TV REVIEW : TAKING A LOOK AT L.A.’S BLACK MUSIC HERITAGE

“The Black Music History of Los Angeles: Its Roots” is a sometimes confusing, frequently sketchy and frustratingly low budget salute to the black jazz and R&B; musicians who played Central Avenue clubs and theaters here in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

To criticize the 90-minute documentary on the above grounds, however, is akin to a man near collapse in the desert complaining that the bottle of water he has just been handed by a rescue party is only half full. For anyone interested in the city’s pop culture, “Black Music History” (6:30 tonight on KCSI, Channel 18) is a stimulating and essential work.

Histories of black music in America are generous in their accounts of the musicians who either grew up in or were nurtured by the night spots of New Orleans, Memphis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago and Harlem. Little, however, has been reported about the vast and colorful black scene here in the years immediately before and after World War II.

In “Black Music History,” producer Tom Reed--whose credentials include years as a disc jockey and a music critic--opens a picture-book of memories: the musicians (from jazzman Charles Mingus, a graduate of Jordan High School, and Eric Dolphy, from Dorsey High School, to R&B; vocal groups like the Penguins, best known for “Earth Angel,” and the Olympics of “Western Movies” fame) and clubs (the Alabam to the Plantation) that made Central Avenue a treasure chest of music. Indeed, the special is too reminiscent at times of a picture book, with still photos of musicians (among others: Les McCann, Joe Liggins, Sam Cooke) and the places they played, all racing by without the text to put them into perspective.

Reed tries to provide insights and color through interviews with musicians (including jazz great Miles Davis), disc jockeys (Hunter Hancock, Gene Norman, Joe Adams) and others who were involved in the scene. Blues belter Big Joe Turner, in an interview taped before his death, recalls how Duke Ellington brought him to Los Angeles from New York.

Band leader-composer Johnny Otis recounts hearing a 9-year-old Little Esther Phillips on his chicken ranch in Watts and thinking she had a voice just like Dinah Washington. Songwriter Ernestine Rounds relates how she wrote the lyrics for the zany R&B; classic, “Stranded in the Jungle” for the Jayhawks group.

Erroll Dolphin, son of record store owner John Dolphin, explains that his father titled his store Dolphins of Hollywood because he wasn’t allowed as a black man at the time to open a record store in Hollywood. The name, young Dolphin says, was his father’s attempt to bring a bit of Hollywood to South Central Los Angeles.

Throughout the conversations and photos, there is a warm, engaging sense of love for the era--enough, in fact, to inspire a more complete chronicling of the black music roots of this city.