A jazz legend exits L.A. club on a blue note

There was a light mist over the Santa Monicas when I drove down from Topanga Canyon to catch the final appearance of the John Hammond jazz quintet in the Back Room at Henri’s.

Earlier that day, a heavier fog had rolled in from the ocean and over the mountaintops but had thinned as it reached the Valley, lying like a bridal veil over Canoga Park. A slight chill in the air was nature’s reminder that winter wasn’t over.

Henri’s is a coffee shop, more or less, with a back room that began hosting Hammond about three years ago. He’s a jazz legend and I’m a jazz nut, and to be able to drive to a club about half an hour away to hear great music was a gift from heaven.

He was there every Friday and Saturday night with either a trio or a quintet, and occasional visits by other jazz greats who dropped by to blow stars into the night.

But that’s all gone now. Economics has ended jazz in the Back Room the way it is ending Dutton’s bookstore in Brentwood. Little pieces of quality are spinning out of L.A. like leaves caught up in a gale.

Oddly, Henri’s was the perfect venue. Most jazz clubs don’t exist in coffee shops, especially on streets that die after dark. Everything around Henri’s seemed to close when the sun went down. There was a feeling of loneliness to the location, which was OK in its way. Jazz is meant to be a little melancholy.

I was in a low mood, I guess, when I walked through the restaurant and into the Back Room to hear the style of music born in New Orleans more than a century ago. Word had gotten around that this was to be Hammond’s last night, and it was jammed with more than 100 jazz aficionados. They were there to say goodbye.

The quintet, with Hammond at the piano, opened with a riff on “It Could Happen to You,” a ballad polished into a new blues form, described once by Billie Holiday as walking in the rain. She was seeing jazz not as a love song but as a mood. The last piece was a whimsical tune Hammond had written called “Big Butt Blues.” Then it was over.

Clearly, Henri’s owner, Mike Puetz, had regrets about ending the jazz sessions. His father opened the restaurant in 1972, and it has become the place to go for breakfast in the Valley. Jazz was added when Puetz discovered Hammond, who was winding up a two-year stint at the Hilton in Woodland Hills.

Dwindling profits and rising prices forced him to end any kind of entertainment in the Back Room, Puetz says. The cocktail lounge will remain open, but it’ll be just another bar without the intricate blending of piano, bass, drums, saxophone and trumpet to pull guys like me off the street and into its dark embrace. You can have a martini anywhere, but it begins talking to you when there’s music in the night.

Trained as a classical pianist, Hammond, 66, switched to jazz when he was 16 and has been playing it ever since. He leans over and almost into the piano as if they’re a single instrument, Hammond’s white hair gleaming under the measured light that illuminates the room. With him on his last night were Jim Hughart on bass, Kendall Kay on drums, Pete Christlieb on the tenor sax and Carl Saunders on the trumpet.

The diversity of Hammond’s talent glows up out of his bio, and includes performing or recording with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, Mel Torme and Tina Turner, and guest-conducting with the Johannesburg, BBC and New Orleans symphony orchestras, among others.

I got into jazz in college when you could hang out in San Francisco’s North Beach and listen to good music for the price of a pitcher of beer. Then it turned into a tourist haven and you had to look harder to find one of those small clubs that didn’t hit you over the head with cover charges and minimums.

Puetz tried a $5 cover at Henri’s but it didn’t help much, and charging more wouldn’t have seemed right. So the decision was made to eliminate jazz. Weekends, already pretty dull in the Valley, are now even quieter along Sherman Way.

A great city needs great art. It needs music and galleries and bookstores. Its people need to be transported beyond gang violence, traffic jams and inadequate leadership. We need more than a Hollywood mentality, more than amusement parks and certainly more than the self-accolades of a chest-pounding city hall.

Looking around at those gathered that last night of jazz at Henri’s, I could see how involved they were in the complicated movements of the music. Some bopped along to the syncopated rhythms; others were transported by the melodies to a level of listening where music is all-embracing. We shared golden moments.

As I drove away from the Back Room, I could almost see Billie Holiday standing under a nearby corner streetlight. It was raining and she was crying.

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