CATALINA’S BAR & GRILL--AN ISLAND FOR JAZZ BUFFS

Not many jazz club owners are glamorous. Few, in fact, are women. As for Romanian women who share a name with a local offshore island, the count is down to one. That’s Catalina.

Yes, there is a Catalina--a tall, slender woman whose customers often express surprise that her club is not on an island, and that the name belongs to a real person.

“I was born in Bucharest,” she said the other day, relaxing after a busy session on the phone dealing with food and drink supplies for her club, Catalina’s Bar & Grill, 1640 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood.

“My maiden name was Catalina Catalui. I always liked music, but it wasn’t easy to find jazz in Romania, although I did go to a Louis Armstrong concert there. We had Dizzy Gillespie too, and Woody Herman, but I didn’t really learn about the whole scene until I came over here.”

Emigrating was not easy. The man who is now Catalina’s husband, Bob Popescu, defected in 1969, acquired his U.S. citizenship, then returned to Bucharest in 1975 to marry her. This enabled her to leave the country the following year as the wife of an American.

“We had our own business here in Los Angeles, a catering lunch truck. Later I worked for five years or so at Bullock’s Wilshire; I was involved with food service and fine wines. Then we saw this restaurant on Cahuenga Boulevard, which looked so pretty, even though the location wasn’t too great.”

Using their experience with catering, Catalina and her husband opened the room as a restaurant in August of last year. Then several friends--among them Dennis Smith, the former KKGO disc jockey--pointed out that they were only a few doors up the street from Shelly’s Manne Hole, the most popular jazz club of the 1960s.

“We started thinking about doing something extra, using music (The Russian-American Jazz Connection will perform at the club tonight; the Pete Christleib Quartet, Thursday; and the Lew Tabackin Trio, Friday-Sunday). It began modestly with just a piano bar, but then we decided to go into a regular band type of presentation.

“Buddy Collette was our first attraction, on Oct. 23, 1986. He’s still a good friend. Slowly we found out about all the problems in booking talent: How to find musicians’ phone numbers, whether to deal with them or their agents, and how to get people who haven’t played in Los Angeles for a long time.”

Catalina soon found a workable policy, alternating between local talent, for whom a door charge as low as $3 might be assessed, and major out-of-town names, whose price mandated a door tab up to $20.

“Our capacity is only 150 to 175 including the bar, but when we charged $20 for Dizzy Gillespie it was a profitable weekend. Benny Carter and Horace Silver were very successful. Our biggest week was with Ahmad Jamal, from every point of view--he has an audience that is very hungry for his music; also he’s not only a great musician but a great human being. He’ll be coming back in the winter.”

A hurdle Catalina is trying to face is the reluctance of customers to accept the fact that this is a restaurant. “People think of a jazz room as some place they come to after having dinner elsewhere. It makes no sense, because they can come here and enjoy the entire evening and probably pay a lot less money. Our name is still Catalina’s Bar & Grill.”

An open secret in the success of the room has been her friendly relationship with the musicians. “We like to invite them to drop by if they’re in town on a visit to see what the place is like. We’ve reached the point where a lot of musicians consider it a hangout room and drop by here to see their friends without even knowing who’s performing.

“Bud Shank liked it so well that he told me this is the only room he will work in Los Angeles. Of course, it was costly to do what was needed to make musicians feel this way: an expensive new piano, a new sound system, a larger stage. But it all seems to be working out. Some months we lose or break even, other times we make a profit. I’m very happy to be this far ahead after less than a year.”

Did she know, back in Bucharest, about the existence of an island bearing her name?

“I’d never heard of it in my life. But when I arrived, Bob was already settled in Los Angeles, and the first thing he did after I got here was hire a boat and take me for a trip--out to Catalina.”