This month’s guest column comes from Lara Wickes, President of the Recording Musicians Association Los Angeles. 

Greetings friends and colleagues, I’m honored to get a chance to write my first column for the Overture and share some of the recent goings-on in the Recording Musicians Association. In our continuous task of representing the specific needs of recording musicians both to the AFM and the larger entertainment community, board members Sidney Hopson, David Horne and myself, along with local president Marc Sazer attended a very informative hearing at Burbank City Hall last Friday (March 20) hosted by Senator Adam Schiff, in which he spoke about a bill he has been drafting over the past year that will, if enacted, put into place federal tax incentives for film and TV production in the United States. A bill that is, in the opinion of every speaker at the hearing, highly necessary and long overdue. Especially with the impending merger of Warner Brothers and Paramount poised to wreak even more havoc on the livelihoods of entertainment workers.