On Sunday, September 23rd at the Monterey Jazz Festival, we hosted bassist (and Clint's son) Kyle Eastwood and jazz vocalist Tierney Sutton at the Amoeba tent to sign their latest albums.

Kyle Eastwood grew up in Carmel, California as the eldest son of actor Clint Eastwood. His father hadbeen attending the Monterey Jazz Festival since it began in 1958, and when his children were born it became a yearly family outing. Initially studying film, Kyle soon realized that jazz was his true passion. After years of paying his dues gigging around Los Angeles and New York, his debut album From Here to There was released on Sony in 1998. Showing his ability as an accomplished composer, Kyle began working in film with a contribution to the score for Mystic River. The film later won two Academy Awards.

Today, Kyle Eastwood is less known as the son of Clint Eastwood and more of a universally respected musician and leader in his own right. Dynamic and pulsing, full of swing, great rhythms and memorable melodies, his 2011 release, Songs From The Chateau, is Eastwood’s fourth US effort. With this new album Eastwood set out to capture the sounds and energy with which his band regularly tours the world to sellout crowds.

In addition to being the setting for countless movies, including Clint Eastwood's Escape From Alcatraz and Burt Lancaster's Birdman of Alcatraz, the island of Alcatraz, aka "The Rock," has also been the setting for some music videos. Eighties metal guitar gods the Scorpions chose the former prison setting, smack in the middle of the San Francisco Bay, as the set backdrop for the video of their popular song "No One Like You" (see clip below).

The next decade horror-core, hardcore Sacramento producer/rapper Brotha Lynch Hung got permission to shoot scenes on Alcatraz for one of his music videos. During the overnight shoot, Brotha Lynch Hung swore on his life to me, in an interview for XXL at the time, that he witnessed a ghost in one of the creepy abandoned old cells on the small island.

Listed as a historic landmark for over twenty years, the best way to access daily tours of Alcatraz (home to the oldest operating lighthouse on the west coast) these days is by taking the ferry from either the Fisherman's Wharf in SF or from the other direction: Angel Island and Tiburon. For more information on Alcatraz, which is well worth a visit and is administered by the National Park Service, click here.