West Coast Jazz: Scene and heard

West Coast jazz is a tale of one city, but two musical scenes. The higher profile West Coast scene in the 1950s was dominated by white musicians and centered around, but not exclusively, the Lighthouse club at Hermosa beach in Los Angeles (and featured in these pages last year – see Jazzwise 294, April 2024). The second, the lower-profile (to many jazz fans at least) and unpublicised scene was centered around, but not exclusively, Los Angeles’ Central Avenue and was mostly the purview of black American musicians.

An example of how little attention had been focused on the black West Coast scene came in 1959, when the jazz world was set on its collective ear by a quartet of musicians who had been booked into the fashionably déclassé Five Spot in New York.

The Ornette Coleman Quartet – Don Cherry (trumpet), Coleman (alto sax), Charlie Haden (bass) and Billy Higgins (drums) – were announcing a major fork in the road of jazz history. At the time, Coleman’s ‘free jazz’ was thought to be as significant as the arrival of bebop; but instead of being incubated in the clubs and bars of Harlem, Ornette’s famous quartet came from the black Los Angeles jazz scene – something that even today barely gets a mention.

Equally, musicians such as Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Charles Lloyd and Chico Hamilton either came from Los Angeles, or began their careers there before becoming established and gaining recognition on the New York scene.

Los Angeles in the 1950s has usually been portrayed as a destination East Coast jazz musicians travelled to, played, and then went home again. A case in point is Charlie Parker’s 1945 appearance with Dizzy Gillespie in Billy Berg’s nightclub in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles: it famously bombed, and is now writ into jazz folklore. But probe a little more deeply, and you’ll find in Ross Russell’s Bird Lives! that Parker, after playing his sets at Berg’s, would go off and “jam at one of the spots along Central Avenue.”

What were these ‘spots’ along Central Avenue? Well, first of all Central Avenue extended from downtown Los Angeles south through Watts and was the social centre of the black Los Angeles population. In the 1950s, it was the centre of the city’s nightlife, attracting thousands of people throughout southern California to its restaurants, bars, nightclubs, jazz clubs, casinos, dance halls and night spots with spectacular floor shows (and quite apart from jazz music, it also launched the careers of some major names in rhythm and blues).

Interviews from those around at the time and collected at the UCLA Oral History Program speak of musicians going from club to club in the early morning hours and catching jam sessions involving musicians such as Art Tatum, Lester Young, Nat ‘King’ Cole (when he was a much-respected jazz pianist), Dexter Gordon, Hampton Hawes, Wardell Gray and Art Pepper. The Central Avenue scene concentrated night-time entertainment within a relatively small area, and Angelenos claim it would have been the equal of New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York’s 52nd Street and Harlem in their prime.

What seems remarkable today was how little attention was being paid to all this activity in the media – The Los Angeles Times seldom covered it, and even the black newspapers, the California Eagle and the Los Angeles Sentinel, failed to cover the scene as assiduously as The New Amsterdam News covered the music scene in Harlem during the interwar years.

But fortunately, the recorded evidence tells a story all of its own, and while all sweeping generalisations have exceptions that prove the rule, the Central Avenue jazz scene in the late 1940s into the 1950s was largely shaped by hard bop influences.

You don’t have to probe too deeply to quickly become aware of the sheer number of ferociously talented musicians on the scene at the time, from home grown Angelinos to out-of-towners who settled in the city.

Take the saxophone, for example. Just to throw a few names into the hat, how about Sonny Criss, Harold Land, Teddy Edwards, Buddy Collette, Sonny Simmons, Prince Lasha, Curtis Amy, Earl Andreza, Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon, Eric Dolphy, Charles Lloyd, and Ornette Coleman? And that’s just for starters. These players were most certainly the equal, and in some cases superior, to the East Coast roster of saxophonists on the much-vaunted Blue Note label – with the notable exceptions of Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter – but you wouldn’t know it today.

So why is this? Well, the West Coasters who crossed the continent to settle in New York did receive the attention of the critics – for example, Ornette, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, Charles Lloyd – but those who remained at home, and this is true of the West Coast musicians in general, were out of sight and out of mind of the opinion-forming critics in New York. And besides, the undercurrent of rivalry between the relative merits of East and West Coast jazz resulted in a certain parsimony among the East Coast gatekeepers of culture in apportioning credit to upstart West Coasters, a tendency that has continued to influence subsequent generations of historians and critics.

But take Harold Land’s The Fox, for example (recently reissued by Craft as an excellent facsimile of the original Contemporary Records LP). On its release in 1960, critic Leonard Feather called it, “an important event.”

It’s a classic album that teams the tenor saxophonist, who had recently partnered Clifford Brown in the Clifford Brown & Max Roach Quintet, with trumpeter Dupree Bolton, a brilliant musician who allowed heroin addiction to ruin his life, but who here plays with the assured mastery and invention of a coming great. A year earlier, Land had debuted on Contemporary with Harold in the Land of Jazz, while Hear Ye! – with bassist Red Mitchell – had Land paired with West Cost trumpeter Carmell Jones, with whom he made several recordings worth tracking down.

Teddy Edwards is another who left a fine legacy from this period on the Contemporary label. Credited with the first recorded bebop solo on tenor saxophone on ‘Up in Dodo’s Room’ (with pianist Dodo Marmarosa for Dial in 1946), he played on Central Avenue for several years. One of the leading tenor saxophonists in Los Angeles along with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray, his albums on Contemporary –Teddy’s Ready, Sunset Eyes, Heart and Soul and Together Again!!!!! – are a good representation of an important talent on his instrument.

Clockwise from top left: Wardell Gray; Curtis Counce; Charles Lloyd, 1964; Curtis Amy

Wardell Gray moved to Los Angeles in 1946, playing clubs along Central Avenue, and was talent-spotted by Ross Russell for his Dial label; ‘The Chase,’ a tenor sax ‘duel’ with Dexter Gordon, became a hit which Joachim Berendt called “one of the most exciting musical contests in the history of jazz,” in his monumental tome, The Jazz Book.

Gray’s double album Central Avenue collects together several sessions, and includes ‘Twisted,’ which Annie Ross subsequently put words to his solo for a vocalese hit. Gray’s seemingly effortless approach to improvisation can be heard with Benny Goodman on Benny’s Bop; Goodman, a man not noted for dishing out compliments, thought Gray “wonderful.” Claimed by drugs and playing Las Vegas at the time, he died of a heroin overdose in a hotel room, aged just 34; his body was discovered in the desert with a broken neck, an event now only remembered in the noir-ish novels of James Elroy and Bill Moody.

Curtis Amy relocated to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, later signing with Pacific Jazz Records, making some six albums for them, including Katanga!, a powerful album that included the enigmatic Dupree Bolton on trumpet. Subsequently, he became a session musician who’s on countless albums, from The Doors’ The Soft Parade to Carol King’s Tapestry. Inspired by her experience of working with Amy, King wrote the uplifting ‘Jazzman,’ from Wrap Around Joy in his tribute. But it was his association with organist Paul Bryant on albums such as Groovin’ Blue and Meetin’ Here for Pacific Jazz he will probably be remembered.

Altoist Earl Anderza barely had time to put his mark on the ledger with Outa Sight (Pacific Jazz, 1962), a debut of immense promise, before succumbing to drug addiction. It is not without some irony that in San Quentin State Prison he was a member of the gaol band alongside Dupree Bolton and Art Pepper. So too altoist Frank Morgan, who also ended up in San Quentin’s prison band. While Frank Morgan, his first album from 1955, had Leroy Vinnegar, Wardell Gray and Conte Candoli on it, it wasn’t until 1985 he retrieved his career, thanks to his Contemporary release Easy Living. A formidably gifted player, The New York Times said he was “a leading figure in the jazz revival of the late 1980s, a living reminder of bebop’s durability.”

On the Central Avenue scene there was no shortage of top-notch rhythm sections and very able pianists such as Elmo Hope, Carl Perkins, Jack Wilson, Hampton Hawes (to whom Bill Clinton gave a Presidential pardon when he was again in prison for drugs offences), and from 1960 (check out his Contemporary releases) jazz legend Phineas Newborn Jr. There were also some remarkable drummers, not least Billy Higgins, Frank Butler and Lawrence Marable.

But two of the most in-demand bassists of the great and good of the West Coast jazz scene were Leroy Vinnegar and Curtis Counce. Both had impeccable time, the ability to lift a band with an irresistible sense of swing, perfect intonation and a full, round tone. Counce was the bassist of choice on several Shorty Rogers albums, on Stan Kenton’s Cuban Fire!, and for Shelly Manne, Maynard Ferguson and many others; yet equally at home on arranger Lyle ‘Spud’ Murphy’s 12 Tone Compositions and Arrangements on Contemporary, as well as the advanced experimental concepts of Teddy Charles and Jimmy Guiffre. His own albums include You Get More Bounce with Curtis Counce with its memorable cover art; Carl’s Blues and Exploring the Future, both with Harold Land, Carl Perkins and Frank Butler on drums.

Leroy Vinnegar made the descriptor ‘walking bass’ all his own, earning him the nickname ‘The Walker’. Bassist of choice for André Previn’s trio, whose My Fair Lady album for Contemporary was not only a hit, but numbers among the best-selling jazz albums of all time. The list of great West Coast albums on which Vinnegar features goes on and on, but under his own name he recorded Leroy Walks! with Teddy Edwards, Gerald Wilson, Vic Feldman and Carl Perkins, and Leroy Walks Again!!, once more with Edwards and Feldman in the line-up.

While Ornette Coleman left for New York to fame and glory, Prince Lasha (a childhood friend of Coleman) on flute and alto and Sonny Simmons on alto had been experimenting with free jazz several years before Coleman’s celebrity broke. Almost unknown today, their album The Cry (a recent Craft reissue of the original Contemporary LP) is a classic from 1962 as is Firebirds from 1967, both good illustrations of how being in the wrong place at the wrong time ensures that you are not only bypassed by history, but you don’t even get a look in.

That, with one or two exceptions, is the fate of the black LA jazz scene of the 1950s and 1960s.

This feature originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Jazzwise – Subscribe to Jazzwise today