Lifestyle
There’s a jazz renaissance happening in Los Angeles. Why now?
From top to bottom: Bobby Hutcherson, Dexter Gordon, Esperanza Spalding, Abbey Lincoln, Herbie Hancock and Charles Mingus.
(Getty Images)
Backstage at the Blue Note L.A., Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter’s widow, Carolina, have come, along with me and a friend, to see Esperanza Spalding between sets one late summer Sunday. The club is new and the dressing room feels more humane than most, like a hotel banquet room. Esperanza makes an altar on the vanity and prepares the space for chanting, a prayer meeting but more unapologetic, ritualistic and communal. We make an impromptu jazz orchestra in clipped Sanskrit, and my mind wanders to the first time I heard this Lotus Sutra, when Tina Turner performed it on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” explaining that it’s how she got into her transcendent mode when she still lived with Ike in Inglewood — her means of escaping him in spirit before she ran away physically. When she finally left, she hid from Ike at Wayne Shorter’s home. With my mind on Turner, I do transcend; I feel so emboldened I could leave anything behind in peace after the session. On the way to the car, we pass Turner’s star on the Walk of Fame. Think it not strange; one perfect improvisation leads to another, jazz music is a way of life, collective improvisation is — one note calls to another, one star lights another. One runner in need of sanctuary clears another’s path, and every jazz club is half house of worship and rebellion that way.
There’s an ongoing jazz renaissance in Los Angeles, one loosely rooted in the genre’s prematurely and cyclically proclaimed death — the same way the city’s celebrities tend to become franchises in the afterlife, worth more dead than alive. Jazz haunts with debts owed to its creators, and has a knack for revivals, collectives, new venues in the old forms, and stalwart clubs revivified by benefactors and grant funding. The West Coast Blue Note to complement the one in New York’s West Village opened on Sunset Boulevard last August, enticing tourists and supper club enthusiasts. Leimert Park’s World Stage just received substantial Mellon funding. There are musicology programs, like the one at UCLA helmed by Herbie Hancock, and local hip-hop producers like Madlib (nephew of a jazz trumpeter) and the Alchemist who have been sampling and looping jazz records until they’re part of a canon beyond themselves.
Why there is renewed interest in the genre now is the question. What about the ecosystem or nervous system of Los Angeles is baiting jazz music out from its malleable shadow into a renewed prominence and even granting it rank in the clout economy? I think it has to do with the genre’s ability to orient and organize social life through collective improvisation, the fact that hip-hop, now in its 50s, is aging out of the night club and needs to highlight its proximity to jazz to reinvent aspects of its image as more subdued and inviting, less reminiscent of Diddy parties and more chanting wholesomely with elders backstage. Ultimately, the desire for a new jazz age is a wish for a new national identity as glamorous and unassailable as old Hollywood. Jazz is diplomatic yet just elitist and gatekept enough to feel like it belongs to the state and the people alike, it’s democratic with hints of classist rhetoric in some of its spheres and jazz is Black music, but that has never stopped borderline-racists from appropriating and loving it.
Jazz lore is concentrated in New York, Chicago and New Orleans, however, and even finds Paris, Antibes, Milan and Tokyo before it settles into the elements of its reputation that include L.A.-born, -raised or -influenced players and scenes. As is common for Los Angeles, the sense of exile and wasteland here makes it an overlooked frontier, a place where new worlds incubate undetected and experts are mistaken for philistines in the glare of year-round sunshine and casualness conflated with lack of rigor. L.A. and its music scenes tend to be fervently, rigorously casual — daylight blinds the spotlight as the preferred illumination for concerts and parties. And we would be right to laugh or clap back more often, retaliating against those towns that take themselves too seriously. If we had a public transportation system that didn’t induce depression, alienation and self-loathing and meaningfully breached the seemingly willful segregation covenants between neighborhoods and zones here, you could take a jazz tour of L.A. that would be heartbreaking in its range. As it is, the durability and versatility of a Los Angeles jazz consciousness depends as much on real estate as on fans and musicians; it’s as territorial and precarious as the land, which burns, trembles or courts dysfunction on a whim indiscriminate of season and somehow remains photogenic and certain of its appeal. There are awards season, fire season and season of the witch, and beneath the intersection of Kendrick and Flying Lotus, of laid-back rap and half-hippie psychedelia, jazz is each season’s encrypted soundtrack, it scores our city.
A roll call of local jazz heroes raised here: There are Charles Mingus and Eric Dolphy in Watts, coming of age together. There’s Dexter Gordon, son of a Black doctor who treated Duke Ellington whenever he was in L.A. One Christmas, Ellington and Dexter’s dad had plans to meet at the Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue, then the city’s primary jazz mecca, a West Coast version of Manhattan’s 52nd Street, lined with venues and shops carrying an attitude that matched the textures of the music. Dr. Gordon didn’t show; he died that night of a heart attack. Dexter went from sheltered son of a doctor to brooding child hipster who left home early to tour with big bands. There is the It Club, owned by a Black gangster and visited by everyone from Miles to Coltrane to Monk, who recorded an album there. There’s Hampton Hawes, born in L.A. the same year as Dolphy, imprisoned for heroin possession after serving in Japan and eventually pardoned by Kennedy. His style on the piano carries the relaxed tension of a man for whom syncretism comes naturally, East and West, sun and sorrow. Then, there’s Abbey Lincoln, escaping to Los Angeles to pursue theater and film alongside music. There’s Dial Records, founded by Glendale-born Ross Russell, which recorded Charlie Parker and Django Reinhardt. There’s vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson, trumpeter Don Cherry, and Ornette Coleman, who came through L.A. and worked as an elevator operator while developing bands with locals like Bobby Bradford. I interviewed Bradford a couple months back and he emphasized how modest their band-building had been. Conversations during day jobs at department stores led to woodsheds and studio recordings.
American Jazz musician Ornette Coleman (1930–2015) plays saxophone as he performs onstage at the University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois, May 1982.
(Steve Kagan/Getty Images)
Portrait of American blues singer Ella Fitzgerald. She is shown posing in a studio in a sequined dress. Undated photo circa 1940s.
(Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
There was less glamour in the way of the making of an avant-garde in L.A., less of a hip reputation at stake, so that these bands ended up innovating more than those in New York in some cases. Horace Tapscott built a whole hyperlocal arkestra exemplary of this freedom. And there’s Chet Baker’s sound, there’s Ella Fitzgerald returning to Beverly Hills, Miles in Malibu, who also delivered his final performance at the Hollywood Bowl. L.A. eventually became a refuge for those who became too famous or comfortable elsewhere, as it still is now. But most of the jazz world ended up moving in the other direction, fleeing to New York and Paris and never looking back as if chasing elite romance, and this was as valid an impulse as chasing the sun. Decades passed, some L.A.-reared jazzmen died young or in middle age, and then the exodus yielded a return, not always physical, but in the spirit of relentlessly laid-back improvisers who refuse to feel inferior to their East Coast counterparts.
In the belly of a whale at a jazz venue in Little Tokyo, early 2014, I gathered with Fred Moten, Kima Jones and others to memorialize Amiri Baraka a week or so after his death. I was visiting from New York at the time, Fred lived here then and taught at UC Riverside, and I emailed the owner of the Blue Whale explaining that we should be on the East Coast at Baraka’s funeral but because we were here, we had to do something to celebrate him, it was urgent. The owner, Joon Lee, responded in kind and gave us a Monday night to improvise our grief; we read Baraka’s poems to one another and told stories. It’s what he might have done if stranded in Los Angeles on the week of his death, or what he would have joined us to do, and had, while alive. A few years later, having moved back to L.A., I went to Blue Whale to see Jason Moran with his band, and it felt close to being back at the Village Vanguard hearing them, close to a real night out. In 2021 Blue Whale closed after the year in the dark we’d all had, leaving jazz in the city barren and institutionally driven. Clubs nationwide were folding, but in L.A., if one or two music venues went under, it meant monopoly by Goldenvoice-owned spaces and well-intentioned hipster havens like Zebulon, gentrifying both neighborhoods and music.
At Zebulon I can see a Black jazz performance and be one of three Black people in the audience. At World’s Stage you can see local acts with a Black crowd but fewer out-of-town groups are invited because it’s exceedingly expensive to fly a band out and lodge them for days for shows. At Catalina’s, an older crowd with less current tastes convenes. At Hollywood Bowl, you have to be ready for an Event, not just a concert or show and not quite a festival. At Sam First, you’re so far into the Westside it feels conniving and like a tech monster might hold you hostage until you give up all your data. At the new Blue Note, you’ll see blockbuster acts in the jazz world but be rushed out to make room for the next set’s crowd as if on a ride called jazz at an amusement park. The wayward party “Jazz Is Dead” has turned the hype of that phrase into a brand that angers so many of the genre’s elders and angels, to sell jazz’s death and displacement back to you as big concerts with legends like Stanley Cowell, Azymuth and Sun Ra’s Arkestra.
The true renaissance is annexed to hidden places and in our collective will to excavate them: house and private parties, venues that go under the radar and book jazz avant-gardists sans fanfare, archival interest in jazz migration to and from Los Angeles, and the fact that more young people want to find ways to hear jazz music in defiance of how they’re told to access it — in backyards and nontraditional venues. The venues are like decoys, real estate ventures that would find a way no matter the acts or genre, it turns out. I cannot be visited by the ghost of Tina Turner by way of Herbie Hancock, Esperanza and the Lotus Sutra while scrolling, and nothing in the live sets will be identical to what’s on their albums even if they play the same songs in name. What’s really making a comeback with unlimited momentum is our collective will toward experiences that can only happen live, which is what makes jazz important beyond any institutional, cultural or regional capture. In a city that feels rigid with concern about its own image projection, jazz is the only music that demands we abandon script.
American jazz musician Don Cherry (1936–1995) plays a pocket trumpet at a World Music Institute ‘Improvisations’ concert at Symphony Space, New York, New York, June 8, 1991.
(Linda Vartoogian/Getty Images)
Tracy Morgan, left, and Daniel Radcliffe star in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.
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Tracy Morgan, as a presence, as a persona, bends the rules of comedy spacetime around him.
Consider: He’s constitutionally incapable of tossing off a joke or an aside, because he never simply delivers a line when he can declaim it instead. He can’t help but occupy the center of any given scene he’s in — his abiding, essential weirdness inevitably pulls focus. Perhaps most mystifying to comedy nerds is the way he can take a breath in the middle of a punchline and still, somehow, land it.
That? Should be impossible. Comedy depends on, is entirely a function of, timing; jokes are delicate constructs of rhythms that take time and practice to beat into shape for maximum efficiency. But never mind that. Give this guy a non-sequitur, the nonner the better, and he’ll shout that sucker at the top of his fool lungs, and absolutely kill, every time.
Well. Not every time, and not everywhere. Because Tracy Morgan is a puzzle piece so oddly shaped he won’t fit into just any world. In fact, the only way he works is if you take the time and effort to assiduously build the entire puzzle around him.
Thankfully, the makers of his new series, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, understand that very specific assignment. They’ve built the show around Morgan’s signature profile and paired him with an hugely unlikely comedy partner (Daniel Radcliffe).
The co-creators/co-showrunners are Robert Carlock, who was one of the showrunners on 30 Rock and co-created The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Sam Means, who also worked on Girls5eva with Carlock and has written for 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt.
These guys know exactly what Morgan can do, even if 30 Rock relegated him to function as a kind of comedy bomb-thrower. He’d enter a scene, lob a few loud, puzzling, hilarious references that would blow up the situation onscreen, and promptly peace out through the smoke and ash left in his wake.
That can’t happen on Reggie Dinkins, as Tracy is the center of both the show, and the show-within-the-show. He plays a former NFL star disgraced by a gambling scandal who’s determined to redeem himself in the public eye. He brings in an Oscar-winning documentarian Arthur Tobin (Radcliffe) to make a movie about him and his current life.
Tobin, however, is determined to create an authentic portrait of a fallen hero, and keeps goading Dinkins to express remorse — or anything at all besides canned, feel-good platitudes. He embeds himself in Dinkins’ palatial New Jersey mansion, alongside Dinkins’ fiancée Brina (Precious Way), teenage son Carmelo (Jalyn Hall) and his former teammate Rusty (Bobby Moynihan), who lives in the basement.
If you’re thinking this means Reggie Dinkins is a show satirizing the recent rise of toothless, self-flattering documentaries about athletes and performers produced in collaboration with their subjects, you’re half-right. The show feints at that tension with some clever bits over the course of the season, but it’s never allowed to develop into a central, overarching conflict, because the show’s more interested in the affinity between Dinkins and Tobin.
Tobin, it turns out, is dealing with his own public disgrace — his emotional breakdown on the set of a blockbuster movie he was directing has gone viral — and the show becomes about exploring what these two damaged men can learn from each other.
On paper, sure: It’s an oil-and-water mixture: Dinkins (loud, rich, American, Black) and Tobin (uptight, pretentious, British, practically translucent). Morgan’s in his element, and if you’re not already aware of what a funny performer Radcliffe can be, check him out on the late lamented Miracle Workers.
Whenever these two characters are firing fusillades of jokes at each other, the series sings. But, especially in the early going, the showrunners seem determined to put Morgan and Radcliffe together in quieter, more heartfelt scenes that don’t quite work. It’s too reductive to presume this is because Morgan is a comedian and Radcliffe is an actor, but it’s hard to deny that they’re coming at those moments from radically different places, and seem to be directing their energies past each other in ways that never quite manage to connect.
Precious Way as Brina.
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It’s one reason the show flounders out of the gate, as typical pilot problems pile up — every secondary character gets introduced in a hurry and assigned a defining characteristic: Brina (the influencer), Rusty (the loser), Carmelo (the TV teen). It takes a bit too long for even the great Erika Alexander, who plays Dinkins’ ex-wife and current manager Monica, to get something to play besides the uber-competent, work-addicted businesswoman.
But then, there are the jokes. My god, these jokes.
Reggie Dinkins, like 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt before it, is a joke machine, firing off bit after bit after bit. But where those shows were only too happy to exist as high-key joke-engines first, and character comedies second, Dinkins is operating in a slightly lower register. It’s deliberately pitched to feel a bit more grounded, a bit less frenetic. (To be fair: Every show in the history of the medium can be categorized as more grounded and less frenetic than 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt — but Reggie Dinkins expressly shares those series’ comedic approach, if not their specific joke density.)
While the hit rate of Reggie Dinkins‘ jokes never achieves 30 Rock status, rest assured that in episodes coming later in the season it comfortably hovers at Kimmy Schmidt level. Which is to say: Two or three times an episode, you will encounter a joke that is so perfect, so pure, so diamond-hard that you will wonder how it has taken human civilization until 2026 Common Era to discover it.
And that’s the key — they feel discovered. The jokes I’m talking about don’t seem painstakingly wrought, though of course they were. No, they feel like they have always been there, beneath the earth, biding their time, just waiting to be found. (Here, you no doubt will be expecting me to provide some examples. Well, I’m not gonna. It’s not a critic’s job to spoil jokes this good by busting them out in some lousy review. Just watch the damn show to experience them as you’re meant to; you’ll know which ones I’m talking about.)
Now, let’s you and I talk about Bobby Moynihan.
As Rusty, Dinkins’ devoted ex-teammate who lives in the basement, Moynihan could have easily contented himself to play Pathetic Guy™ and leave it at that. Instead, he invests Rusty with such depths of earnest, deeply felt, improbably sunny emotions that he solidifies his position as show MVP with every word, every gesture, every expression. The guy can shuffle into the far background of a shot eating cereal and get a laugh, which is to say: He can be literally out-of-focus and still steal focus.
Which is why it doesn’t matter, in the end, that the locus of Reggie Dinkins‘ comedic energy isn’t found precisely where the show’s premise (Tracy Morgan! Daniel Radcliffe! Imagine the chemistry!) would have you believe it to be. This is a very, very funny — frequently hilarious — series that prizes well-written, well-timed, well-delivered jokes, and that knows how to use its actors to serve them up in the best way possible. And once it shakes off a few early stumbles and gets out of its own way, it does that better than any show on television.
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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Andy Richter has found his place.
The Chicago area native previously lived in New York — where he first found fame as Conan O’Brien’s sidekick on “Late Night” — before moving to Los Angeles in 2001. Three years ago, he moved to Pasadena. “Now that I live here, I would not live anywhere else,” he says.
There are some practical benefits to the city. “I am such a crabby old man now, but it’s like, there’s parking, you can park when we have to go out,” Richter says. “The notion of going to dinner in Santa Monica just feels like having nails shoved into my feet.”
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
But he mostly appreciates that Pasadena is “a very diverse town and just a beautiful town,” he says.
For Richter, most Sundays revolve around his family. In 2023, the comedian and actor married creative executive Jennifer Herrera and adopted her young daughter, Cornelia. (He also has two children in their 20s, William and Mercy, from his previous marriage.)
Additionally, he’s been giving his body time to recover. Richter spent last fall training and competing on the 34th season of “Dancing With the Stars.” And though he had no prior dancing experience, he won over the show’s fan base with his kindness and dedication, making it to the competition’s ninth week.
He hosts the weekly show “The Three Questions” on O’Brien’s Team Coco podcast network and still appears in films and TV shows. “I’m just taking meetings and auditioning like every other late 50s white comedy guy in L.A., sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.”
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
7:30 a.m.: Early rising
It’s hard for me at this advanced age to sleep much past 7:30. I have a 5 1/2-year-old, and hopefully she’ll sleep in a little bit longer so my wife and I can talk and snuggle and look at our phones at opposite ends of the bed, like everybody.
Then the dogs need to be walked. I have two dogs: a 120-pound Great Pyrenees-Border Collie-German Shepherd mix, and then at the other end of the spectrum, a seven-pound poodle mix. We were a blended dog family. When my wife and I met, I had the big dog and she had a little dog. Her first dog actually has passed, but we like that dynamic. You get kind of the best of both worlds.
8 a.m.: Breakfast at a classic diner
Then it would probably be breakfast at Shakers, which is in South Pasadena. It’s one of our favorite places. We’re kind of regulars there, and my daughter loves it. It’s easy with a 5-year-old, you’ve got to do what they want. They’re terrorists that way, especially when it comes to cuisine.
I’ve lived in Pasadena for about three years now, but I have been going to Shakers for a long time because I have a database of all the best diners in the Los Angeles metropolitan area committed to memory. There’s just something about the continuity of them that makes me feel like the world isn’t on fire. And because of L.A.’s moderate climate, the ones here stay the way they are; whereas if you get 18 feet of winter snow, you tend to wear down the diner floor, seats, everything.
So there’s a lot of really great old places that stay the same. And then there are tragic losses. There’s been some noise that Shakers is going to turn into some kind of condo development. I think that people would probably riot. They would be elderly people rioting, but they would still riot.
11 a.m.: Sandy paws
My in-laws live down in Long Beach, so after breakfast we might take the dogs down to Long Beach. There’s this dog beach there, Rosie’s Beach. I have never seen a fight there between dogs. They’re all just so happy to be out and off-leash, with an ocean and sand right there. You get a contact high from the canine joy.
1 p.m.: Lunch in Belmont Shore
That would take us to lunchtime and we’ll go somewhere down there. There’s this place, L’Antica Pizzeria Da Michele, in Belmont Shore. It’s fantastic for some pizza with grandma and grandpa. It’s originally from Naples. There’s also one in Hollywood where Cafe Des Artistes used to be on that weird little side street.
4 p.m.: Sunset at the gardens
We’d take grandma and grandpa home, drop the dogs off. We’d go to the Huntington and stay a couple of hours until sunset. The Japanese garden is pretty mind-blowing. You feel like you’re on the set of “Shogun.”
The main thing that I love about it is the changing of ecospheres as you walk through it. Living in the area, I drive by it a thousand times and then I remember, “Oh yeah, there’s a rainforest in here. There’s thick stands of bamboo forest that look like Vietnam.” It’s beautiful. With all three of my kids, I have spent a lot of time there.
6:30 p.m.: Mall of America
After sundown, we will go to what seems to be the only thriving mall in America — [the Shops at] Santa Anita. We are suckers for Din Tai Fung. My 24-year-old son, who’s kind of a food snob, is like, “There’s a hundred places that are better and cheaper within five minutes of there in the San Gabriel Valley.” And we’re like, “Yeah, but this is at the mall.” It’s really easy. Also, my wife is a vegetarian, and a lot of the more authentic places, there’s pork in the air. It’s really hard to find vegetarian stuff.
We have a whole system with Din Tai Fung now, which is logging in on the wait list while we’re still on the highway, or ordering takeout. There’s plenty of places in the mall with tables, you can just sit down and have your own little feast there.
There’s also a Dave & Buster’s. If you want sensory overload, you can go in there and get a big, big booze drink while you’re playing Skee-Ball with your kid.
9 p.m.: Head to bed ASAP
I am very lucky in that I’m a very good sleeper and the few times in my life when I do experience insomnia, it’s infuriating to me because I am spoiled, basically. When you’ve got a 5 1/2-year-old, there’s no real wind down. It’s just negotiations to get her into bed and to sleep as quickly as possible, so we can all pass out.
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