorado (https://www.amejorado.com/), Diego Torres-Casso, and Wendy Cubillo (https://www.eonagapi.com/12540648-home).Check out the María Magdalena Campos-Pons exhibition page (https://review.getty.edu/exhibitions/campos-pons/) for related events and images.

Jaime Roque follows photographer George Rodriguez through two LAs at once—red carpets and street marches.Hollywood assignments put him beside movie stars and musicians; lunch breaks send him to East LA walkouts, the Chicano Moratorium, and UFW marches. One camera, two worlds. Jaime meets the people and places keeping that record alive. At the Getty Research Institute, curator Idurre Alonso opens thirty boxes—the first Chicano archive to enter the collection—and together they handle images that feel both historic and close to home. You see the craft: studio light brought to sidewalks, composition in the middle of a moving crowd, patience for the breath between chant and silence. In Santa Ana, photographer and educator William Camargo traces how George’s example shaped his own work—celebrity gigs by day, community documentation by night—and how a new generation is mapping their neighborhoods before the stories are erased. Join Jaime as he follows the images that built a city’s memory. Hear how archives, street corners, and studio lots weave one Los Angeles.See more of George’s photography on the Getty website (https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/105RWY).Special thanks to George Rodriguez, Idurre Alonso, William Camargo, Marcia Prentice, and Nicole Belle.

Jaime Roque follows the life of a familiar image across LA, beginning with the 2001 backlash to Alma López’s digital artwork Our Lady.What looked like a small museum fight opens a bigger story about who gets to remake a figure many people call sacred—and why that matters in everyday neighborhoods, not just in galleries.Jaime meets the people keeping the image alive in different ways. In downtown, Manuel treats the classic print like family and warns against changing it. In Boyle Heights, artist Nico Aviña rolls out a seven-foot plywood Guadalupe holding an eviction notice, a moving reminder of how families and their stories are being pushed out. Online, Oscar Rodríguez—known as @lavirgencita—photographs and maps murals before they’re painted over, building a simple record so the glow doesn’t disappear. Even at a ball game, a tiny pin on a cap feels like a small altar, proof that the image still travels with us.The episode also looks back to the figure’s early roots on Tepeyac Hill—a mix of Indigenous and Spanish worlds that helps explain why she carries both faith and culture. Through these voices and places, Jaime and his guests ask straight questions with real stakes: Who gets to redraw her? When is it devotion, and when is it pride or protest? Recurrent lands in that middle space—where street corners, shop walls, and phone screens can teach, comfort, and push back all at once—inviting listeners to see how a shared picture can hold a community together even as the city changes.This episode was inspired by the Visualizing the Virgin Mary exhibition.Special thanks to Alma Lopez (http://almalopez.com/), Nico Avina (https://www.instagram.com/espacio1839/), Oscar Rodriguez (https://www.instagram.com/_lavirgencita/), Melissa Casas, and Alejandro Jaramillo. Additional music provided by Splice. Rights and Clearances by Gina White.