Swinging Again to the Up-Tempo Sounds of Central Avenue

Streets can age and die like people, and Los Angeles’ Central Avenue -- once the West Coast’s jazz capital -- is no exception. But soon it will ring with the sounds of long-shuttered nightclubs and concert halls at the ninth annual Central Avenue Jazz Festival.

For more than three decades in the early 20th century, the thoroughfare pulsed with the music of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington and Edward “Kid” Ory.

The master of trombone and New Orleans jazz, Ory cut the first jazz recording by a black band -- and he did it in Los Angeles, kicking off the city’s black recording industry.

Central Avenue was the economic heart of Los Angeles’ black community. By day, barbershops, doctors’ offices and pool halls catered to migrants from the South, who often lived on the avenue as well. By night, Central was a social and cultural mecca and melting pot where color didn’t matter.

Jazz gave the black community identity and a social life. It also attracted whites, especially from the movie world, to some of the swankiest and swingingest bars, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels, dance halls, theaters, burlesque houses and speak-easies, especially during Prohibition.

“I first came out here in 1919,” Ory said in a 1961 Times interview. “We played in a place called the Cadillac [Cafe] on Central Avenue. Hollywood was just a wide spot in the road then. Movie stars used to come down there to hear us, and it was nothing to get tips of $25.”

Ory, an on-again, off-again fixture on Central, was best known for composing “Muskrat Ramble” and for giving Armstrong his first professional gig. A Louisiana Creole whose first language was French, Ory began playing homemade instruments at age 10.

Three years later, in 1899, he formed his own band and took to the stage amid the boisterous applause of pimps, prostitutes and pickpockets in bawdy New Orleans’ red-light district. Fans nicknamed him “Kid.”

As early as 1908, musicians playing ragtime migrated to Central Avenue from New Orleans and throughout the South.

In the late 1920s, the Summerville Hotel rose at 42nd Street and became the center of a cluster of nightspots. (Later it was renamed the Dunbar.) Nearby was the Club Alabam -- originally called the Apex Club, the most celebrated club on Central, with the Breakfast Club upstairs. Farther south was the Club Plantation at 108th Street.

Kid Ory’s Creole Orchestra played in most of the clubs, some of them taxi-dance halls where men traded a dime for a dance. Timing was important; dance hall managers always wanted Ory to speed up the tempo so the dances were shorter and the customers paid more often.

Ory was booked all over the city, at Elks picnics and Moose lodges as well as on boat and train trips to Catalina, San Diego and Tijuana. He soon met “Reb” and Johnny Spikes, who opened the city’s first black record store at 12th and Central.

The Spikes brothers, who had a band of their own, sold records and musical instruments. They also owned a music publishing company, cafes and nightclubs, and booked gigs for local bands and Hollywood studios. They started booking Ory too.

During the silent screen era, Ory’s band played “mood music” for the actors during filming. When “talkies” came along, Ory and other black musicians recorded soundtracks for many films, while white musicians pantomimed their parts in front of the camera.

In June 1921, Ory’s Sunshine Orchestra and the Spikes’ Seven Pods of Pepper rented a Santa Monica studio. Ory blew the first sounds that put a black jazz band on wax.

The melded bands recorded six songs on wax master discs, but four of them melted in the summer heat. The two that survived -- “Ory’s Creole Trombone” and “Society Blues” -- became a 78-rpm recording released under the Sunshine label. Until then, no black combo had had an instrumental phonograph record released anywhere.

That same year, Ory’s band became the first black band to broadcast jazz on the radio -- back when KFWB made a different sort of news.

A few years earlier, he had helped propel the young Armstrong to fame. “It was 1918 in New Orleans,” Ory recalled in a 1964 Times interview. “I had this little band called Kid Ory’s Brownskin Babies, and I needed a trumpet player. I sent for this kid, but he had to borrow a pair of long pants before he could go to work.”

In the same interview, Armstrong recalled: “I remember you told ‘em, ‘Go fetch little Louie.’ That was my first break, man.” Armstrong had been 17.

They would remain friends all their lives. Ory moved to Chicago in 1925, joining Armstrong and his Hot Five and Hot Seven bands. After a succession of performances, mostly in Al Capone’s nightclubs, Ory composed “Muskrat Ramble,” which he recorded with Armstrong.

Ory returned to Los Angeles in 1929 as the big-band swing era was on the move. When the jazz era faded, he ran a chicken farm with his brother, worked as a janitor at the county morgue and unloaded mail trains for the U.S. Postal Service.

The early 1940s brought a Dixieland revival, and Ory made a name for himself again. He opened a nightclub in San Francisco, formed a band with old musician friends “Papa” Mutt Carey and Jimmy Noone, and made dozens of recordings and radio appearances.

In 1944, Ory’s band (which included Carey and Noone) had a spot on Orson Welles’ weekly radio show. “He telephoned me,” Ory said in a 1952 Times interview. “ ‘Kid, Jimmy Noone just passed away. Yeah, it’s tough, but we’ve got a show to do tonight. I’d like to have a song played for him. See if you can work one up. We’ll call it “Blues for Jimmy.” ’ “

Ory said he worked out a 12-bar chorus, wrote the melody and found a clarinet player to fill in for Noone. “I don’t mind saying that when we played ‘Blues for Jimmy,’ all the musicians in the band were crying,” Ory recalled. “So was Mr. Welles and the audience too.”

World War II’s end brought changes to Central. Blacks moved out as nearby communities ended racial restrictions. Employment and educational opportunities elsewhere added to the exodus, and in 1953, when musical unions integrated, black musicians seemed to scatter. The bustling doorways were silent, the storefronts empty.

Ory found other avenues for his talents. He played in films, including “New Orleans” with Armstrong and Billie Holiday in 1947 and “The Benny Goodman Story” in 1955.

By the 1960s, Ory was in his 70s, living in Brentwood and blowing his horn only in Dixieland performances at Disneyland. In 1962, he and Armstrong performed there together.

In 1966, Ory moved his family to Hawaii. In 1971, at a New Orleans concert, he played his last note on the trombone he affectionately called Boo-Boo. He died in Hawaii two years later at age 86.

But Los Angeles is where he rests. Seventeen members of the Southern California Hot Jazz Society gave him a proper send-off at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City. When the band broke into “Muskrat Ramble,” everyone danced around his grave.

Memories of Ory and that magical era will be revived by the Central Avenue Jazz Festival, in front of the legendary Dunbar Hotel, July 31 and Aug. 1.