(from a  Brick’s Picks in the LA Weekly, 2011)

We thought Raymond crossed the freeway. It doesn’t. When CalTrans dug their huge ditch right through Pasadena and filled it with the 210, Raymond was one of the old thoroughfares that was sundered. Swinging the car around in front of a huge church we swore we heard a saxophone. We stopped. Sure enough. It was a tenor, sounding huge. So we parked in front of the place, this St. Andrews Catholic Church, with its enormous, medieval bell tower we’d seen from the freeway a thousand times, and when we opened the big giant wooden doors out poured “Trane’s Blues”. It was the Carl Randall gig we’d forgotten about. The place was enormous inside as well, vast even, and very very ancient looking. Old Rome must have looked like this to the first saints. It certainly didn’t sound like this, though, not this huge tenor saxophone that filled the place with this whole new holy spirit, this John Coltrane tone and those Coltrane chords, or that Dexter Gordon smooth with the edges on, or what before that, Coleman Hawkins? Is that where this sound comes from, the sound you hear all over town on a good night, that modern tenor saxophone sound? The drummer wailed too, the keyboard sounded like a pipe organ in all this space, the bass was huge, everything was huge. When Elliott Caine began blowing trumpet his notes stung, it was almost shockingly savage, so loud and brash and brass and just how radical a thing jazz trumpet was way back then became clear, when Louis Armstrong so shook up a western civilization so wracked and rent by war and plague and revolution. This was crazy stuff, this jazz. We forget that now. But it’s bad, crazy stuff.  It changed if not everything then a hell of a lot. If not the fundamentals of what we are—it echoed off these holy walls, and the saints weren’t fazed a bit—it certainly shook up the cultural innards forever. Cheryl Conley came out to close the gig. Nice, nice voice,  very lively and quite lovely. Afterward there was a party at the parish hall.  Wine flowed till the wee hours and people talked of jazz.

Outside, hushed and still, the city of Pasadena curled up for the night. We drove home thinking of the past, the ancient past, and wondering about the future, the immediate future. That big church will be there forever. But this music?

(2010–Brick’s Picks, LA Weekly)

On Monday the Theo Saunders Quartet is at Charlie O’s on Monday. We imagine they’re doing Monk again but to be honest club gigs are where jazz really happens, and always has, and always will.  Three or four sets, a loose vibe, good booze, good food, and a parking lot or alley to smoke funny cigarettes, that’s the way it ought to be. That’s the way it always has been.  Forget the whole America’s classical music thing.  That implies something beautiful and way old that’s been preserved a long time. That’s a concert hall thing, which is OK but not us, not at all. Galleries and museums and “performance spaces” are nice, but smack a bit of salons…too many rich people and intellectuals and  like that. The jazz thing is something we need to hear and watch and feel for real. We dig the jazz bars. Minton’s was a bar. That’s all you need to know. Google “Minton’s” and dig.

(2008–Brick’s Picks, LA Weekly)

There is a lot of jazz this week, but if we have to pick a fave it’ll have to be Jesse Sharps’ Gathering at the Jazz Bakery this Sunday. Jesse—a key player in the Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra—released The Gathering a couple years back, an excellent slice of Leimert Park jazz featuring a couple dozen of the neighborhood’s finest all blowing like mad on some great compositions and nice arrangements. He’s gathered them up again for this show, and besides his own sax playing, there’s reedmen Charles Owens and Kamasi Washington, each capable of extraordinary fireworks (this is Eric Dolphy’s hometown, after all), trombonist Phil Ranelin and the incredible vocalist Dwight Trible. So good to see the great tradition of Leimert Park jazz alive and kicking.

Bit of a shame, though, it has to do its lively kicking out in Culver City, a long way from Degnan Avenue. Or that Jesse Sharps has to come all the way from Germany to get the ball rolling. Leimert Park is probably this town’s last living jazz neighborhood. Central Avenue is but a memory brought brilliantly to life once a year at its jazz festival, and downtown and Little Tokyo exist only in fond memories and some books; the older days are utterly gone. No memory, no history, no names, nothing. But Leimert Park is still here, charming and lovely and full of life. You can tell that jazz was once everywhere….but it’s often hard to hear any now. Now the music of Horace Tapscott echoes over at the Bakery while the spirit of Billy Higgins inhabits a too often empty World Stage. So sad. Perhaps some of our local politicians whose election posters still grace the walls around there will deign to take notice. Or perhaps not. Jazz is a hard luck story, no matter who wins elections. But we digress….