Time to Think Outside L.A.’s Musical Boxes

Earlier this summer, tenor saxophonist George Coleman was in town for a series of local appearances. Several were at non-ticketed venues--a free museum date at LACMA and a free performance at the Westin Los Angeles Airport Hotel’s Jazz Lobby among them. But Coleman was also scheduled to appear, after the free dates, for a cover-charge event at Rocco’s in Bel-Air--a booking made by the club reportedly with no awareness that Coleman would be making the earlier, no-charge appearances.

The situation--in which the prior dates might easily have undercut attendance at Rocco’s--was not unusual. Jazz club owners and concert presenters rarely have much communication with each other, and they generally make their scheduling choices according to their own interests. (The larger venues, in fact, usually have contractual time and geographical limitations with performers regarding other appearances in the area.)

Jazz education seems to take place in the Southland in similarly random fashion. The Los Angeles Jazz Society, the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz and the annual summer teaching sessions of the Henry Mancini Institute are among numerous organizations making individual efforts to illuminate the art at varying levels. As do the many university-level programs, ranging from jazz departments at USC and UCLA to Cal State Northridge and Cal State Long Beach. But here too there is very little evidence that the programs make any effort to explore common goals beyond their own individual efforts.

Should they?

In a word, yes. Each individual entity--the clubs, the concert series, the educational programs--are, whether they choose to acknowledge it, part of a large, complex design in which jazz has maintained its entertainment-world connections while establishing itself as an American art. There is no better evidence of the extent to which this transformation has taken place than the success of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

But jazz, and the support for jazz, in Los Angeles, is as balkanized as the city itself. The far-ranging collection of individual organizations, educational entities and commercial interests that essentially controls the music never seems able to break out of a myriad of self-interest agendas.

Rodney G. King’s plaintive call for community--”Why can’t we all get along?”--was the metaphor at the heart of a jazz column I wrote a few months ago, calling for the organization of an Academy of Jazz Arts and Crafts. Why not, I suggested, create a centralized, nonprofit umbrella organization to support jazz of every stripe and style--from New Orleans and swing to bebop, avant-garde, fusion and Latin?

Listing the benefits that could accrue from such an organization, I finished with a plaintive call of my own: “Anyone ready to step up and form a steering committee to make the Academy of Jazz Arts and Crafts a reality?”

From the responses I received, it was apparent that there were many who would be willing to serve, but virtually no one who was prepared to take on the process of organizing and leading such a committee.

In addition, there were warnings from those who had attempted similar organizations in the past. “You’ll never get all the jazz interests in L.A. to sit down at the same table” was the message that was repeated over and over.

Because of those competitive interests, the small amount of available funding--from individual, corporate and government sources--is distributed with little sense of focus, fragmented by the narrow needs and demands of individual organizations. No wonder there’s a reluctance to take on the task of bumping heads with so many different interest groups.

So it seems obvious that--before anything as far-reaching as an academy can be achieved--the Los Angeles jazz community needs to find a way to “get along” on a more modest level.

And it can start with the establishment of a nonprofit “We all can get along” organization that might be called JazzWorks L.A.

There’s no question that the local community deserves such support. The Southland is home to some of the world’s finest jazz artists, and the skill on every level of performance--from world-class local artists such as Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter down to the students in the many high school jazz programs--is first-rate. Los Angeles jazz doesn’t have to take second place to anyone, and its practitioners deserve all the support they can get.

But there are problems that are a direct reflection of the city itself.

For one, Los Angeles is not New York City, and its geographical layout creates difficulties not present in the short distances and heterogenous neighborhoods of Manhattan. Musicians, like anyone else, tend to develop friendships within their own neighborhoods. In the Southland, that means, for example, that musicians who live in the Valley are not likely to spend too much time jamming with players from South-Central or East L.A.

Another is the persistence of the Second City Syndrome. New York continues to make siren calls to jazz artists, in part because of its history as the jazz mecca, in part because of the presence of so many world-class players, in part because of the employment opportunities it offers. But Los Angeles has been a jazz mecca too, dating back to Jelly Roll Morton and the earliest years of the Central Avenue scene. There are plenty of world-class players in the Southland, and the employment situation--in a city that is the heart of the entertainment world--has the potential to improve dramatically.

*

An effectively functioning, all-inclusive nonprofit jazz support organization would play a vital role in that improvement. Some of the potential activities mentioned in my June 16 column that were associated with the Academy of Jazz Arts and Crafts are equally applicable to a locally functioning umbrella support organization.

One, the provision of pro bono medical, legal and financial aid, provoked a response from California Lawyers for the Arts describing its existing program for providing legal advice to artists and arts organizations of all disciplines. That’s all to the good.

But medical aid is still needed by an artistic community that has never had organized access to health insurance. And financial advice--especially guidance on how to find dependable management (so rare in the jazz world)--may be the most vital of all. Most jazz artists have historically preferred to concentrate on the creative aspects of their careers, often placing themselves at the mercy of bad, even dishonest, management. Serious, unbiased guidance and advice are badly needed.

Other activities mentioned in the column could also come under the purview of JazzWorks L.A.: the establishment of an updated, online jazz database; the bringing together of individual and often oppositional jazz entities; the far-reaching advocacy of the music.

Education is also a key to jazz performance as well as jazz appreciation. Several local organizations are working effectively to accomplish both those tasks. But coordination of their activities rarely takes place. And it should. Prior consultation and planning could assure that there is no redundancy in the efforts to bring jazz to elementary and secondary schools.

On the collegiate level, institutions should be persuaded to plan their curricula with an awareness of what others are doing, allowing for the possibility that individual courses taken at one school will be acceptable at another. (If, for example, Cal State Northridge is offering a program in the connections between jazz and Indian classical music, why shouldn’t a UCLA student have the opportunity to receive academic credit for taking the course?)

JazzWorks L.A. could also play a role in bringing jazz artists into the loop of the Information Age. If, as seems likely, the business of delivering music product to the public changes from hard copies (CDs) to soft copies (downloaded material), the effect upon jazz artists could be significant. One possible JazzWorks L.A. activity might be the creation of a nonprofit Web site that would allow artists to market their music directly over the Internet, at prices they set for themselves.

As I noted above, none of this will be easy. It will, first of all, require considerable capitalization. But Los Angeles has a surprisingly large number of wealthy individuals who wouldn’t hesitate to describe themselves as jazz fans. Their collective support could make the difference, at least in the beginning phases of getting JazzWorks L.A. off the ground.

It will take institutional support, as well, if only because funding rarely surfaces without the presence of a highly visible backing organization. And that could be a rub, since any existing organization is probably going to have its own agenda. But, as Michael O’Daniel--who runs the Saturday Jazz Institute at the World Stage in Leimert Park has been involved in the organization of performing arts management for 35 years--pointed out in a letter to me, the Los Angeles Opera “enrolled enough wealthy individuals to fund the organization for three years without any outside support.”

For JazzWorks L.A. to actually come together, of course, communication will have to be opened up, egos will have to be set aside, and all involved will have to accept the minimizing of individual expectations and agendas in favor of an interlinking effort for the greater good of the music. That, alone, as several in the jazz community advised me after my initial column, could be a herculean task.

But it can be done. And the time is ripe. So let’s get JazzWorks L.A. rolling. After that, we can move on to an Academy of Jazz Arts and Crafts.