How a journalist focused public attention on a musical wonder’s misfortune

By Ajay Singh

Over the seven years that Steve Lopez has been writing for the Los Angeles Times, he has received countless responses to his columns about a wide range of issues affecting Southern California.

By far the most overwhelming reaction to anything Lopez has ever written — not just for the Times but in his entire 30-year career as a journalist — came from a series of columns over the past three years about Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless musical prodigy suffering from schizophrenia on Los Angeles' Skid Row.

An African American from Cleveland, Ohio, Ayers is the subject of Lopez's latest of four books and his first work of nonfiction. Titled "The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music," the book was published by Putnam this past April and is being made into a movie, to be released this fall, with Robert Downey Jr. playing Lopez and Jamie Foxx playing Ayers.

On June 11, Lopez gave a talk about his friendship with Ayers to a packed audience at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

The event, held at the institute’s auditorium, was organized by the Friends of the Semel Institute, a volunteer organization dedicated to supporting and enhancing research and treatment for illnesses of the mind and brain.

Lopez first met Ayers on the corner of Hill Street and 2nd Street downtown, not far from the offices of the Los Angeles Times, while researching a column. "I was interviewing people and there was this striking image of a gentleman playing the violin," he recalled, adding: "I noticed that the violin was scratched up and was missing two strings."

Lopez instantly realized that Ayers was no busker — he didn't have a hat or an open violin case for donations — and that he was a fairly accomplished musician. "You seem to have some practice," he told Ayers, who appeared to be just over 50 years old.

Then Lopez noticed a list of names the musician said he had scrawled with a rock on the pavement where they were standing. Asked whose names they were, Ayers replied they were his friends from Julliard, the prestigious music school in New York City.

An inquiry revealed that Ayers had indeed studied at Julliard, where he played the string bass, but was unable to finish the program, evidently following a mental breakdown. Lopez was stunned that such a talented man was on Skid Row, a "human landfill unlike anything I've ever seen," he said.

When he called Harry Barnoff, one of Ayers' teachers at Julliard, "Harry began to cry," said Lopez. Ayers was one of his most promising students, Barnoff said, and he often got calls from him late at night during his schizophrenic episodes.

Asked what he talked to Ayers about, Lopez quoted Barnoff as replying: "Music. That always calmed him down."

Schizophrenia is a chronic mental illness that affects 1% of the world's population. "People don’t die of it — they smolder on," explained Peter Whybrow, director of the Semel Institute, in an address following Lopez's talk.

"There is a big debate that music is healing," Whybrow said. "Music is a language and language is tied to the emotions." He lauded Lopez's efforts to focus attention on the mentally ill, many of whom, he said, populate Skid Row and the Los Angeles County jail.

Lopez's first column about Ayers' plight, titled "He's got the world on two strings," moved numerous readers. Many sent Lopez cellos and violins for the hapless musician. Lopez arranged medical care for Ayers as well as a managed-living apartment in which the musician has been residing and playing a variety of musical instruments for the past two and a half years.

"It is as if music is his medicine," said Lopez, adding: "His life changed and in some ways my life changed, too."

The columnist took Ayers to Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and arranged for him to meet one of his musical idols, the renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who happened to attend Julliard at the same time as Ayers.

Over the years, Ayers also befriended Ben Hong, assistant principal cellist at the L.A. Phil, who played a sonata for the audience at the end of the Semel Institute event.

Although Ayers' mental state has improved, he is still prone to sudden bouts of paranoia and aggression. But "he knows more joy in a day than 98% people I know," said Lopez. "He goes to sleep with his fingertips on the keyboards of a piano, as if he were falling into a symphony."

For more on Lopez and his book, go to stevelopezonline.com.