A Musical Love Story By Writer and Contributor Kari Sayers
If you stop by Ascension Lutheran Church in Rancho Palos Verdes on a Sunday morning, you may be struck by an unusually versatile guitarist by the name of Sandy Erickson – really Sanford, Mr. Erickson says but only if he’s in trouble. His special genre is jazz, but he also plays music by Bach and other classical composers, including a rousing guitar solo of Edvard Grieg’s “March of the Mountain King.”
In the pews sits his most fervent admirer and supporter Marisa Solomon, herself an amazing musician and scholar with two master’s degrees from California State University, Fullerton, one in music and one in German, and a PhD in musicology from UCLA. She too plays the guitar in addition to piano, violin, cello, and trumpet. Both she and Sandy teach their instruments privately and at Amuse Music in the Palos Verdes Peninsula Center, where they met in 2000. Sandy had taught there since the music store and school was called Mr. B. Marisa was new and asked around who the best guitar teacher was. She was told it was s Mr. Erickson. “So we went from being colleagues to being student and teacher, Marisa said in a recent interview joined by Sandy. “He was so kind and helpful,” Marisa shared. At that time, however, Sandy was married to his long-time wife Karen, and Marisa was also in a relationship, but they became good friends. When Sandy’s wife developed ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), he took care of her, and Marisa tried to be a good support. “She came to check on me,” Sandy remembered with a smile.
“I have so much respect for what he did,” Marisa added.
When Sandy’s wife died after 40 years of marriage, Marisa was there to support Sandy in his grief, and the two started to spend more and more time together. “We had another mutual friend who became ill and passed away, and then we spent even more time together,” Sandy said. And so, from the depths of grief, love blossomed and the two became a couple.
However, their commitment was soon tested when Marissa too became ill and had to have a kidney removed. “He very sweetly took care of me too,” Marisa said but admitted she feared he might leave her. “After all, who can stand to go through that again,” she said. But Sandy stayed. “So, from the bottom of my heart, I can say he’s definitely a good guy,” Marisa concluded.
Marissa was born and raised in Whittier, her mother a middle-school teacher and very musical. Her father, worked for Chevron Oil while her son now manages a theater complex in Utah, near Brigham Young University.
During the time Marisa was teaching at Amuse, where she still works, she was also the leader of a mariachi band at the Mission Ebenezer Family Church in Torrance. “I transcribed and arranged the music and had to know the workings of the trumpet,” Marisa said. The church had two services in English and one in Spanish, and she also had to learn that language. “When you’re a voice student, you’re required to study two foreign languages and learn how to pronounce French and Italian. German she had perfected at the Goethe Institute in Germany.6
She went to Harbor College and took all the Spanish classes they offered and then to El Camino to take more Spanish. “I’m a totally white girl, and you’d never expect me to lead a mariachi group, but there are people all over the world now playing in mariachi bands,” Marisa said. Unfortunately, her gig with the mariachi band ended when COVID struck.
While Marisa is a jack of many trades, Sandy has focused on the guitar, both electrical and traditional. He was born and raised in Los Gatos, CA but the family also spent a few years with his family in Connecticut at his grandparents’ house. Sandy’s father was a US Navy veteran and a painting contractor and his mother a homemaker. His older brother is a police officer and an inspiration for Sandy’s interest in criminology and psychology in addition to his music studies at California State University, San Jose. After a short research project on sleep at Stanford University, he decided to go to Germany to play the guitar and went on two tours with a jazz group all over Germany: Berlin, Hannover, Frankfurt, Hamburg, where they played in nightclubs and at festivals.
When he returned, he worked in Northern California, and would come down to Los Angeles to do studio work at Capitol Records and others. He recorded for the Jacksons and other groups and met George Harrison once and played with him. “I was also a freelance musician and played with Frank Sinatra a couple of times, and that was a resume enhancer.” No need to audition after that.
All along, both Marisa, now age 68, and Sandy, age 71, kept teaching, Sandy also online both nationally and internationally.
As time permits, Marisa and Sandy play together, and on the agenda is performing together, maybe piano and guitar. And what kind of music will they play then?
“Jazz,” Sandy says. “And she likes the bossa nova, Brazilian.”
I can’t wait.
Kari H. Sayers BIO
With a BA in English and an MA in linguistics from California State University, Long Beach, Kari Sayers went with her husband to Saudi Arabia, where she first worked as a music teacher at Riyadh International Community School and then as a journalist for the English newspapers the Saudi Gazette and the Arab News as well as in-flight magazines. When she returned to Southern California, she taught literature, college composition, and English as a Second Language at Marymount California University in Rancho Palos Verdes, while freelancing as a theater, classical concert, and opera reviewer for local newspapers and magazines in the Los Angeles area.. In addition to authoring the novels Roses Where Thorns Grow, Under the Linden Tree, and the soon-to-be-released Justice for Lizzie, all published by Melange Books in Minnesota, she is the developer and editor of the anthology Views and Values, published by Cengage. Now widowed,. Kari lives in the Los Angeles area.