With a Bit More Synergy, We Could Really Jam

The Playboy Festival at the Hollywood Bowl this weekend kicks off another rich summer season of jazz for Los Angeles. Soon to follow will be the strong lineup in the eight programs of Lexus Jazz at the Bowl, as well as a wide variety of events at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, Grand Performances at the California Plaza Watercourt, MOCA, LACMA and the Mancini Institute’s programs at UCLA.

Still not enough? There also are the week-in, week-out opportunities to hear artists--well-known and less so--at venues such as Catalina Bar & Grill, the Jazz Bakery, Rocco’s, the Jazz Spot, the World Stage, Steamers Cafe and numerous other clubs and restaurants, including, in July, the new Knitting Factory Hollywood. And, looming in late summer and early fall: major jazz festivals in San Jose, Monterey and San Francisco.

Jazz, it would seem, is in fine shape--in the Southland and elsewhere. Yet the only institution that has created a full-scale, major arts center program for what is arguably America’s most important musical creation continues to be New York City’s Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Last week, in this column, trumpeter-composer Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s music director and guiding light, suggested that similar programs could be established “anywhere,” so long as the “right elements” were present. Those “elements,” according to Marsalis, included “concerned citizens,” a leader with an “artistic vision,” an “executive director who understands the mechanics of what is going on,” supportive “mentor-type people” and “an informed press.”

All well and good, and all elements amply present in Los Angeles. So why is it, then, that Los Angeles has not generated a similarly productive, arts center jazz program? Perhaps because Marsalis left out one equally important element: that the success of any arts program is directly related to its capacity to reflect the community in which it exists. Los Angeles is not New York--nor, to be even more precise, Manhattan. It is a vast, multicultural collection of dozens of towns and cities stretching for miles in every direction--not a centralized urban city heavily weighted with an upper-income population.

And the jazz programs in Los Angeles tend to reflect the diversity, even the fragmentation, of the community. Institutions such as UCLA, USC, Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Northridge all offer extensive jazz education programs; organizations such as the Los Angeles Jazz Society and the fledgling Thelonious Monk Institute provide important exposure to jazz for younger students, from elementary to high school. Two radio stations--KLON and KJAZ--offer 24-hour-a-day menus of most forms of jazz.

What is missing is not a centralized, Lincoln Center-style arts center, which would be both unlikely and inappropriate for Los Angeles. What is missing is a centralized, nonprofit umbrella organization that would support jazz of every stripe and style--from New Orleans and swing to bebop, avant-garde, fusion and Latin. An organization that already has a number of Southland precedents.

Call it the Academy of Jazz Arts and Crafts.

(No, not the more familiar “Arts and Sciences,” a definition that seems at odds with the very nature of jazz. Instead: “Crafts,” which more accurately describes the one-of-a-kind, handmade qualities essential to the music.)

What would the academy do? Here’s a list of possibilities:

* Establish an all-inclusive, constantly updated database of information about jazz in Los Angeles--available freely via the Internet.

* Serve as a meeting point for the numerous, and sometimes factionalized, Southland jazz organizations in an effort to avoid duplication of effort. Educational programs by different institutions, for example, can be far more effective if they are created with an awareness of the larger picture. Jazz club owners might do a better job of resolving such common problems as early-in-the-week low attendance and the need for more effective promotion--as well as the inherent difficulties of competing for the same major talent--if they took the risk of interfacing with other club owners. Arts presenters consulting with each other could offer a far wider array of musical choices to their subscribers.

* Provide much-needed support for musicians. It’s no mystery that few jazz players have access to health insurance. A group of physician jazz fans offering pro bono medical aid could make an enormous difference in the lives of many of the players they admire. Similar pro bono legal and financial advice could also be useful to artists who have focused far more on the creative rather than the practical aspects of their careers.

* Serve as an advocacy center to persuade the support and dissemination of music that is either rarely heard, or heard primarily within specific communities. What would the results be, for example, if a pop music promoter was persuaded to schedule a young jazz group such as the Isaac Smith Quartet as the opener for a rock concert? Or, conversely, if an already successful jazz fusion act such as Medeski, Martin & Wood presented their already committed audiences with an opener of New Orleans music? Interesting, at the very least.

* And, of course, an awards program. Sure, awards shows are beginning to surface--most recently at the Billboard/BET convention in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, and next week via the Jazz Journalists Assn. in New York. But the only awards show that really matters is one in which the awards are voted upon by the artists themselves. Hard to make happen? Of course. But eminently worth doing.

Obviously these are only a few of the potential benefits of an Academy of Jazz Arts and Crafts. A little hard thinking and conversation would undoubtedly generate many other possibilities. Anybody ready to step up and form a steering committee to make it a reality?