Organizer Jazzes Up Carnaval With International Mood, Food

Less than a week before hosting one of Long Beach’s biggest events, Al Williams looked over a list of 26 things he had to do. He leaned back at his desk, puffed on a cigarette and told one of his staff where to buy a Panama hat for $60 so everyone would look the same on the parade float.

“There’s no need for me to get all frantic. I won’t get to everything on this list until the day of the event anyway, so why not just relax?” Williams said, flashing a self-assured Cheshire cat smile.

Despite his seeming nonchalance, this jazz club owner has strict control--down to the smallest detail--over Long Beach’s Carnaval, which is expected to draw 80,000 people Saturday. Trying to change the image of a crime-ridden, unfriendly downtown, Williams is closing off part of downtown for the festival.

He stepped in last year and turned the event from a major money loser to a success in its second year. Now, his production company has put together the city’s third Carnaval, and he has a contract to do the next five.

“I’ve always liked to throw a big party,” Williams said. “Carnaval is it!”

The one-day event will feature multicultural entertainment, a two-hour parade, ethnic food stands and dancing in the streets.

Williams, 47, with a graying goatee and mustache, is a flamboyant Long Beach businessmen who drives a replica 1938 Mercedes kit car and who turned the second floor of a historic pastel building into a jazz club called Birdland West. He halted his professional drumming career while he struggled for the last three years to make money in the first lunch and dinner nightclub downtown, Q on Pine Street and Broadway. His club attracts top musicians, and Carnaval brings the cultures of the world to Long Beach. But why Long Beach?

“ ‘Cause I’m insane,” Williams quipped. “But I believe the community is a lot more progressive than it is given credit for, and there is a changing attitude toward Carnaval. It’s a conservative city, yes, but it’s time to live in the 1990s.”

Williams is banking on the city’s central location to draw people from Orange County and Los Angeles. He also expects the success of Carnaval to help his own Long Beach Jazz Festival in August.

“I may have been a bit premature opening up downtown,” Williams said, adding that he hopes to eventually cash in on plans for expanded parking lots, large apartment complexes and movie theaters planned nearby. He joined Downtown Long Beach Associates, an organization of downtown businesses, and was soon elected to the board of directors.

“Al Williams was the first true pioneer” of downtown businesses that remain open 18 hours, said Manny Jones, executive director of Downtown Long Beach Associates. “He has a lot of foresight, and yet control.”

Jones credits Williams’ tight accounting procedures with single-handedly saving Carnaval after the first year’s loss of $67,000. Not only did Williams pay off the first year’s debt, there was a $10,000 surplus after last year, Jones said.

But some remain skeptical about what Williams is doing with Carnaval. Lou Morano, who masterminded the festival and ran it the first year, discounts what Williams has done. “It could have been Al Williams, Joe Blow or anyone who turned it around the second year,” Morano said. “The first time is always toughest.”

Morano said he is disappointed that Carnaval has more of an international flavor rather than the solely Latino image he had intended. People are also paying to get in; the first year was free. Morano tried to buy the rights to the festival, but when he was turned down, he resigned and now runs his own Salsa Festival in September.

Morano was co-owner of a club called Off-Broadway, which opened six months before Birdland West, and only a few blocks away. He sold it in November, 1988, because customers were not coming.

Born in Pasadena and raised on the music of Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald, Williams became a jazz drummer and formed his own band, catching tips from greats such as Dizzy Gillespie. He managed a club near Belmont Shore, and in 1980 opened another club, The Jazz Safari, near the Queen Mary. He lost his lease in 1987 when the owners told him that jazz was not a good image for the shopping village near the shipboard hotel, Williams said.

Now a two-time grandfather who performed on two dozen albums and is writing music for a new one, he has a new band, the Al Williams’ Jazz Society, which still jams occasionally at his club.

Williams has an outward appearance of flippancy and calm coolness, but he closely watches how all the money for the festival and rarely ends up enjoying his own celebrations. But last year, while on stage with headliner musician Poncho Sanchez, a good friend, Williams invited the crowd of thousands up to his club. “I was drunk by then,” Williams recalled. “It was time for me to enjoy the party.”

But he is a straight-shooting businessman, said David Williams, a sales promoter for KACE radio. “If he doesn’t like something, believe me, he’ll tell me very honestly,” said Williams, who is not related to the festival’s organizer.

Although he is running the festival, Williams has never been to New Orleans’ Mardi Gras orRio de Janeiro’s Carnival, the models for his celebration. He may attend one of them next year.

“But for right now, I want to see everyone holding hands and having a good time together right here in Long Beach,” Williams said, grinning again. “I feel like I was put here to make people happy, and I’ll be having a good time myself.”

Szymanski is a free-lance writer who lives in West Hollywood.