9/12/2023 0 Comments Los angeles big business band![]() ![]() ![]() The blacks didn’t have the money to spend. It was a black-owned place that would have 90 percent white audiences. “That’s where the people from Hollywood and Beverly Hills came to go slumming. “It was the club,” alto saxophonist Marshall Royal recalled. In the 1920s and early ’30s, the space was a nightclub called The Apex, and it was run by bandleader Curtis Mosby, “the mayor of Central Avenue.” Today, the Dunbar Hotel is known as “Dunbar Village.” It operates as a low-income apartment building for elderly tenants.īy far the most legendary of all jazz venues on the Avenue, this glittering nightclub was located right next to the Dunbar Hotel. So much rhythm I’ve never heard, as guys were beating on the tables, instrument cases or anything else they could beat on with knives, forks, rolled-up newspapers or anything else they could find to make rhythm. The music continued inside the hotel, in The Turban Room piano bar, where acts like Art Tatum and Gerald Wiggins played. Traveling big bands like Duke Ellington’s band and the Count Basie Orchestra would take over huge swaths of the hotel, rehearsing and partying, with “chicks and champagne everywhere.” Trumpet player Buck Clayton recalled what occurred when Ellington’s band heard their record, “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” playing on the jukebox in the Dunbar restaurant for the first time: “On my way back from school Claude Kennedy-he came from Houston-would say, ‘When are you going to give somebody a headache with that horn?’” “When I passed in front of the Dunbar Hotel, they’d be hanging around talking,” he remembered. That’s where all the night people hung out the sportsmen, the businessmen, the dancers, everybody in show business, people who were somebody stayed at the hotel.” Norman Bowden recalled walking by the hotel as a youth, his trumpet in hand as he walked past his hometown idols. “That’s my favorite spot on Central Avenue,” saxophonist Jackie Kelso recalled, “that spot in front of the Dunbar Hotel, because that to me was the hippest, most intimate, key spot of all the activity. Journeymen jazz musicians hung against the outside wall or in the lobby or cocktail lounge, waiting to catch a break or a glimpse of their heroes. The luxurious hotel soon attracted the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and Billie Holiday. John and Vada Sommerville as a place where black travelers could stay in style and comfort. Undoubtedly the epicenter of the jazz scene in Los Angeles, the Dunbar Hotel was built in 1928 by Drs. Join us as we take a trip down the Avenue, and discover some of the places that made Central Avenue swing. “The dizzy white lights are dancing daringly again, lightsome, lilting, laughter, is tinkling from lips curved merrily in happy faces of white, brown cream or rich orange as the gay, many colored gowns of women of all races flutter like so many tropic butterflies,” California Eagle columnist Harry Levette wrote of the Avenue in 1931. By night, it turned into a dynamic multi-cultural thoroughfare of music, entertainment, and mirth. “I didn’t know where Sunset Boulevard was when I moved to L.A., but sure I knew Central,” legendary producer Quincy Jones recalled.īy day, Central Avenue was a pleasant downtown for the majority of black people in Los Angeles it was middle class, respectable, and family friendly. Famous the world over, “the Avenue,” as it was lovingly called, was a must visit destination for jazz lovers staying in Los Angeles. From the 1920s to 1950s, Central Avenue was the hub of the West Coast jazz scene. ![]()
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