Issue #1

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DEPARTMENTS

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Fresh Berries

Will Lyle: L.A. Source Codes Kyle Simpler

Old Money

A New Life of the Bebop Legend Dexter Gordon Maxine Gordon

The Speakeasys

Culture Clubs: A History of the U.S. Jazz KARL ACKERMANN

FEATURES

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Why Jazz Still Matters

Gerald Lyn Early and Ingrid T. Monson Is jazz a relic of the past, or does it continue to have meaning and influence for today’s artists and audiences?

Los Angeles Explodes Andy Hermann

Despite the Growing Pains in L.A. The Jazz Scene Still Blossoms

Old Town Brews The Mob Museum

The Rise of Jazz and Jukeboxes in the Prohibition

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B e r r i e s

F r e s h 10

Will Lyle: L.A. Source Codes Kyle Simpler For computer programmers, a source code is a piece of computer language, which they are able to read and transfer and put to use in a practical way. With his debut album, L.A. Source Codes, bassist Will Lyle makes a connection between this concept and jazz.

Along with his musical skills, this album also shows that Lyle is a talented composer as well. The originals included are not simply melodies, but each their own musical story. “rains_of_change,” for example, transitions from its melodic beginning into a somewhat freeform structure that ultimately returns to the original melody, which seems to reflect going through and overcoming a challenging situation. “La Cumbia de MacArthur Park” celebrates L.A.’s Central American community with powerful rhythms and Adam Hersh’s exceptional work on the piano. The atmospheric “Above the Clouds” creates a dreamlike landscape somewhat reminiscent of some ECM recordings.

L.A. Source Codes is an impressive debut album that brings a variety of music and musicians that have influenced Lyle’s own playing and writing. Lyle’s talent is impressive, and this album shows how effectively he can transform the “source code” into something very satisfying.

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yle, who was born in 1994, started playing bass when he was 12. In the years since he has created a pretty impressive résumé. After his graduation from Berklee College of Music, he went on to play with numerous artists, including Jon Mayer, Bob Sheppard and Joshua Breakstone to name a few. He also received a presidential scholarship to study bass with legendary bassist, Ron Carter. L.A. Source Codes brings musicians from three different generations to the recording. Dedicated to the memory of Lyle’s mentor, Ralph Peterson, the album includes several jazz standards along with some original compositions. While the selections vary in jazz styles ranging from straight ahead and Latin to modern, the album definitely has a sense of unity throughout. Lyle is joined here by ten different musicians, essentially forming three different groups. The players include Bob Sheppard on tenor saxophone; Marvin “Smitty” Smith, Roy McCurdy and Anthony Fung on drums; pianists Jon Mayer, Mahesh Balasooriya, Mikan Zlatkovich, and Adam Hersh; Nakeiltha Nikki Campbelll on congas; and Jacques Lesure on guitar. The up-tempo opener, “Forasteria,” which is a Lyle original, sets the tone of the album. It features a Brazilian groove combined with some Cedar Walton influences. The word forasteria means outsider in Portuguese, and the song represents the feelings of alienation that practically everyone experiences at one time or another. The song’s driving beat and tight groove offers a sense of overcoming obstacles to experience the joy and optimism life has to offer. L.A. Source Codes includes a good deal of impressive musicianship throughout. While each of the players on the album gets a chance to shine, the bottom line here (no pun intended) is Lyle’s bass work. There are instances, such as Frank Loesser’s “I Believe in You” and George Gershwin’s “It Ain’t Necessarily So” where Lyle plays the melody line. He also takes several impressive solos throughout the album, showcasing his talent as a player. 11

A New Life of the Bebop Legend Dexter Gordon

Although fairly short passages from Dexter Gordon’s notepads appear here and there, the book is mainly Maxine Gordon’s, and that’s to its benefit. She learned about jazz from the inside herself, working in various back-room roles for the composer Gil Evans, the organist Shirley Scott and others before she met her future husband in France in 1975. She worked with him, overseeing his much ballyhooed return to America in 1976, with chief responsibility for the ballyhoo, and she was with him, living quietly (half the time in Mexico), during his late period of reflection, retired from music. It helps, too, that she went back to school after

Dexter Gordon’s death, studied oral history for a summer at Columbia and got a master’s degree in Africana studies at N.Y.U. “Sophisticated Giant” is a work of considerable sophistication, the first-person testimony of its subject employed with affectionate discipline, smartly contextualized and augmented by material from interviews Maxine Gordon conducted with the tenor saxophone masters Sonny Rollins and Jimmy Heath, the record producers Bruce Lundvall and Michael Cucsuna, and others.

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M o n e y

Maxine Gordon

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The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon

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exter Gordon, the lusty virtuoso of bebop saxophone probably best known now for his Oscar-nominated, starring performance in the movie “Round Midnight,” embodied no fewer than four jazz clichés. He made his reputation as the very image of the big, bold, tenor-sax man, blaring rattling solos from the depths of his 6-foot-5 frame. He seemed for years to be a stereotype of the jazz musician as self-destructive hedonist, arrested and imprisoned on narcotics charges and crimes related to drug use. He became a symbol of the black expat demimonde in mid-20th-century Europe, where musicians joined writers, painters and other African-American artists seeking refuge from maltreatment and underappreciation in their homland. And he ended up an emblem of survival and redemption, weathered but still standing and still blowing, a veteran of a lifetime of battle with the world and himself. That Gordon embodied those clichés because he invented or crystallized them in the public imagination is largely forgotten today, nearly 30 years after his death, at 67, in 1990, from kidney failure following treatment for cancer of the larynx. In his final years, Gordon set out to tell his own story, hoping to correct some misconceptions and complicate some simplifications about his life and music. He wrote notes and drafts of biographical vignettes in longhand on yellow legal pads, and for a time tried to collaborate with the novelist Wesley Brown, before deciding to work largely on his own with help from his wife and former manager, Maxine Gordon. When his health began to fail precipitately, he asked her to promise to complete the book if he died before finishing it. “Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon” is the fulfillment of that promise. 13

JAZZ STILL MATTERS WHY

Authors: Gerald Lyn Early and Ingrid T. Monson

Is jazz a relic of the past, or does it continue to have meaning and influence for today’s artists and audiences? And while it may still be present, does it still matter?

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erhaps, like Miles Davis, jazz itself is a mystique wrapped in an enigma, an essential or inescapable unknowingness that makes this music attractive for its audience. But if jazz is partly through its challenging demands as a musical form, through the various changes through which it has sustained itself over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, and through its aspirations to both embody and transform modernity a music of clear and revealed intentions, it remains an art that many, even many of its devotees, do not fully understand. Even the word “jazz” itself is wrapped in mystery. How did the music come to be called this and what does this word mean? Jazz bassist Bill Crow points out that some have thought the word comes the French verb jaser, or to chatter. Others say that the word “arose from corruptions of the abbreviations of the first names of early musicians: ‘Charles’ (Chas.) or ‘James’ (Jas).” Some have thought it came from the slang word for semen or

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that it came from “jazzing,” a slang word for fornication Anthropologist Alan Merriam notes that there are also Hausa and Arabic words that may be related to the term: jaiza, the rumbling of distant drums, and jazz, allurement or attraction. One of the reasons that the early music in New Orleans and after was so disapproved of by the bourgeoisie was because of the association with sex. The same reaction would occur roughly thirty-five or so years later with the advent of rock and roll, another rebellious form of music with a name associated with sex. Because jazz in its early days before World War I was performed in brothels, as well as at picnics and parades, an association with sex and the erotic is not surprising. As Gerald Early observed about Miles Davis, the black male body came to define a kind of black male existentialism functioning as “a symbol of engagement and detachment, of punishing discipline and plush pleasure that operated cooperatively, not in conflict, if rightly understood.”Furthermore, this new

kind of sexuality, first associated with jazz and the margins, became, over time, idealized in mainstream culture. Many jazz musicians never liked the word “jazz,” among the most notable being Duke Ellington, drummer Max Roach, saxophonist Rashaan Roland Kirk, composer Muhal Richard Abrams, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, and Miles Davis, who said to his interlocutor in 1985: “You know I don’t like the word jazz, right? You’ve heard that? I hope that’s one of the things you’ve heard. ” Many African American musicians viewed the word as a music industry label created by whites that demeaned, stereotyped, and limited them artistically. Bill Crow ends his meditation on the word jazz by noting: “As we enter the 1990s the sexual connotation of the word has almost completely faded away. ‘Jazz’ is now used to identify musical forms, as well as a style of Broadway theater dancing, a patented exercise regimen, a toilet water, a basketball team, a brand of computer software.” Within this metamorphosis lies a tale. 15

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mprovisation celebrates the heroic genius improviser, but, as musicians know, that brilliance often depends on the collective magic of the right band: individuals who compliment, anticipate, inspire, and upset each other into a communal whole greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed, two of the most influential heroes in jazz. Miles Davis and John Coltrane are known by the brilliance of their quartets and quintets, which became the most revered models of group interplay. These collective musical relationships became generalized into idealized concepts of community that pervade our contemporary understanding of jazz. For Wynton Marsalis, the jazz ensemble is democracy in action: participatory, inclusive, challenging, competitive, and collective. For the interracial musical scene of the forties and fifties, jazz improvisation was often viewed as the ultimate integrated music, crossing the color line and social categories with aplomb. For others, black musicians created idealized and woke communities of color, which inspired the development of progressive black social l movements. Freedom links the musical aesthetics of jazz and its sociopolitical ambitions: associated with improvisation and desperately needed for racial justice and inclusion. For some, the political and cultural associations of jazz are primary, indeed, above the music itself, which can make jazz seem like a branch of social theory. Ralph Ellison criticized this tendency by wryly critiquing Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) Blues People by noting that “the tremendous burden of sociology which Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give even the blues the blues.” For others, the music must be addressed to the 16

exclusion of the social and cultural. Music theorists are more comfortable on this terrain, but the most interesting recent work on jazz has emphasized the sound of the music, the embodied experience of listening and performing as the link between the musical and the social. Jazz is a complex, highly blended, sometimes contradictory music and, indeed, since its inception, it has been hotly debated exactly what forms or styles constitute this music. Is it music theory or a technique that is applied to music? Is it one music or several loosely grouped forms of music that deal with improvisation? Its roots are African and European, classical and popular, dance music and art music. It has been called both cool and hot, earthy and avant-garde, intellectual and primitive. It has been influenced by Latin American and Afro-Cuban music, by Middle Eastern, Indian, and other forms of Asian music, by African music, and by varieties of religious music including gospel and the Protestant hymnal. Jazz also has roots in the American popular song (which makes up a good deal of its repertoire), the blues, hokum and

circus music, marching band music, and popular dance music. It is known for being improvised and touted for the freedom it permits its players, but jazz in its heyday of swing was largely composed and tightly arranged; although many jazz players have soloed, relatively few, as might be expected, were exceptional, memorial, or highly influential soloists. In any case, why did so-called free music generated on the spot by the player become more highly valued by jazz players and audiences than notated music that, by its very nature, is presumed to have a greater range of expressiveness? Improvised music goes back to Western classical composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, who were superb improvisers, but has also existed elsewhere around the world for millennia. What makes jazz improvisation different? Singers made jazz popular, but the music is mostly instrumental, and the great instrumentalists are considered its most important innovators. Because most of the great singers were women from Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee to Cassandra Wilson and Dianne Reeves

male bias on the part of both the musicians themselves and of critics (most of whom were and are male) likely skewed our sense of this music. Jazz has always sought a popular audience with varying success but, since its earliest days, it has been a music that is often performed by musicians for musicians. This has made many listeners impatient with it, feeling that if one needs practically a degree in music theory to appreciate it, its practitioners should not expect untrained or casual audiences to be bothered with it. But on the other hand, its technical pretensions have made jazz a kind of status music with some audiences. Every dimension of jazz outlined above is the subject of academic and critical study in a variety of fields including English, history, American studies, African American studies, musicology, studies of the Americas, and culture studies. Indeed, jazz studies as an interdisciplinary field of research and pedagogy formally exists and has its own journal, Jazz Perspectives. What is this all about, anyway? And why should those with no interest in jazz care about any of this?

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hatever jazz today has lost in the size of its audience as compared with forms of popular music with bigger market shares, it has gained in the high esteem in which it is held in the business and art worlds as a sophisticated artistic expression (it is frequently used as mood music in upscale business establishments, in museums and galleries, and in commercials promoting upscale products) and in the institutionalization it has experienced as a formal course of study at many colleges and universities. Indeed, if it were not for colleges, universities, and high school jazz bands, and institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center and SF Jazz, it is quite possible that few young people in the United States would be playing or hearing jazz today. 18

As Ingrid Monson wrote, “The art music known variously as jazz, swing, bebop, America’s classical music, and creative music has been associated first and foremost with freedom. Freedom of expression, human freedom, freedom of thought, and the freedom that results from an ongoing pursuit of racial justice.” One has only to read, for instance, historian Michael H. Kater’s Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (1992) or author Josef Skvorecky’s extraordinary novella The Bass Saxophone (1977) to know how profoundly true Monson’s observation is that jazz was a beacon, an act, a trope of freedom, an expression against repression that inspired many people around the world. But if jazz was, at one point in its history, about freeing oneself from artificial and arbitrary constraints in both popular and classical music, about freeing society from its restrictions and repressions, then, for many of its

fans and practitioners, it has now become about preserving and conserving a tradition, an ideology, a set of standards, a form of practice. Today, jazz is an art that can satisfy the compulsions of the liberationist and the conservative, of those who seek change and of those who prefer stasis. Is jazz still a relevant form of artistic expression, still a significant force in the world of popular music or the world of art music? In other words, is jazz so insufficiently hip that its pretensions and its conceit no longer matter as either a theory or a practice? Has it become, in many respects, like mainline Protestantism, a theory and a practice prized by its followers because of its limited and slowly declining appeal and its glorious history as something that once did matter? Is jazz simply a music trapped in the memory of itself, technically exhausted and imaginatively hampered, shadowed and sabotaged by its pop and R&B commercial doppelgänger,

smooth jazz? Fifty or one hundred years from now will more accessible and commercial jazzers like saxophonist Kenny G and trumpeter Chris Botti be more remembered than trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and pianist Brad Mehldau? To be sure, for many of its fans and followers, jazz has gone from being an anti-establishment to an establishment art form, something that may have drained the art form of its purpose and its emotional correlatives. If jazz has acquired a new power, a new appeal, then what precisely is it and what is the relationship of this new power, this new appeal, to the power and appeal that jazz once had when it was the dominant music of the United States? Has jazz transcended the marketplace or is it a music that deserves to be protected from the desecrations of the market as we try to protect classical music? Protectionism, when it comes to the arts, has usually been a lost cause. Jazz’s advocates and supporters say

that jazz is more popular, more listened to than ever despite its low market ratings, and this may be true: it certainly shows up in unexpected places such as, for instance, two unrelated Tom Cruise movies, 1996’s Jerry Maguire (which features a long sequence with an avant-garde Charles Mingus tune) and 2004’s Collateral (which features a trumpeter playing Bitches Brew style Miles Davis jazz). And there continues to be art-house films about jazz, such as Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead (2016) about Miles Davis, Robert Budreau’s Born to Be Blue (2016) about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, and Cynthia Mort’s Nina (2016) about jazz/folk singer Nina Simone. This issue hopes to begin to answer for readers: What made and continues to make jazz different from other forms of music? How did jazz, as popular music, gain and lose its popularity or, put another way, how did it lose its status as a music for the ordinary or casual musical palette? How did jazz’s close

association with the repertoire of the Broadway musical, a song form that itself ceased to dominate popular music with the rise of rock and roll, affect its reception and reputation and its future? How did and how do musicians in other countries change jazz and how much did that change affect how Americans performed it? How have the changes that affect the selling of music affected jazz? Did jazz transcend social constructions of race or did it reinscribe them? How did jazz generate criticism of itself? Who constructs the official history of a form of popular music like jazz? Can music without words, as most jazz is, contain any specific political meaning? Can a music fade away and not fade away at the same time? In moving toward answering these questions, the issue’s authors weave together a narrative about jazz then and now to approach an understanding of why, in its many ways and forms, jazz still matters. 19

LOS ANGELES EXPLODES Despite the Growing Pains in L.A., The Jazz Scene Still Blossoms Andy Hermann

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hen bassist Anna Butterss moved to Los Angeles in 2014, her plan was to stay for no more than a year. Her main draw to the city was her boyfriend, saxophonist Josh Johnson, who had arrived a couple of years before her to study at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at UCLA. Beyond that, she had “no expectations coming in,” she said. “It wasn’t a place I’d ever really thought about living.”Four years later, the Australian native is thriving in her new home. “It just turned out to be surprisingly fantastic,” she said. “I’m working more than I ever worked in my life and I think probably more than I would have if I’d been in New York.” Butterss’ experience is emblematic of how much the L.A. jazz scene has grown in recent years, attracting musicians from around the world to complement its homegrown talent. The rapturous international response to saxophonist Kamasi Washington’s 2015 album The Epic was an obvious turning point. But even before that, there was a surge of excitement around jazz in the city, spurred on by a confluence of factors: the now-legendary gigs by Washington’s group, the West Coast Get Down, at the Piano Bar in Hollywood; the launch of the Angel City Jazz Festival in 2008 and the Bluewhale jazz club in 2009, both of which immediately stood out for their adventurous programming; the arrival of several high-profile transplants, including guitarist Jeff Parker and saxophonists Steve Lehman and Chris Speed; and the 2012 return of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, after a four-year stint in New Orleans (previously, it had resided at USC’s Thornton School of Music; beginning in 2019 the organization announced it will be called the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz). L.A. has a long history as a jazz epicenter, dating back to clubs that thrived along Central Avenue from the Prohibition era through the bebop era, where Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Art Tatum and Ornette Coleman paid their dues. The city also fostered Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker’s development of cool jazz, and more recently was home to a big band revival, populated by the city’s vast pool of seasoned studio players, and spearheaded by Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band and John Beasley’s MONK’estra. But the recent surge in young talent is something the city hasn’t seen in decades. “There’s a lot to do here and it seems like it’s only expanding,” said Johnson, who performs with Butterss most Monday nights at ETA, an intimate cocktail bar in L.A.’s trendy Highland Park neighborhood, in a quartet led by Parker. “It’s an interesting mix of people [who are] playing at a high level.” Across the street from ETA last summer, that mix was on full display at the Lodge Room, a one-year-old music venue that played host to a performance by drummer/keyboardist Louis Cole. His latest release, Time, might not exactly be a jazz album; though the recording features guest appearances by bassist Thundercat and pianist Brad Mehldau, it owes more to the ’80s pop-funk of Prince and the Gap Band. But his album-release performance played out like a stealth jazz concert. After a spacey synthesizer intro, a curtain covering half the stage dropped to reveal a 12-piece horn section, featuring a who’s who of young L.A. players, including Johnson, Kneebody’s Ben Wendel, and Amber Navran and Andris Mattson of soul-jazz trio Moonchild.

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“You have a new generation of kids that’s grown up listening to Thundercat and Kendrick Lamar. This is informing an entire generation’s understanding of what jazz music can be.”

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n addition to Devasthali and Cole, several other Thornton School graduates performed alongside recent grads from the Monk Institute and CalArts. L.A. long has been home to many of the nation’s top music schools, but until recently, few students stayed in town after graduation. That’s starting to change, said Monk Institute West Coast Director Daniel Seeff. “There were four [Monk Institute] classes at USC from ’99 to 2007 and almost all of them would just move right away to New York. And now it’s about 50-50; half of them go to New York and the other half stay here.” In the case of Johnson’s Monk Institute class, which graduated in 2014, the entire group not only remained in Los Angeles, but continues to work together under the name Holophonor. The group’s Wayne Shorterproduced album, Light Magnet, arrived in 2017 to widespread acclaim. It was releaseWd on World Galaxy, an upstart jazz-adjacent label founded by Kevin “Daddy Kev” Moo, better known to L.A.’s experimental electronic music scene through his other imprint, Alpha Pup, and his recently concluded club night, Low End Theory. Recognizing that many young L.A. jazz artists still were going unheard, Moo founded World Galaxy to give their records a home and improve those records’ chances of reaching his existing audience, an assortment of listeners primed by The Epic and rapper Kendrick Lamar’s jazz-informed To Pimp A Butterfly. World Galaxy’s releases tend to feature a mix of tradition and innovation, including an iconoclastic Thelonious Monk tribute by Tim Conley’s fusion project Mast, featuring guest appearances by saxophonist Speed and drummer Makaya McCraven; The Heart Of Infinite Change, a collection of standards given a cosmic sheen by vocalist Natasha Agrama, Stanley Clarke’s stepdaughter; and the mix of straightahead arrangements and hip-hop-inflected grooves on the debut album from Ryan Porter, West Coast Get Down trombonist. Moo is also a well-regarded mastering engineer who got his start in the hip-hop world and brings some of that genre’s bass-heavy sensibilities to World Galaxy. In addition to mastering all of World Galaxy’s releases, he’s the engineer of choice for the West Coast Get Down. His work can be heard on The Epic, bassist Miles Mosley’s Uprising and keyboardist Brandon Coleman’s Resistance.“I played West Coast Get Down records at Low End Theory,” Moo said. “They’re made to be bumped.” World Galaxy isn’t the only L.A. label making its mark on contemporary jazz. Founded in 2014 by trumpeter Daniel Rosenboom, Orenda Records has released boundary-pushing albums by pianist Cathlene Pineda, guitarist Alexander Noice and Rosenboom’s jazz-metal quartet Burning Ghosts. More recently, recording-studio-turned-label Big Ego in nearby Long Beach added jazz to its frequently unclassifiable offerings, putting out albums by local bassist Anthony Shadduck and Kansas experimental guitarist David Lord, both sharing some of World Galaxy’s genre-flouting DNA while veering off into their own realms of avant-gardism. And Leaving Records, an electronic-leaning label with roots in the scene Moo cultivated at Low End Theory, recently released one of the year’s best L.A. jazz albums in Wilkes, the debut album from multi-instrumentalist Sam Wilkes.

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“There were four classes at USC from ’99 to 2007 and almost all of them would just move right away to New York. And now it’s about 50-50; half of them go to New York and the other half stay here.”

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his past October, the Monk Institute’s class of 2020 made its Bluewhale debut. Though they only had been playing together for a few days, the seven-piece ensemble already was a tight unit with several distinct voices most notably Israeli harmonica player Roni Eytan and Pennsylvanian tenor saxophonist Chris Lewis, whose witty, laconic style provided a tart counterpoint to Eytan’s more technically ornate runs. “Everyone’s playing at such a high level, it’s really easy to make music with them,” said pianist Paul Cornish, another standout, after their performance.Cornish, a Houston native, is yet another gifted young player who came to L.A. to further his education—prior to being accepted into the Monk Institute, he studied at the Thornton School—and decided to put down roots. Like many of the city’s jazz-trained musicians, he cites the richness and diversity of L.A.’s many music scenes as a major factor in his decision to stay on the West Coast.“You see someone doing a pop gig once and then you see that same person doing an r&b gig, and then you see that same person playing church on Sunday,” said the 22-year-old, who moonlights in funk-rock band Thumpasaurus. This kind of genre agnosticism has a long history in Los Angeles, where generations of highly skilled players have made their living as studio musicians on pop recordings and film soundtracks, then played jazz on the weekends. The city’s oldest jazz club, the Baked Potato—owned by keyboardist Don Randi, who made his name in the renowned group of L.A. session players nicknamed the Wrecking Crew—frequently books veteran studio players like Chad Wackerman, Steve Lukather and Dave Marotta, whose resumes straddle the jazz, rock and pop realms. Among younger players, Washington’s saxophone has graced albums by Lamar, electronic producer Flying Lotus and art-rocker St. Vincent, while saxophonist Johnson recently took on a gig as soul singer Leon Bridges’ touring music director. “I think there can be a really negative connotation to the term ‘studio musician,’” said Butterss. “But I think that’s another thing that people get wrong about L.A.” She cites drummer Jay Bellerose, with whom she regularly plays as part of Parker’s quartet at ETA, as a prime example of a veteran studiohand who’s played with everyone from Madeleine Peyroux to Robert Plant without compromising his distinctive, restrained style: “You can identify him in an instant. That’s why people love him so much.”Drummer Martin Diller, a Bay Area native who came to L.A. in 2009 to study jazz at CalArts, also has found success as a hired gun, mainly in indie-rock circles, playing with the band Givers and ex-Dirty Projectors singer/guitarist Amber Coffman. He acknowledged that economic necessity drives some of his choices there still aren’t enough jazz venues and gigs in L.A. to go around but said he enjoys mixing things up. “Here, you gotta be flexible in order to work,” he said. “And that’s something that’s attractive to me as a musician.” ON A COOL SATURDAY EVENING in October, Diller led his own quartet, featuring Holophonor’s Miro Sprague on piano, through a set of lyrical original compositions at the city’s newest jazz venue, Sam First. Tucked into a sleek lounge on the ground floor of an office building near LAX, surrounded by hotels and long-term parking structures, it’s an unlikely place for a jazz club. But the venue’s booker and Holophonor bassist Dave Robaire said owner Paul Solomon is committed to filling the intimate space’s calendar with top talent.

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“You see someone doing a pop gig once and then you see that same person doing an r&b gig, and then you see that same person playing church on Sunday,” - Thumpasaurus

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handful of newer spaces have risen to fill the void, including ETA, Sam First and Tabula Rasa, a wine bar on Hollywood Boulevard. There’s also the Lodge Room and another recently opened venue, Zebulon, the West Coast reincarnation of the Brooklyn experimental music space of the same name, both of which sprinkle the occasional jazz night among their other offerings. But according to Robaire, it’s still not enough. “Some days I get five to 10 emails about playing Sam First,” he noted. “It’s kinda crazy.” Among the city’s more venerable jazz institutions, only the World Stage in the historic Leimert Park neighborhood books young local talent on a regular basis. World Galaxy’s latest signing, a hip-hop-influenced group called Black Nile, often plays there, and like the Bluewhale, World Stage hosts a monthly jam session with Monk Institute students. But the venue’s executive director, vocalist Dwight Trible, said it can be a struggle to attract paying audiences for younger acts. “I just think that it’s something about the mindset of the people here in Los Angeles that they believe that when it comes to jazz, they’re supposed to get it for free,” he said, citing free summer jazz series at places like the L.A. County Museum of Art and outdoor mall Hollywood & Highland, whose popularity seldom seems to trickle down to clubs that charge a cover. “This city is too big to not have enough people come and support 10 jazz venues. There’s just no excuse for that.” ETA owner Ryan Julio said the solution is to present jazz in a setting that feels more familiar and less intimidating to younger audiences used to rock shows and hip-hop clubs. At his tiny bar, there’s no two-drink minimum or no-talking policy; bartenders happily rattle cocktail shakers (sometimes in time to the music) during performances, and a DJ in the corner spins jazz LPs between sets. “I had some buddies who are rockers or classical musicians come and check out what I’m doing here,” Julio said, “and the first question that both sides ask [is]: ‘When are we allowed to clap?’ It’s like, whenever you want. It’s just a bar. We’re hanging out. I don’t tell the bartenders to shake quieter.” For the first 18 months that he booked jazz on Monday and Tuesday nights, Julio didn’t charge a cover. He wanted ETA to be a neighborhood spot, where people not necessarily looking for a night of jazz could happily stumble upon it. “Much to the chagrin of my business partners,” he said drily, sitting on a barstool during a recent Tuesday night, he wanted to “make it about the discovery aspect first.” In July, however, Julio did begin charging a cover. And he’s certainly more than justified in doing so. Three-quarters of his Monday night quartet—Parker, Johnson and Butterss—featured prominently on one of the most well-received jazz albums of 2018, drummer McCraven’s Universal Beings (International Anthem). It’s the latest in a long line of indicators that L.A.’s jazz scene now rivals that of any city’s in the world—though many of those involved in it would argue that the rest of the world only just now is recognizing what’s been true for the better part of a decade. “You have genuine interest in this new generation” of musicians, said World Galaxy’s Moo. “You can’t manufacture that. You can’t start the fire. But you sure can fan the flames. And it’s a bonfire right now.”

“I just think that it’s something about the mindset of the people here in Los Angeles that they believe that when it comes to jazz, they’re supposed to get it for free,”

Interview & News : Anna Butterss, Jeff Parker, Kamasi Washington, Josh Johnson, John Beasley, Ben Wendel, Makaya Mccraven, Paul Cornish, Martin Diller, Holophonor, Dwight Trible.

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Old Town Brews The Rise of Jazz and Jukeboxes in the Prohibition The Mob Museum

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hile jazz music predated Prohibition, the new federal law restricting liquor advanced the future of jazz by creating a nationwide underground nightclub culture in the 1920s. This competitive club culture had mobsters such as Al and Ralph Capone of Chicago and Owney Madden of New York vying for the best

performers for their drink-swilling customers. That culture advanced the careers of major jazz performers such as Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Paul Whiteman, Bix Beiderbecke and jazz itself as an art form. It also would lead to millions in profits for organized crime bosses. Prohibition forced tens of thousands of saloons throughout the country to shut down, but the demand for drink remained, and thousands of illegal bars, or speakeasies, soon opened. Gangsters, who manufactured or transported liquor in violation of the federal Volstead Act, supplied the liquor, owned the speakeasies, or both. At first some speakeasy owners offered live music by bands linked to vaudeville stage acts. But jazz was a better fit for the era’s party mood. Bar owners soon were hiring small jazz bands with local players to furnish background or dance music.

The decade that F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, hailed as “the Jazz Age” began when jazz was already the pop music of its time, especially among members of the younger generation in the 1920s. Women, given the right to vote by the 19th Amendment, were welcomed in the new underground lounges. Many young women rebelled against the restrictions on “ladylike” behavior and dress of the Victorian age, becoming liberated “flappers” or what Fitzgerald would call “good-time girls.” The combination of jazz and liquor-infused partying by men and women characterized this period known as the “Roaring Twenties,” inspiring dance crazes such as the “Charleston,” 32

“Fox Trot,” “Shimmy,” “Toddle” and “Lindy Hop.” Recordings of jazz and blues music had been sold as “race records” since 1917 and played on acoustic phonographs, both home models and the coin-operated variety in arcades. In 1920, Prohibition’s first year, Bessie Smith, a rising AfricanAmerican jazz singer, sold one million records. Also that year, the first commercial radio stations went on the air. Soon, the popularity of jazz soared as more records were cut, top musicians performed in clubs in New York and Chicago and the music was broadcast on the airwaves. Within two years, more than 550 licensed radio stations operated across the nation. 33

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ther technological advances would spur the growth of jazz during Prohibition. Coin-run phonographs playing low-fidelity acoustic records operated alongside louder, coin-run player pianos and band instrument machines as cheap entertainment in speakeasies. Jukeboxes would take over with the introduction of 78 rpm records made with amplified electronic sound in 1926. The American Music Instrument Company of Michigan introduced the first “coin-op” electronic record machine, with ten 78 records and 20 song selections, in 1927. The new cultural phenomenon of listening to jazz on high fidelity 78 rpm records on a nickel-per-play machine became a fast hit in speakeasies. The marquee nightclubs serving liquor in New York and Chicago known to police but frequently tolerated thanks to payoffs from club owners became larger, noisier and more opulent as they competed for paying customers. Armstrong and Ellington were among the jazz acts in highest demand. Two of the best known nightclubs of the era were Madden’s Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn, owned by Conrad Immerman, both in New York’s predominantly black Harlem district (Connie’s Inn closed its doors with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933). The new opportunities for live musicians in higher-paying clubs would foster two types of jazz in the 1920s. From New Orleans, where Armstrong and Oliver originated, came a style in which musicians performed together as an ensemble. Some of their jazz records openly referred to illegal booze. One of Smith’s songs, called “Me and My Gin,” included the refrain, “Any bootlegger sure is a pal of mine.” Armstrong recorded a popular song about drinking titled “Knockin’ a Jug.” 34

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any Prohibition-era jazz players were African-Americans who often perfor med for exclusively white audiences. But the illicit club culture would go on to promote integration, leading to what were known as “black and tan” clubs with multiracial crowds. This Prohibitioninspired trend was nearly unprecedente d for an age in America when segregation was not only the cultural norm but a common government policy. As Armstrong, Oliver, Ellington and many top black jazz musicians attained national fame in the 1920s, they felt pressure from Mob-owned clubs. Some mobsters used enforcers to threaten players into signing performing contracts or extorted money from them. White jazz artists who also won national reputations during the era included Whiteman, a band leader nicknamed the “King of Jazz,” and Beiderbecke, the hard-drinking cornetist, pianist and recording artist. By the late ’20s, Chicago was regarded as America’s jazz capital with its famous line of clubs on the city’s South Side. Its most infamous bootlegger of hard liquor and beer was Al Capone, leader of the crime syndicate known as the Outfit. Capone himself at one time owned 10,000 speakeasies in the city. He liked jazz and installed his brother, Ralph, to run their finest nightclub, the Cotton Club, in the Chicago suburb of Cicero. The club served white audiences and dignitaries such as Chicago Mayor Jim “Big Bill” Thompson. Al instructed Ralph to book only black musicians because he considered them as oppressed as his Italian immigrant relatives. The devotion to jazz shown by the Capone brothers and other business-minded mobsters during Prohibition would benefit black jazz greats Armstrong, Ellington, Waller, Earl “Fatha” Hines and Ethel Waters, and with them, the future of jazz as an enduring genre of American music. 36

“Its most infamous bootlegger of hard liquor and beer was Al Capone, leader of the crime syndicate known as the Outfit.” 37

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History Of The

U.S. Jazz KARL ACKERMANN

Marching bands, ragtime music, and the blues, were all well-entrenched and spreading up the Mississippi River Valley from New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century. Dixieland was the popular music staple and with the all-white Original Dixieland Jass Band recording the first jazz side, “Livery Stable Blues,” in 1917, an original musical language was validated. By the early 1920s, that group was moving away from the early form of jazz, settling into contented and bland dance music. But the etymology of jazz was progressing quickly among others musicians in the city. Caribbean rhythms, Creole influences, the call and response of hymns, and the music of freed slaves were coming together to push the expansion of jazz beyond the frivolous and shallow Dixieland style. The contribution of the African slaves was the single most critical element to the development of modern jazz; they had taught themselves to improvise as a means of holding on to the last vestiges of their culture, and in the process, provided the most influential component of modern jazz.

mob by its new owners, the Chamales Brothers, and a large stake in its ownership went to Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn, reportedly the principal gunmen in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. McGurn was employed by Al Capone. Though Capone owned a speakeasy across the street, his chosen hangout was the Green Mill where bribes to the Chicago police allowed the bar to operate freely. In the years of Prohibition, a gig at the Green Mill was a mixed blessing. A singer and comedian, Joe E. Lewis, failed to renew his contract with the club after a competing mob-run club offered him a more lucrative contract. The infamous mobster, Sam Giancana and two other Capone associates visited Lewis, leaving him for dead. Lewis, a crony of Frank Sinatra recovered eventually, and re-signed with the Green Mill while, McGurn, who ordered the hit, was himself, gunned down not long afterwards.

In the early years of the Green Mill, top-name talent included Ruth Etting, Billie Holiday, and Anita O’Day who all launched their careers, in part, by appearing at the club. In later years the club featured Shelia Jordan whose engagement was taken over by Patricia Barber and her quartet continues, in 2017, as the Monday night house band. Upcoming shows include the Dave Liebman Quartet, Matt Ulery’s Loom Large and Kurt Elling. The club also features its After Hours Green Mill Quartet Jam Session, a relatively fixed group that performs weekend from midnight to five in the morning.

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he Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (also known as the World’s Columbian Exposition), drew many ragtime musicians from the South, particularly pianists. The migration had set the stage for jazz musicians much the way the fair triggered an economic boon that built demand for dance halls and cabarets, especially on the city’s south side. Hotels, in and around the Chicago Loop, the city’s central business district, provided nightclub space for jazz acts. The Palmer House Hotel contained the Empire Room, the Stevens Hotel featured the Boulevard Room and the Panther Room was located in Sherman Hotel. These venues were primarily designed for big band dancing but also transmitted live radio broadcasts. The opening of independent clubs largely coincided with Prohibition, many functioning as speakeasies, typically located in, or just outside, the Loop. Possibly the oldest jazz club in the U.S., The Green Mill is certainly the longest running establishment of its kind, opening in 1907 in Uptown Chicago, on Broadway. Originally known as Pop Morse’s Roadhouse, it was taken over by an entrepreneur named Tom Chamales in 1910, and renamed as the owner’s tribute to the Moulin Rouge in Paris. Charlie Chaplin, who had composed “Smile,” a hit for Nat King Cole, would occasionally stop in for a drink when he was filming at a nearby studio. The visitors to come later were far more nefarious. During Prohibition the club was leased to the 39

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