A Jazz Reprise : Central Avenue Festival Brings Back the Memories and the Music

If they played jazz in Los Angeles from the 1920s to the ‘50s, they were probably on Central Avenue. And on Saturday, many were back during the kickoff of the two-day Central Avenue Jazz Festival.

Jazz greats strolled the streets while hundreds of fans attended free concerts that will continue through 5 p.m. today, returning a familiar feel to what was once the heart of the Los Angeles jazz scene.

To celebrate the cultural contribution of what was a colorful 30-block stretch of a predominantly African American neighborhood, the city of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department organized the festival in front of the Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue between 42nd and 43rd streets.

The Dunbar once faced several jazz clubs and housed a number of traveling legends, including Charlie Parker and Ella Fitzgerald. Now the salmon pink, chandeliered building faces a flock of stores and houses a number of memories.

“This is where our roots were,” said drummer Roy Porter, 73, who played with Parker. “We used to stay here and play right next door, at the Alabam, and at the Last Word across the street.”

Sitting at a piano bench inside the old hotel, Porter said: “White people used to come to all these clubs--Mae West, Ava Gardner. They used to come down here to have a good time.”

When Central Avenue was swinging, color didn’t matter, said reed man Buddy Collette.

“It was about love and being kind to each other,” he said.

Collette, 75, president of Jazz America, an organization in which young musicians learn how to play from jazz music’s masters, helped draw youth to the festival because “it’s important to focus on the young. . . . We have to teach the young about this.”

Jennifer Kramer, 15, is eager to learn.

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Shunning her contemporaries’ preference for what she calls “you-want-to-die music,” Kramer takes flute lessons from Collette and marvels at his methods.

“[Jazz] speaks to your soul. It goes straight to your heart,” she said, casting long, hard stares up and down Central Avenue.

“I wish I could still come here and see” the old jazz scene, she said. “I would have liked to have been here.”

Those who were there were out in droves.

“Human treasures should be perpetuated. Those of us who experienced it realize that there was an indefinable magic here,” said saxophonist Jacki Kelso, 75, in an explanation of what the Central Avenue of the 1930s and ‘40s was all about.

Dressed in the hipster uniform of a black pinstriped suit, turtleneck and beret, Kelso stood in the cruel summer heat on Central Avenue and 42nd Street, managing to keep his cool and attract a crowd.

“I just want to tell you that I love your music,” said Clifford Henderson, strolling up to the corner and extending a hand.

Middle-aged but an old-timer to the scene, Henderson reminisced with Kelso about the days when jazz music reverberated up and down Central, when many of the genre’s greatest players poured out of Jefferson High School.

“Excuse me, young man,” a wizened man said, interrupting their conversation. “I’m Charlie Brown. I’m 80 years old.”

That’s all he needed to say.

“Wow,” Kelso replied.

Brown used to blow the trumpet at the Plantation and Alabam clubs before the legendary locations were closed down and reincarnated as apartment complexes.

Dressed from head to toe in varying shades of beige, Brown said his hellos to Kelso and others on the street corner and then scuttled off toward a tent under which younger jazz musicians were soon to play.

“It was a tremendous life here,” Brown said. “This was a heavenly street because so much was going on.”