(2008/2012)

Wow…. Here’s a Brick’s Picks  from June 2008, just a couple months before the economy finally tanked. There were so many clubs, so many shows, so much live music. Audiences had already peaked–the Recession had been on since late 2007–but it hadn’t quite sunk in with club owners yet. It wasn’t until the housing market imploded, Wall Street collapsed and banks began folding that audiences dried up. Some fans had lost their jobs, some people were terrified of their own credit cards, and a lot of people were doomed by mortgages. It was probably the last bit that doomed the clubs.  Jazz fans were heavy into real estate speculation.. You’d sit at the bar at Charlie O’s between sets and that is what they’d talk about. They were mature, over all, and knew a good thing when they saw one. They snapped up houses, ridiculously over priced houses, betting the future on a terrifying mortgage. That was their doom. If you figure the younger jazz fans tended to be highly paid internet savvy yuppies (remember them?) who racked up stratospheric credit card debt…well nobody was paying cash at jazz clubs. It was all plastic. The older dudes were sitting  on their real estate holdings, the younger ones knew they were gonna make a zillion dollars in the digital industry. When the real estate bubble burst and the stock market crashed (taking with it all that Silicon Valley venture capital) it was like a scythe went through the jazz audience. All that remained were the rich, the lucky and the cheap. There are only so many rich, even fewer lucky, and the cheap ain’t buying. Suddenly jazz became a very bad business model for a music venue. Now there are almost no jazz clubs left at all. Read this column from 2008 and weep.   

There’s good jazz all over town this week. Too bad this is such a big, wide town. But it is possible to actually club hop the LA jazz scene, if you time it right, even though the damn jazz clubs tend to finish up at midnight in this town, which makes absolutely no sense at all from a jazz hoppers point of view. But still, it is possible, if you keep an eye on your drinking and avoid the vipers outback. So let’s check out Friday for starters, where the very entertaining Jack Sheldon—a veteran of west coast bop—is at the Café 322 in Sierra Madre and avant saxist Vinny Golia is just down the 210 a tad at the Pasadena Jazz Institute (in the Paseo Colorado). Of course, that’s the kind of jarring genre change that will make your skull crack. But somewhere in between there stylistically will be saxist Chuck Manning at Café Metropol downtown, and Manning never fails to knock us out with his playing…when he’s leading his own quartet his horn is set so beautifully inside the understated arrangements that you can almost miss just how brilliant and even edgy his ideas can be. Now, because the Metropol has to stop at ten (the yuppie neighbors complain) you can check this one out first and then decide between Sheldon or Golia. It’s so simple. Logical even.

Now Valley-wise on Friday, saxist Pete Christlieb and trumpeter Carl Saunders do the Back Room out in Canoga Park, but to be honest the jams will be so good and the between set breaks so long you won’t want to leave which makes this a bad start for club hopping. Trumpeter Kye Palmer’s quartet at Spazio is a much better starting point for a set or two and he’s such a fine straight ahead player….then go to La Ve Lee in Studio City for an uproarious Poncho Sanchez set or head deep into the innards of the Valley to Charlie O’s for saxist Charles Owens. When Charlie O get’s cooking at Charlie O’s it just might turn intro some of the best jazz you’ve seen since gawd knows when—a Cole Porter standard segueing into some Eddie Harris funk into some deep Trane into a plain dirty blues…. Then again, the quintessentially swinging guitarist Kenny Burrell’s quintet is at Catalina Bar and Grill, but he’s there all weekend, which gives you options. So maybe on Saturday you can combine that with a wild couple sets by Justo Almario at Charlie O’s or combine it with the great jazz vocalist Jackie Ryan (with the Tamir Hendelman Trio) at Landings in the Airtel Plaza in Van Nuys. Alas, catching ex-Zappa drummer Chad Wackerman’s trio at the Rosalie & Alva Performance Gallery in San Pedro on Saturday at 8 p.m. rather limits your options. The Valley is out…that 405 is a club hop killer, and the easy thing would be to head into old town Pedro to the Whale and Ale on 7th where we once heard a saxman play some lazy Prez. But a determined hopper would split Rosalie’s after a set and do double nickels on a dime (or 75 without the dime) up the 110 and catch the last set of young bassist Mike Gurrola’s quartet at the Pasadena Jazz Institute on Saturday…. It’s a terrific space, the bar’s open till two and Gurrola has fine saxist Javier Vergara, pianist Austin Peralta and drummer Tony Austin so the hard bop will be happening.

Sunday starts grooving hard at 5 p.m. with the absolutely cooking CJS Quintet at Glendale’s First Lutheran Church at 1300 E. Colorado. Then head up the 134 into the Valley for a mellow double header. First, a very impressive, spacey, cool-toned Joe-Less Shoe (that’s tenor Matt Otto, guitarist Jamie Rosen and drummer Jason Harnell) celebrate their CD release at the Baked Potato. And at Charlie O’s bassist Luther Hughes presents a Nat King Cole tribute (John Proulx doing the Nat, Barry Zweig the Oscar Moore).

On Tuesday our pick is Med Flory’s Jazz Wave at Vibrato. This powerhouse big band has a line up that includes the likes of Pete Christlieb, Rob Stout, Steve Huffsteter, Jack Nimitz, Frank Capp and probably the sentimental core of the thing has to be the old Supersax charts (that is…Bird solos arranged for a big band) Flory puts the band through. Be bop tempos, blistering solos, smart ass commentary….what more could you want?

On Wednesday drummer Roy McCurdy brings his quartet to Sangria in Hermosa Beach, and Jack Sheldon is at the Westin LAX. Scott & Ginger Whitfield celebrate their take on the Great American Songbook, Dreamsville, at Catalinas, and the pianist Cyrus Chestnut is at the Jazz Bakery on Wednesday and Thursday. Fired up tenor Azar Lawrence will blow out the Hollywood Studio Bar and Grill on Wednesday and Vibrato on Thursday. And two of our finest local pianists lead trios Thursday, and both are highly recommended:  Tateng Katindig at Spazio (just a beautiful, advanced, swinging player), and Josh Nelson, who has Matt Slocum on drums, plays Red, White, and Bluezz in Old Town Pasadena (and Nelson’s latest, Let It Go, has been knocking us out lately.)

Of course, if you’re lazy or broke or live near Glendale, there’s a four night run of jazz quartets at Jax, beginning with pianist Alexandra Caselli on Monday (which often includes saxist Carol Chaikin); then multi-reedman Fred Horn on Tuesday (who shifts from Tower of Powery funk to straight bop); then Benn Clatworthy with the great pianist Theo Saunders on Wednesday (and Clatworthy’s playing here lurches from offhand craziness to pure beauty); and finally Jack Sheldon packs them in for his regular Thursdays. Go every night and see if they can tell a jazz fan from a lush. Here’s a hint: the lushes talk through the bass solos. (Just kidding…the sax players talk through the bass solos.)

A Love Supreme in a still, dark room describes the scene four months later.

Ya know, they call the jazz of Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke and all their cohorts “Twenties Jazz”. It’s a whole style, a whole genre, that hot, loose, often frantic music that we associate with speakeasies and booze and gangsters and wanton women. There is no “Thirties Jazz”, really, and certainly no forties or fifties or seventies or eighties jazz. I’ve heard “sixties jazz” bandied about but it makes no sense as there was no singles “sixties jazz”, it’s just a lazy journalist’s term. But there was a Twenties jazz. Simply because it virtually ceased to exist by 1930. The Depression virtually destroyed the recording industry and hammered the venues. Very few people could afford to go hear it. Certainly not enough to make it viable. There were far too many musicians and too few gigs. A couple years later the big band era opened and jazz became a viable commodity again, something you could make a living at. Something that sold records and filled ballrooms. The audience was mostly kids, though. They probably didn’t do much for liquor sales. I’m not sure how jazz did in bars then.  But you could no doubt find the cats from the roaring twenties in a few of them blowing their asses off twenties style. They’d draw some of the old fans, too. A good time was had by all.  Just not like before.

(Charlie O’s closed it’s doors on the last night of August, 2011. I still miss the place. Here’s some things pulled from Brick’s Picks columns back in the day, just to remind you why you were always there.)

Charlie O’s has a solid seven straight night’s of killer jazz music this week. Every one a pick. If you can manage to do all your shopping in the vicinity of Victory and Woodman you can just kinda pop in on your way home every night. (There’s a 7 11 nearby, a liquor store, always a yard sale or two in the area, that should work.)  It kicks in hard with tenor Ernie Watts on Friday…if you’ve heard his latest, the live To The Point, then you know what’s in store.  Then on Saturday tenor Pete Christlieb takes over, with that shiny namesake horn of his and just blows solid, swinging stuff. (and his classic Apogee with Warne Marsh is a terrific stocking stuffer). Then on the Sabbath cometh Benn Clatworthy, another mighty player who wanders off the blues map as often as not, looking over edges, soloing through unknown territories, smacking into unseen walls…. We love this cat’s style. Check out The Decider, a nicely succinct display of his chops and thinking. For Big Band Monday they brought in the great Med Flory’s JazzWave. The heart of which is SuperSax (you crate diggers take notice), those massed brass and reeds playing Bird solo’s rendered into large ensemble arrangements without dropping the tempo an iota. Wild. Then on Tuesday it goes deep again with Theo Saunders’ quintet built around his imaginative Monkish-McCoy flavored constructions that lets soloists go some serious places. Great jazz. Then the trumpet players wind up the week with Jack Sheldon on the night before Christmas and Carl Saunders grinching up Christmas night itself. Like we said, every night’s a great one….

…..Now how about the genuine nightspots….real jazz junkies collect at Charlie O’s in the Valley. It’s this town’s straight ahead epicenter, and the crowd is purist, half of them players themselves, the rest jazzophiles. These people demand the real stuff, three sets worth. There’s usually no cover (except on Big Band Mondays) and there’s no minimum, what else you want? This Friday check out saxman Justo Almario, a Colombian whose impassioned sound is shot through with Trane (much like fellow South American Gato Barbieri used to, though Justo can bop with the best, too.) In fact, the great tenor work continues all weekend here….with the mighty Don Menza on Saturday, his is a big, fat powerful tone, the kind that as they said of Dexter Gordon, seems to fill the whole  room. And on Sunday it’s Doug Webb, who delivers with a passionate intensity and nods to Trane and Joe Henderson and Hank Mobley and all the rest of those cats. We dig him. Real jazz in a real jazz freak’s club.….

….Since the legendary all night contest when Lester Young finally cut Coleman Hawkins, tenor battles have been a jazz tradition. Crowds love it: Herman Riley and Rickey Woodard brought down the house last year at Catalina’s going chorus after chorus. But such matches are rare anymore. Battling tenor albums are even rarer. A particularly splendid example, Apogee, had Pete Christlieb and his mentor Warne Marsh going at it across two sides and the result was joyous, intoxicating hard bop. Alas, Warne is gone, but Christlieb has found a worthy sparring partner in mighty Don Menza. They sound nothing alike but share a passion for aggressive soloing and their past matches have been electrifying. No one gets humiliated—these are more chivalrous times—but the competition is real as the two battling tenors strive to outblow each other at Charlie O’s this Friday, April 13. It’s a perfect way to kick off a great week of local jazz…..

…..Charles Owens is at Charlie O’s again this Friday, with the fine quartet of pianist John Beasley, bassist Edwin Livingston, and drummer Roy McCurdy. Last time Charlie O played Charlie O’s he finished the night with a suite of half a dozen tunes, included some Miles, an incredibly funky “Cold Duck Time” (bassman John Heard owned the tune that night) that actually had people dancing (at Charlie O’s!), and then into a profound take on a movement from A Love Supreme that eventually segued naturally, somehow, into an extended avant-blues workout on “Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On”.  His playing had tapped all his specialties—the blues, the straight up, the hard bop, the spiritual and the out there. It went unrecorded of course.  Owens has few recordings. A few old LPs if you can find them, and last year’s fine So Far So Good but like so many of our local horn masters (and Owens plays nearly as many reeds as Rahsaan Roland Kirk) you have to catch him live. He’s a different animal in different venues: catch him in Dwight Trible’s Band and he summons up the ghosts of masters past, simmering low or exploding in Dolphy-esque fireworks. At the World Stage last year he went into the stratosphere with percussion accompaniment, an event we described deep in the pages of “The Best Of L.A.”  In a blues band he’s down and dirty. But at Charlie O’s he’ll run down the middle, veering into some blues here, some craziness there, but always back to the righteous straight ahead with an unparalleled “Eternal Triangle”. Don’t miss this one…..

….When alto saxist Zane Musa takes off it is a sight to behold. He leans into the wind and seems to blow out the crazy chords with every ounce of his being, rocking back and forth in some sort of jazz ecstasy. It’s a style not for everyone—some prefer their players cool—but for fans his wild Bird progressions, gutsy Maceo funk and all that Cannonball seem just right. Those influences and inspirations fuse into white hot flurries and molten blues runs that never fail to kick up the pace on the bandstand a notch or three. On Friday at Charlie O’s he’s backed by a terrific version of the John Heard Trio, with bassist Heard, drummer Roy McCurdy and pianist John Beasley.  An excellent way to open up the jazz week….

….There are a pair of saxophonists bookending the weekend at Charles O’s that absolutely slay us every time. On Friday we got Charles Owens, fresh from a big LACMA appearance. A masterful player (and orchestra leader…the Luckman has done brilliantly under his direction), Owens plays just about every reed and woodwind ever made (just dig him on English horn) and plays a mean dirty flute; but it’s on tenor that he is on fire. At the World Stage we’ve seen him go what looked like utterly out of his mind, all Dolphy and Kirk and late period Trane or a way gone Sonny running down East Broadway, you know, crazy clusters and Fulani scales and notes flying so fast, damn…. And at Charlie O’s we’ve heard the most soulful A Love Supreme, the crowd utterly silent, not a whisper or a stir till it fades on that final bass thrum…then hot damn it’s Charlie getting down with Eddie Harris, music so funky people are actually dancing at Charlie O’s, and so greasy they’re getting drunk. That’s Charlie Owens, delivering. And that’s part one. Part two is Benn Clatworthy, same stage on Sunday. You’d never think a foul mouthed Michael Caine-as-Alfie-sounding Brit would play saxophone as good as any Yank, even better than most. He’s got a voice on that thing, steeped in mid period Trane, in Booker Ervin, in lots of Sonny Rollins when Sonny was the greatest of them all. But that’s just the sound. But the ideas, the vision, the places he goes, pushing, daring…god damn. Nobody in LA does this. Maybe nobody nowhere. It can be the most radical. It can be the most hard bopping. It can be so gorgeous you will not draw a breath till that horn has expended his. His is an intense, radical, beautiful jazz playing and still completely in the tradition. So there ya go, two of LA’s most exciting saxophonists, just waiting for your ears. Oh…and who’s got the floor on the Saturday between them? Tenor Don Menza is who, and he can kick anybody’s ass. Don’t let no one tell you this town ain’t got great saxophone players…..

…..We first remember seeing pianist Otmaro Ruiz some years ago at Charlie O’s, where he once was pretty regular on the piano bench. We walked in one night and a perfect maelstrom of piano chords was filling the joint, customers yelling, the band in a jazz frenzy. We’d never heard jazz piano like that, the mad chord progressions, the crazy Latin rhythms we couldn’t identify, the things plucked from Chopin and chunks of Monk and Bud Powell. It was a different bar inside then, some ridiculous piano lounge layout from days when people hung in places like that, smoking too much and picking each other up, and the crowd stood round the piano and there’s was no way to see who the hell was making that crazy wonderful music. Otmaro Ruiz someone said. Who? Otmaro Ruiz, the Venezuelan guy. Like that explained it. But he really was an exotic, inexplicable genius back then, and just as thrilling now. We saw him with Dwight Trible at California Plaza this summer, and every time he soloed the audience shouted with excitement. He’s always exciting, with a mess of players or just a duet. He can completely blow your mind with some one-of-a-kind Latin American meets jazz thing, or an absolutely gorgeous melody awash in color, or an utterly mad explosion of ideas that defy words completely. He has a trio at the Blue Whale on Friday…..

….Charlie O’s is the quintessential jazz room. Outside is a non-descript stretch of the Valley, but you walk inside and it’s dark, with a low stage at one end and a handful of players jamming their asses off. So leave it to this joint to book saxist Chuck Manning with John Heard’s house trio when you’re all supposed to be home with the eggnog and Andy Williams. Manning’s intensity really comes out here with John Heard behind him, there’s a toughness to his sound at Charlie O’s. He probably has that sound everywhere he plays, actually, it’s just something you notice more at Charlie O’s, the way you notice the chance taking at the World Stage or new ideas at the Blue Whale. A great room has a vibe, and Charlie O’s has that bad ass nothing but straight ahead vibe. Which makes it special. And not sappy on Christmas Eve….

….Now Charlie O’s has a purist vibe, too…but it’s still a place where you can just waltz in on most nights (there is a cover on Mondays) and sit at the bar and down a few as well. It’s a jazz joint, our one true jazz joint, and as jazz has always been made in joints since time primordial, it is in that sense maybe the purest jazz venue in town. It certainly has a helluva line up this week, beginning with house band the John Heard Trio (with drummer Roy McCurdy and pianist Theo Saunders) hosting a pair of Trane-mad saxists this weekend: Justo Almario on Friday and Azar Lawrence on Saturday. Saunders’ McCoy Tyner inspirations connect especially well with Azar; his Monk underpinnings work beautifully with Justo. On Sunday trumpeter Carl Saunders leads his sextet there…the man’s technical skills are extraordinary, his Live at Charlie O’s (of course) is a veritable handbook on the things one can do on a horn without need of another breath. And grooving trumpeter Elliott Caine has his Charlie O’s debut on Tuesday. But the high point for us is Theo Saunders again, fronting his own sextet on Wednesday. He’s collected some exceptional players: tenor Chuck Manning and alto Zane Musa (both are fine and completely distinct soprano saxophonists as well), his longtime trombonist David Dahlsten, and the powerful team of bassist Jeffrey Littleton and drummer Tony Austin. Saunders is an underrated composer (word has it that he has several albums of stuff out somewhere), his pieces can be difficult, if beautiful, and are rhythmically complex, his solos are always surprising and for some reason we really dig his unpredictably right-on-the-money comping best of all. Four whole sets of the stuff and no cover, baby, just a couple of drinks. Can’t beat that.

(2009)

I was at a symposium or something once that had jazz panels. I hate panels. I hate anything jazz that doesn’t involve people actually, you know, playing jazz music. I got lots of better things to do.  But I checked out one of these panels, though, because it had an old alto playing be bop buddy of mine on it. But it was dull anyway. Dull dull dull. Even the panelists looked bored. So I told a pal sitting next to me that I could completely wreck it. He said I couldn’t. I said just watch this, and raised my hand and asked about Johnny Hodges. My old be bop alto buddy hates Johnny Hodges and out came a long winded, offensive and hysterically funny diatribe against the way Johnny Hodges played saxophone and against pre-bop alto saxophonery in general.  People in the audience were offended and yelled back. After a few raucous minutes things finally settled down. So I raised my hand again and asked about Art Pepper. My old be bop alto buddy hates Art Pepper and went into another long, offensive and hysterically funny harangue against Art Pepper. All hell broke loose again. The famous trumpeter on the panel, to calm things down, told an extremely rude joke about Puerto Rican women. The famous trombone player talked about how high he used to get. My bop buddy talked about reefers. The trumpeter told another rude joke. The trombonist had a million drug stories. My buddy went after Johnny Hodges again. The trumpeter told another joke. All three panelists were in stitches. People walked out. The moderator just gave up entirely.

And while that was probably the best jazz panel ever, I promised myself that I would never do that again.

So consider this an apology.