Mike Stoller Donates $3M to Help Altadena Fire Victims

The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and his jazz musician wife Corky Hale Stoller have donated $3 million to the Black Freedom Fund

During his formative teen years living near MacArthur Park, songwriter Mike Stoller hung out at Tommy’s at Rampart and Beverly. He learned his style from the east side pachucos and developed his musical taste in the Black jazz clubs in South L.A. “I heard a lot of good music,” the 92-year-old Grammy winner tells Los Angeles. “We used to hang out at the Club Alabam and Dolphin’s of Hollywood and the 5-4 Ballroom.” Stoller remembers catching gigs by esteemed artists as Count Basie and Chet Baker in the clubs along Central Avenue.

Stoller and his partner, Jerry Leiber, exploded onto the scene in the early 1950s with compositions like “Hound Dog,” which became a number one hit for Elvis Presley but was originally recorded by Big Mama Thornton. “As would-be songwriters, our interest was in black music and black music only,” Stoller says in Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography. “We wanted to write songs for black voices.” The duo’s string of hit compositions includes “Stand By Me”, “Yakety Yak”, “Kansas City” and “Poison Ivy.”

Credit: Photo courtesy of Leiber & Stoller

Like many, Stoller was saddened to read about the musicians and artists who were displaced following the Eaton fire in Altadena last year. “Friends lost their homes in that area, and we had friends that lost their homes in the Palisades, but I was very moved by the idea of trying to preserve that community,” Stoller says about the $3 million grant that he and his wife Corky Hale Stoller, the esteemed jazz musician, have made to the Black L.A. Relief & Recovery Fund. “Our purpose was to preserve that community and keep it from being invaded, if you will, by real estate developers so that families and people who have lived there for a long time could return.”

The fund, led by the California Community Foundation and the Black Freedom Fund, plans to make housing grants to 33 families in Altadena to rebuild in the aftermath of the fires.

Credit: Photo courtesy Leiber and Stoler

The Stollers have been major donors to the arts and to progressive causes over the years, including Homeboy Industries and Planned Parenthood. They helped revive the Pasadena Playhouse when it fell on hard times in 2010, and the Southern Poverty Law Center named its Civil Rights Memorial Theater after the couple. Homeboy’s music studio is also named for the Stollers. “Father (Gregory) Boyle said that there are young people here making music together rather than shooting each other,” Stoller says. “And that’s more important than the kind of music they play or the proficiency they have.”

Stoller heard stories of displaced Altadena residents, including the son of painter Charles White, who was Stoller’s art instructor in the 1940s. “I’ve never met his son, but the whole thing impacted me, and we decided to do what we could. There were wonderful musicians that lost their homes and famous instruments,” Stoller says. “But most of all I was just taken with the loss of that wonderful African American and interracial community that was built from the time of redlining. That’s when African American people couldn’t buy land in L.A. because there were restrictive covenants where you could not sell to black people. (In Altadena) you had a good warm community with people who had lived there for generations.”

Scroll to continue reading

Credit: Photo courtesy Lieber and Stoller

“When I was young, I went to a summer camp out of New York City, where I was born, and it was totally interracial,” Stoller says. “It was a very important part of my life and I was really moved to preserve such a community.”