Los Angeles's jazz roots: the Willis H. Young family. (2024)

The historical and etymological origins of jazz are rather murky, although the average fan associates the history with New Orleans and the Deep South and often with African Americans. As it happens, the word "jazz" first appeared in print in a California newspaper in 1923. The term (1) itself was traditionally linked with a style of dance and sometimes with sex. Analysis of the history of jazz in Los Angeles reveals how closely the city was linked with its development and popularization and that it played a singular role in the acceptance of the music in Hollywood's film industry, in southern California night clubs, and in its spread throughout the world. As the Louisiana patriarch of his extended family, Willis Handy Young (1872-1943), bandleader and professor of music, played a signal role in jazz history and its development in Los Angeles. (2)

Studies that focus on key cities--New Orleans or Chicago--fail to appreciate the considerable impact of jazz on the hinterlands and on the West Coast, or, for that matter, the effects of these regions on the evolution of the music. Significantly, jazz did not simply migrate north to Chicago, it radiated from a number of urban centers at about the same time--late in the second decade of the twentieth century.

EARLY LOS ANGELES JAZZ

Despite the usual emphasis on New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York in histories of jazz, Los Angeles and San Francisco assumed roles of singular significance in the music's origins and evolution. Typically, a New Orleans citizen reached the West Coast, found a great demand for jazz and sent for enough of his fellow residents to field a band. For example, at least one member of the Original Creole Jazz band, one of the three bands singled out as the creators or purveyors of New Orleans jazz, could be found in Los Angeles as early as 1907, and the band was actually formed on the West Coast and documentation indicates they performed at least as early as 1911. Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz, included Los Angeles and cities along the Pacific Slope in his wide-ranging travels. He ran shows at the Cadillac Cafe in downtown Los Angeles and in San Francisco and Vancouver in the World War I years. "Jelly Roll" Morton returned to Los Angeles late in 1940. He died the next year and was buried in a Los Angeles cemetery. (3)

The number of jazz personalities in Los Angeles within the first decade of the music's history is impressive. (4) Morton played with "Bricktop" (Ada Smith) at the Cadillac on Central Avenue near Seventh Street before she became the owner of the world-renowned Parisian nightclub that carried her nickname; this red-haired entertainer reached Los Angeles in 1917. (5)

New Orleans trombonist Edward "Kid" Ory arrived in 1919, then formed his Creole Jazz Band with Crescent City bandsmen Thomas "Papa Mutt" Carey, Alton Redd, Ed "Montudi" Garland, and Wade Whaley. Ory discovered the demand for the music was such that he sent for Joe "King" Oliver's Creole Jazz Orchestra to fill one of his engagements in 1921. (6) (Oliver's band also played in the Bay Area in early 1922.) Indeed, the first authentic records of Crescent City jazz were made by Kid Ory's Creole Orchestra and by Ory with singers, in Los Angeles in 1922; this was also the first recording of the music by African Americans, just five years after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the white group whose records first popularized the music. (7)

The producers of this session, John and Benjamin "Reb" Spikes, opened a music store at 1203 Central Avenue in 1919; the versatile brothers wrote songs, published music, and provided bands, sometimes "four or five bands in a night," for clients such as Warner Brothers. They also led and performed in bands; saxophonist Reb Spikes was featured in both Los Angeles and San Francisco jazz bands as early as the World War I years. In 1921 the two brothers performed over radio station KFI, then they made records for the soundtracks of Warner Brothers movies. They made a "jazz" film and registered it through Warner Brothers only eleven days after the copyright was filed for The Jazz Singer, thought to be the first sound motion picture, in 1927. By 1930, Reb Spikes ran a restaurant next door to the Dunbar Hotel with Curtis Mosby. (8)

Jimmy Rushing came to California from Oklahoma City to perform in 1923 for movie stars in the Quality Night Club and in another resort, the Jump Steady, which he described as "a rough place." Rushing stayed for about two or three years and then returned to join the Oklahoma City Blue Devils and the Benny Moten and Count Basle bands. (9)

Tessie Patterson managed the Humming Bird Cafe, formerly the Quality Care, at 1143 East Twelfth, in 1924, and both clubs featured local singers, musicians, entertainers, and quality food. Curtis Mosby, an enterprising musician from Kansas City, led the Dixieland Blue Blowers and, by 1929 or 1930, opened nightclubs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, evidencing the close musical connections between the two California metropolises. He ran two Apex Clubs--one for each city. The famous Club Alabam succeeded the southern California Apex--"the mecca for music lovers and devotees of the dance" around 1932. The Club Alabam occupied the site of the old Club Araby, which itself preceded the Apex. It was owned by the Rizzo Brothers; Mosby managed it, however, and bought it around 1940. It was located at 4015 S. Central Avenue (later 4215 when the city renumbered the streets) in the lower level of a building next to the Dunbar Hotel. (10)

When the Young family moved to Los Angeles in 1930, they encountered a local jazz milieu nearly two decades old. It had been accelerated by the advent of sound in movies, an area where the Spikes brothers pioneered; by the filming of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong performances; and by the developing swing movement in the mid- and late 1930S. Willis H. Young was one of many Black Louisianans who made Los Angeles home. Like so many of the others, he did not move directly to the West Coast when he left the Deep South; he brought his family in stages that included a year's residence in Minneapolis in 1927 and then stints in Albuquerque and Phoenix. The family's nomadic existence ended when they settled in at 1651 Essex Street south of downtown Los Angeles in the early 1930s. (11)

PROFESSOR WILLIS H. YOUNG

Willis Young was born in 1872 in the bayou country of Lafourche Parish about fifty miles west of New Orleans; his father, Jacob, worked as a blacksmith and cooper just outside of Thibodaux, the parish seat. Martha, his mother, was an African Methodist Episcopal missionary who traveled spreading the gospel. Willis was the fourth child and third son in a family of five children who grew up in the aftermath of the Civil War. They were literate, beneficiaries of the public schools introduced during Reconstruction, and while his older brothers followed the father's line of work as artisans and farmers, Willis and his older sister Mary became teachers.

How Willis Young learned music is unclear, but he became thoroughly knowledgeable of music traditions: he played every instrument available, learned to notate and arrange music, taught voice, and led carnival-minstrel as well as dance bands. The designation of "professor"--an honorific term applied to Black band leaders who were steeped in musical traditions and earned their living this way--was one he shared with such notables as song writers and arrangers W. C. Handy (known for "St. Louis Blues"), and, years later, Henry "Buster" Smith ("One O'Clock Jump"). (12)

Willis Young was a full generation older than Los Angeles jazz pioneers such as Kid Ory (b. 1886), King Oliver (b. 1885), and "Jelly Roll" Morton (b. 1892). (13) Young had moved to Los Angeles to retire at the age of fifty-eight, having ridden the crest of the jazz age as leader of bands on the carnival-minstrel and Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuits, and at dances in the Deep South, Upper Midwest, and Great Plains regions.

The very name New Orleans Strutters, one of the professor's outfits, represented Young's efforts to capitalize on and honor this city's music tradition. Young was photographed with the band and its entourage, which included singers, dancers, and blackface minstrels, at the Lexington, Kentucky, State Fair in 1924. The makeup of the band in this photograph is noteworthy: The professor's wife, Sarah (c. 1895-1943), was on bass or baritone saxophone; his oldest son, Lester (1909-1959), on tenor saxophone; his daughter, Irma (1912-1993), who also played saxophone, sang, and danced; and his youngest son, Lee (born 1914), was a singer and dancer who appeared in blackface and top hat. Two nephews played saxophone and trombone. The New Orleans Strutters also included a number of adolescents whom he picked up along the way after promising their parents that he would teach them music and look after them as if they were his own children. (14)

Before their westward migration, the professor and his family became accustomed to living and traveling in style. The Ellington and Calloway bands toured in their own train coaches in the 1930s, but Professor Young had clone so a decade earlier. His daughter recalled: "Papa had a stateroom ... and with a stateroom, you could cook and live there, too. The whole train. A whole car ... [with] berths upper and lower, so my two brothers slept together and I slept by myself. Mama and Papa down ... in the berth, downstairs." (15) This was also a way of avoiding the restrictions of Jim Crow in the South; Professor Young was known for hating racial discrimination, and this probably played a role in his choice of Minneapolis and Los Angeles as places to reside as the jazz decade came to a close. (16)

The style in which the professor lived was also indicated by the fact that, when on their own--apart from the carnival-minstrel trains--his bands traveled by automobile from one location to another. Professor Young could not drive, but always found someone to perform this task. He usually had a chauffeur; Otto "Pete" Jones, the band's trombonist and later Irma's husband, did much of the driving in the Midwest. In Los Angeles, his driver was Napoleon Whiting, Irma Young's stage partner.

Shortly after the Young family and its entourage arrived in Los Angeles, the professor went into gear and placed his teenage son, Lee, in the Apex as a dancer and singer. The Labor Board, however, cracked down and removed the minor from the night club scene. (17) In 1933, Irma Young was advertised on an Apex billing with Ernestine Porter. (18) The following year the professor and his family lived at 1706 S. Central Avenue, next door to the Black musicians' union at 1710 (outside of New York City, unions were segregated until the early 1950s); this proximity underlined the professor's close ties to the southern California music scene. (19)

In 1936 the Young household at 1706 S. Central consisted of three generations: Willis and Sarah; his widowed sister Mary ("Aunt Mamie") Hunter; his daughter Irma's two children, Martha and Crawford ("Brownie"); and the professor's grandchildren from an earlier marriage, Lucille, Alvin, James, Esther May, and Martha Ann Tolbert. Every member of the household was involved in music and the professor's activities with the exception of his sister, Aunt Mamie ("Sugar Pie" to the grandchildren), a church mother who sang at Ward African Methodist Episcopal. His wife, Sarah, recalled as a "very very aristocratic lady," from Texas, played banjo with them and sewed costumes for the dramatic presentations at a club on Main Street. After leaving the household, Irma continued her involvement in music, playing the role of "Bo-Peep," one of the three sisters in The Hot Mikado, a jazz version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, when it was staged in Los Angeles. Lee Young, who left the household during the swing era, played drams in the Los Angeles bands of Papa Mutt Carey, Buck Clayton, Eddie Barefield, and Fats Waller. (20)

Willis Young was a stern disciplinarian, a moral exemplar with no vices except, perhaps, for his love of sweets and suits of clothes. He was always dressed up, although he wore "one of these fancy robes" around the house. He neither swore--the closest was an occasional "dadgummit!"--drank, nor smoked. While he was religious, the dominating passion in his life was "music, music, music ... music." In spiritual matters, Aunt Mamie presided, and she was also exempt from the rule that everyone in the house was to learn an instrument. His religiosity became more apparent when, after a stroke, he joined Father Divine's Universal Peace Mission movement. His authority was such that "when he converted to Father Divine," his grandson explained, "the whole family was converted." Previously, the family "played at most twice a week [at St. Paul's Baptist Church], now we played almost every night in a different Father Divine mission." (21)

Professor Young's musical tastes were far-ranging-the--bands he led had played all kinds of popular music. The selections he presented in church were "not of the church, really, but not necessarily of the world either," his grandchild, Lillian Tolbert, recalled. He preferred cornet, the typical New Orleans band leader's instrument, but played whatever was needed in his band or anyone else's at the time. James Tolbert claimed "my grandfather played jazz," and another grandchild, Martha Young, argued that he insisted on the importance of that swing quality characteristic of all good African American music wherever and whenever he conducted his band, in church or for dancers. The professor also listened to radio broadcasts of the swing bands of the era--Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Lunceford, and Count Basie. (22)

He was the archetypal music professor, one who lived and breathed music, turning fans and family into musicians, arranging compositions and writing music while carrying on a conversation about something else. In a rare recollection by Lawrence Douglas Harris, a musician interviewed by the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, Harris described the professor as one who "could write an arrangement while in conversation, writing the parts before he wrote the 'cue sheet' [score], which he might write after he had written the parts." (23)

When he left his studio where he wrote music at 1706 S. Central, Professor Young invariably wore a suit, shirt, tie, and hat. He had more than a hundred suits and a number of silk shirts. A soft-spoken gentleman, he "always knew exactly what to say." (24) The professor would "walk all the way downtown," and, "although we had very little money," somehow he frequented the barbershop every day to have his daily shave and his head massaged (he was bald). (25)

His business acumen was considerable. A grandchild reminisced, he "was a manipulator as far as music was concerned and the money." His connections were such that he obtained a job for "Aunt Lillian," his daughter from a previous New Orleans marriage, at Gold's Furniture Store after she migrated to Los Angeles in 1936. Also, "we never felt [the effects of the Depression] stomach-wise, because there was always something on the table." At that time "a lot of people were in the bread lines ... [but] we always had something to eat." Although the professor liked to cook, his wife prepared dishes of what later would be called "soul food"--"greens, ham hocks, neckbones, chicken, sweet potato pies, lemon pies, [and] peach cobblers." During hard times she cooked "the best [pork] skins you ever had in your life" or boiled skins with red beans and rice. (26)

The professor's sense of dignity, self-confidence, and persuasive powers permitted him to "win [people] over confidentially," to recruit teenage students for his bands, and to procure jobs for himself and his family in Los Angeles during the Depression. He also knew how to talk to the "hustling people," such as when he was a school teacher in Bogalusa, Louisiana, and needed money for the school. He was "absolutely the autocrat of all times" in his South Central household and on the East Side, as the area was known. One of his grandchildren explained, "you could not be in his house and not play some instrument." Some of them learned more than one so they could fill in as needed. He was kind of a "roving consultant" for the W.P.A., James Tolbert explained, who would upbraid derelict musicians on the spot. Once in the park he approached a band member, and "I saw him ... snatch this guy's horn out of his hand and tell him about the proper care of his instrument." (27)

Professor Young's discipline concerning music education was unbending. When he stopped that musician in the park, "he took his handkerchief and spit, and took a little section of the man's bell of the horn, and just shined it ... and showed him the contrast.... Then he told him how his shoes weren't shined!" James Tolbert maintained, "to my grandfather, all of that was a part of the musicianship."

His ability to convince salesmen to provide him with musical instruments became the stuff of legend in family oral traditions. Lee Young recalled that his father never had any trouble providing him with an instrument even though, as a youngster, he frequently expressed his desire to switch. James Tolbert contended, "my grandfather was the kind of guy who could go down into the music stores with no money, and the proprietor would already have told [salesmen] ... 'Do not let this man have any credit.'" Professor Young's winning ways and silver tongue "would mesmerize them," and as a result, anyone studying under him had "a very good instrument." This business experience and confidence served the family well; in 1936 he was able to provide comfortable accommodations for several grandchildren when they joined the homestead on South Central. (28)

His musical versatility and leadership abilities permitted him to work as a band leader for all occasions. "Papa always did have some kind of a band because he used to play for a burlesque show down on Main Street.... The Mills Brothers ran it." Furthermore, he could be counted on to fill in whenever a band needed another musician on short notice. While Professor Young was never recorded, he led bands in the local park on Twenty-second Street off of Central Avenue, where "they had the Sunday afternoon things, [when] ... the older musicians get together over at Ralph Schneider's ... and also [at the] Twenty-second Street playground." Then too, he conducted the St. Paul Baptist church choir; several choir members were from his household. When his grandchildren from an earlier New Orleans marriage came to Los Angeles to stay with him, they, of course, came under his tutelage, serving as the nucleus of the family band and the choir. "We all sang," the boys learning trumpet and trombone, and the girls studying piano and often also playing saxophone. (29)

Willis Young "taught an awful lot of kids in the neighborhood ... on Central Avenue," charging fifty cents a lesson. "He would have taught them for nothing," but "he just thought that you should pay for something if you get it." Knowing of Willis Young's favorite dishes and his sweet tooth, neighbors might exchange a chicken dinner or "a six-layer cake if they didn't have the money" for music lessons for their prospective student. In this respect, Professor Young was like a "country doctor, by that meaning they all knew Papa" on South Central Avenue and on the East Side. (30)

When he donned his "music hat," so to speak, his grandchildren addressed him as "professor," and they knocked quietly at his studio door when they were ready to demonstrate mastery of their lesson. While he worked on the band's arrangements during the day, they attended the local schools, but, James Tolbert added, "he didn't tolerate any lagging behind [after] school. You came straight home."

Once home they came under the professor's regime. When they walked in the door, he handed them each a piece of music "every single day." This was something he had prepared for them, "some new arrangement of an old song, or sometimes a completely new song." He "was very formal," and "absolutely intolerant about mistakes." When the unlucky pupil made "even the slightest mistake [in music] ... don't even try to apologize ... Just go back to your room." Moreover, "nobody in the house could eat until everybody had their part." After dinner and chores, "everybody came together ... and the whole family would play [their respective parts]." (31)

Martha Young, Irma's daughter, studied piano under the professor and reminisced about the unique musical setting next door to the union local building. "There was hardly anybody musician-wise that ever came to the musicians' local that didn't come over and see Professor, which was Papa. Everybody," she insisted, "had been to that house." The young pianist, Nat Cole, who recorded with Lester in 1942, "came to the house so many times...." Musicians practiced at the union regularly, and her room "was upstairs right across from the rehearsal room," so "I saw Art Tatum from sitting in my window with my feet on the roof.... I saw Lionel Hampton." She recalled the house as being "full of a lot of childhood memories of my cousins ... of the good times, of the music that we played [in] the little family band," which had jam sessions every Friday. (32)

Irma and Lee Young reported that as children they used a special language, one partly derived from the carnival-minstrel and TOBA circuits, and they also spoke some variant of pig Latin. While they recalled that this way of talking was considered nonsensical by Professor Young (though he probably understood every word), its usage in the Young household seemed unique to at least one of Basie's bassists. (33)

Rodney Richardson visited the Young household in the early 1940s; Richardson was with Basie at the time, and during one of his visits he realized that Lester Young "spoke his family's language." He explained they used English words, "but if you had never heard them talk you wouldn't know what they were talking about." However, "it was good listening." "Mother and father and cousins.... Every one of them. Sisters, brothers, cousins, ... All of them talked that way. Unusual." This observation suggested how much three generations of Youngs were a part of show business and jazz and how its argot affected their family life. (34)

Martha Young's testimony corroborates Richardson's observations to some degree; she explained, "all kids usually can speak pig Latin, but my mother and her brothers had a language that couldn't nobody understand, especially when us kids were around." She emphasized how "didn't nobody understand it but them," adding, "Papa understood it, but we never did." Furthermore, "they never did teach it to us"--this last statement contradicting Richardson's, but it clearly indicated something creative in language was going on in the Young household, particularly among Lester, Irma, and Lee, whose childhoods were spent on the road. Her mother, she explained in winter of 1982, and "Uncle Lee still do it sometimes, just to see if they can do it." A professional pianist and later a band leader herself, she emphasized "I have no idea what it [their manner of speech] is, I don't even know what they call it." (35)

LOS ANGELES IN THE SWING ERA

By the onset of the swing era, usually dated from Benny Goodman's national acclaim after a very successful venue in Los Angeles in 1935, highly proficient musicians made the city home. Increasingly they originated in the Midwest and Southwest; they included Eddie Barefield and Le Roy "Snake" Whyte, (Iowa), Nat "King" Cole (Illinois), Art Tatum (Ohio), Don Byas (Oklahoma), Herschel Evans (Texas), and Buck Clayton (Kansas). When Clayton returned after a two-year stint with his band in Shanghai, his plans to go on to New York were arrested by the allure of the Los Angeles jazz scene. "I noticed quite a few changes in Los Angeles" during his years away, so he reorganized his former band "and had no trouble at all getting the guys together." (36)

Aside from Lionel Hampton's big band, with its "Flying Home" hit, California has not been known for producing the kind of band or sound typically treated in the history of jazz. Ted Gioia's West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960 begins with the end of the war; the earlier years are "beyond the scope of this book." (37) There are, for example, from other urban sites, the Chicagoans, the Kansas City bands, and New York and east coast aggregations such as Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington. On the other hand, San Francisco is closely connected with the New Orleans revival of the World War II era, when Kid Ory and Mutt Carey joined other New Orleans citizens to reintroduce the roots of the music. In the process, Bunk Johnson was brought out of retirement from Louisiana's rice fields and rode the tide of the Crescent City renaissance. While not known for their name bands, Los Angeles musicians manned eastern and southwestern bands and contributed to the popularity of the music overseas and in films. (38)

In the early 1930s, whites opened a jazz club in nearby Culver City to rival the Club Alabam. Sebastian's Cotton Club attracted the city's movie stars and celebrities who wished to dine, dance, and hear the latest jazz in the "most lavish and best attended" spot in the city; it was said to be the "equal of modern Las Vegas" with its club acts, floor shows, and gambling rooms in the rear. Marshal Royal, whose family came to Los Angeles before the Youngs, recalled "all the movie people of Hollywood came to Sebastian's Cotton Club at one time or other." "Just about everybody that you could think of that was in big time show business came [there] because it was the biggest nightclub in the world, sizewise, and it had first-class entertainment." By 1937, however, it felt confident enough to release its Black band, led by Les Hire, and to make its bid for "the class of people ... not particularly seeking a colored show." It initially made its reputation, however, as a venue for the latest in jazz. (39)

Ellington, Armstrong, and Calloway came to Los Angeles to make films. The reception that the city accorded Cab Calloway the year after his movie short, "Cab Calloway's Hi-de-ho," indicated how much the music was familiar to Angelenos and considered to be an important part of its official culture. The band leader visited the West Coast in late 1935 and was "welcomed ... with honors befitting a king." When he, his wife, and fifteen band members departed from Union Station, they were followed by the city's crowds "in a long parade headed by a police motorcycle escort." (40)

The reception that he received from the city council was perhaps unparalleled in the city's history. When he entered the chambers of that governing body, he was asked to sing, but demurred, pointing out there was no piano. Finally, he complied with the request when his band agreed to second him, and they performed their hit song, "Minnie the Moocher." "It was the most unusual occurrence that has ever happened in the council chambers of Los Angeles." (41)

Los Angeles included jazz bands in its parades as well as in city council chambers because entertainment was so much a part of its life's blood and also because of the connections of many of its African American citizens with New Orleans. In 1937 the Labor Day parade through the African American district was an important occasion. Local 767 of the American Federation of Musicians participated in the parade and "really stole the show." Composed of thirty-three musicians, they played six trumpets, six trombones, ten saxophones, three bass horns, one bass drum, three snare drums, and four guitars. Former Calloway bandsman Eddie Barefield, on clarinet, led the band. As they marched from Pico to Broadway, "crowds [went] wild to the tempo of their swing music." (42)

Approaching city hall, "the band renewed its fervor, played possibly with more swing than ever before ... a genuine jam session." The city's mayor "stood up in his seat to wave official welcome ... inviting them to the reviewing stand." Indicative of the city's appreciation of the music, a genuine free-spirited revelry followed. The band "literally 'went to town' there and kept up the gay sessions for hours until the whole front of Los Angeles's city home and its otherwise dignified city fathers were shimmying and hi-de-hoeing as Central Avenue habitues might have done." (43)

Thus in 1936, when Lester, the professor's oldest son, visited the Los Angeles household, having traveled by car from Kansas City to visit his ailing father, he found a rich Los Angeles jazz scene. At this time he was a member of the Count Basle Band that went on the road to Chicago and New York later in the year. He came again to the West Coast with the Basle band in 1939 and then, in 1941, settled there, having left Basie.

Lester's visits were a very special occasion in the family and also in the Los Angeles jazz community. To the family, he was the exemplar of their music traditions and certainly Professor Young's best-known pupil. When his niece, Martha, saw Lester with the Basle band in the newsreel at the Lincoln Theater at Twenty-third and Central, she raced home to inform the others. "I came home excited about seeing Uncle Bubba [Lester] in the newsreel and [Professor Young] went to the show, just to see the newsreel." She reminisced, "when Uncle Bubba was coming home ... he was [to the nieces and nephews] a king." They got to stay up late with him to play pokeno. A pianist who often played for the choir and for church teas, Martha "was ... too [much in] awe of Lester ... [to] let him hear me play." (44)

When he arrived late that summer in 1936, prior knowledge of "that ace of tenor men" impressed the locals, because "the other night at the Breakfast Club the cats decided to get together and have a real old eastern jam session in [his] honor," reported Freddy Doyle, a columnist for the California Eagle and a musician as well. The session included saxophonist Eddie Barefield, with whom Young had played in Minneapolis in the late 1920s, trombonist Tyree Glenn, pianist Art Twyne, and "some ofay [white] tenor man who was really out of his class," along with Young. As Doyle recounted, "those cats really had a ball until the boss of the place made them break it up just as I was getting in the groove." He concluded that "while it lasted it was tops." (45)

Besides informing readers of the local jazz scene, Doyle employed the swing slang, jive talk, or hip (hep) vocabulary popularized by Cab Calloway and New York Amsterdam News columnist Dan Burley as well as Lester Young. Earlier that year Doyle greeted his readers with "Hi, Gang, everything is mellow and mild so 'latch' on and swing with me." The next year, reporting on the Basle band's successes at New York's Roseland, he reminded his readers of Young's Breakfast Club performance: "I was fortunate to hear this 'cat' beat out some fine horn and believe me he had all the 'stuff' that I had been hearing of." Doyle seemed confident that anyone who read the column would not only understand the slang he used but would, in fact, prefer this language for the specific subject at hand. (46)

Doyle's column indicated that both swing music and swing slang were as current in Los Angeles as in the more famous jazz cities. Like the music of Calloway and Armstrong, the jive vocabulary and syntax were spread by families as well as by individuals, and it seems that Young's special talent in the area of swing slang or jive talk was spurred by his siblings and their lives as child performers.

Lester Young, Count Basie's premier saxophonist, went to Los Angeles for other reasons than simply to visit his sick father; he appears to have been authorized to find saxophonists for the band at a crucial time in its evolution--shortly before it headed for Chicago and New York City. Caughey Roberts, replacing Buster Smith, and Herschel Evans filled out the Basie reed section. Basie's idea of two tenors led to his placing Evans opposite Young in the reed section, but Buck Clayton had two tenors in his Los Angeles band two years earlier. Both Roberts and Evans were well known in Los Angeles for playing with local musicians and, in the case of the latter before his migration, several southwestern bands in Oklahoma, Texas, and Kansas City. (47)

Then too, other Basie band members were familiar with Los Angeles, trumpeter Buck Clayton having hoboed there from Parsons, Kansas, in the late 1920s while he was in high school. He found a congenial jazz milieu, perfected his craft, befriended a number of Los Angeles musicians, and returned a year or two later to take up residency and lead a band. In 1934, Clayton received word of the need for a jazz band in Shanghai, rounded up a group of west coast musicians, and headed for that port city where he performed and lived for two years before returning to file U.S. (48)

Clayton, Evans, and Roberts were Los Angeles residents before joining Basle, which went on to become one of the exemplars of the Kansas City swing tradition beginning in the late 1930s and continuing to this day. It is also noteworthy that when Basie needed a sax section leader in the 1950s, he turned to Los Angeles's alto saxophonist Marshal Royal, who was the straw boss for the band for a number of years. Clayton first heard of Lester Young from Evans, who "sometimes ... would call up [on the telephone from] the Reno Club in Kansas City while Basie was playing on the stand and hold the telephone receiver up to my ears so that I could hear the band swinging." (49)

Moreover, Los Angeles was the birthplace of the first really successful touring jazz review, Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP), which started at the Philharmonic Auditorium in 1944. It was frequently allied with progressive causes; the first JATP was in the tradition of these progressive politics: It was a benefit for the Sleepy Lagoon case in which several Mexican-American youth were charged with a murder. Granz's motto concerning himself and the musicians stressed equality: "Wherever we go, we go together"--in other words, first-class treatment all the way for everybody. This meant nondiscrimination clauses in JATP contracts with Southern bookers so that they would not have to perform before segregated audiences down South. (50)

From the vantage point of the Young family, however, JATP was partly their doing, and this is said without taking any credit from Norman Granz, the sparkplug and financier of the traveling review which included in different years Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Roy Eldridge, Ella Fitzgerald, and others. Both Lee and Lester Young were active in the Los Angeles jazz scene in 1941 and 1942 in a band led by the younger brother. They performed at Billy Berg's, the Trouville, and the Capri at La Cienega and Pico before traveling to the Hickory House in New York City in mid 1942. (51)

At that time musicians liked to jam in clubs--Minton's in New York City was famous for this activity, as was the Trouville in Los Angeles--Lee and Lester were among them. Nat Cole often played piano with Lee, Lester, George "Red" Callender, and Hubert "Bumps" Myers. From time to time Lionel Hampton and Jimmy Blanton, Ellington's bassist, stopped by. Tenor saxophonist Don Byas, who had known the Youngs in the southwest in the 1920s, and another tenor player made four on this instrument (with Lester and Bumps) one Sunday, and "on the next Sunday," Lee Young recalled, "we had Willie Smith, Johnny Hodges, and two other alto players." Eventually Granz, who befriended Young, took an interest in forming jam sessions. "That's how the Jazz at the Philharmonic [originated] ... I started giving Norman names of the guys to call and Norman took it a step further." Granz "went to the different clubs, and he used to have sessions at the 331 Club on a Monday night, he'd have one at the Trouville on Sunday afternoon, and then he'd have a session someplace else. And I'm certain," Lee Young averred, "this is how he came up with Jazz at the Philharmonic." Its successes were so phenomenal that in the 1950s it toured Europe as well as the United States yearly and occasionally visited the Far East. (52)

During a gig in New York, Lee and Lester's band broke up when they received word of their father's death early in 1943; Lee Young left to take care of the funeral arrangements and family matters, and he then remained in Los Angeles. His subsequent role in films indicated how important his skills were to the film industry. The Spikes brothers' contributions were noted above, but the Young brothers were also remarkable in contributing to the success of jazz in the film industry. Lee played drums for movies, as in Louis Armstrong and Mae West's Every Day's a Holiday, and taught Mickey Rooney how to handle the drumsticks for Strike Up the Band. He also obtained a contract with Columbia for three-and-a half years; he was the first African American to hold a position as a "regular studio staff orchestra member." (53)

Los Angeles's Black musicians regularly provided the soundtrack for jazz orchestras in films, and when they had the stature of an Ellington or Calloway, they made appearances as themselves in these films. Trombonist Lawrence Brown, who lived in Pasadena as a youngster, played obbligato behind the comedienne Mae West as she sang "My Old Flame" in Belle of the Nineties, a film featuring Ellington's orchestra. Brown also played in the Marx brothers's A Day at the Races and in other films. One of the most famous associated with jazz featured Lester Young; this was Gjon Mili's art film, Jammin' the Blues, which was nominated for an Academy Award. (54)

While MGM was producing lavish film musicals with all-Black casts such as Cabin in the Sky (1942) and Stormy Weather (1943), Norman Granz made the ten-minute short with minimal staging, and no audience evident aside from the performers (there were, however, some "exotic" camera effects and movie stars watching off screen.) His objective was to recreate a jam session, to give a casual air to the whole affair, one where musicians played, sang, and danced for themselves after hours. It was an art film instead of just an audio recording of JATP.

Lester Young's image was frozen for an eternity in the eyes of jazz fans and film buffs as the film begins with his famous pork-pie hat viewed from above so that all you can see in the spotlight are two abstract, concentric circles. After the credits unwind, the hat tilts back to reveal the face of the tenor saxophonist filling the screen. Young is featured in close-ups and in profile throughout, winning him a place in jazz film history. The particular angle of one shot--from the floor up to the seated subject--has been reproduced with other tenor saxophonists such as Dexter Gordon.

Leonard Feather described Jammin' the Blues in 1945 as "the best intimate jazz ever recorded for a movie." He characterized its music as "the best small band music I heard on the coast." Rather than have dialogue and some vague semblance of a plot, Jammin' the Blues was "nothing ... but well-played, well-presented, well-recorded music." More than thirty years later, David Meeker characterized the film as "probably the most famous jazz movie of all." Barney Kessel, the guitarist in the film, commented that--nearly forty years later--he respected its artistry and authenticity even more with each showing. (55)

Willis Handy Young did not live to see this famous film, as he died the year before it was shot. His remarkable influence continued after his death in the activities of his children, grandchildren, and various students--some of whom were quite famous, including Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams; Ben Webster, who was a pianist before coming under Young's tutelage; and songwriter Clarence Williams. Few of the name pupils were linked with Los Angeles jazz, however.

In the southern California metropolis, the Youngs continued to play a remarkable role, branching out from music to entertainment law and record production. Lee Young stopped playing drums in 1962 and started producing records of artists as diverse as the Edwin Hawkins Singers to Pharaoh Sanders. His son, Lee, Jr., became a lawyer for Motown, and his grandson, Wren Brown, made a popular recording with pianist Billy Childs and starred in a television series. Other grandchildren and great-grandchildren continued the tradition in churches as well as in classical music arenas and entertainment law.

Aspects of Los Angeles's jazz history are remarkable for the light they shed on the music's evolution and popularization. For one thing, the early emergence of the music in Los Angeles, in the very first years of its known existence, must tell us something about the richness of Black culture as well as the Los Angeles scene. Before World War I, there were only seven thousand African Americans residents, and the tumultuous reception of the Original Creole Jazz Band and those of Kid Ory and King Oliver suggests how dynamic and vital the music tradition was outside of New Orleans. In other words, you only needed a few Black people as musicians or as members of the audience to perpetuate Black music culture in general and jazz in particular at the beginning of the century.

Another significant aspect is the versatility of the idiom and the musicians. These performers were often well trained, familiar with different kinds of music, and who were, besides, arrangers, leaders, and businessmen--unlike the untutored savant still found in stereotypes of early jazz musicians. The fact that the new idiom was visible in so many different forms--on records, sheet music, in night clubs, dance hails, speakeasies, in films, in clothing styles, and in slang--heightened its influence and increased its popularity as it became synonymous with a way of life instead of simply music or good times.

Racial discrimination played a role in the dissemination of jazz, and nothing illustrates this more clearly than Los Angeles. White musicians received higher wages than Black musicians, and the union local did not challenge this order, so African Americans played in the less than respectable places because it was better than no job at all. Other victims of racial discrimination found safe havens in these jazz joints. Black musicians, for example, predominated in the taxi dance joints where one paid for the privilege of dancing with a "hostess" for a dime a dance. Filipinos, Chinese, and Mexican patrons, barred from the expensive all-white clubs by racism as well as the expense, became accustomed to the music and preferred African American musicians. Filipinos were among the first to adopt the Zoot Suit, a dress phase in the jazz world of the early 1940s; Mexican Americans followed the music of Ellington, Calloway, and Basie, and to this day, so-called Latin or salsa bands are powerful repositories of African and African American rhythms, harmonies, and instruments. In other words, familiarity with Black music culture accelerated the acculturation of colored peoples in southern California. (56)

The early introduction of jazz in the movies was evident in Los Angeles's history and in the specific nature of the movie colony's domination of the city's life. From Hollywood, films of Armstrong, Ellington, Calloway, and Young traveled around the world, and they are seen to this present writing, lost ones occasionally surfacing. The fact that bands left Los Angeles for Asia and the islands of the Pacific, as well as Europe, is no less remarkable an instance of the effects of the city upon the world's music culture.

Ellington trombonist Lawrence Brown commented on the unique nature of the jazz scene in Los Angeles, and he was struck even more by its uniqueness after he had traveled and played in the east. When he saw New York's famous Cotton Club, he remarked, "I wasn't too impressed with the Cotton Club because to me Sebastian's Cotton Club out in Los Angeles was much more glamorous." Contrasting the two Cotton Clubs, he found the New York one very plain, while "in Los Angeles," he averred, "everything was just glamorous." After pointing out that "everything that went on in the music business in those days was really terrific," he contrasted the east with the west: "the western part of the country had a completely different atmosphere than the eastern part." Brown concluded, "it was real honey out west.... Things were reasonable, things were cheap." (57)

To single out Willis Handy Young is not to claim that there were not other families similar to his in Los Angeles. Another Louisianan, Alton Redd, played with Willis Young, and his daughter, Vi Red& performed with Irma Young and later on the television special "Roots." Her aunt, Alma Hightower, was a moving force in the family and the community, a music teacher who taught generations of Angelenos." (58)

The Woodman family is one that also involved generations of musicians, and the younger ones played in "The Greatest Little Band in the World" in Watts in the 1930s; the father, William B. Woodman, Sr., was every bit as much the disciplinarian as Willis Young. One of his sons, Britt Woodman, became very well known, and his other sons played in swing bands. (59) Marshal Royal also came from a family of musicians--his father was a professor as was his uncle, his father's brother; Marshal's brother Ernie was also a musician; they migrated from Texas and Oklahoma to Los Angeles around World War I. Marshal was section leader in Basie's sax section during the 1950s. (60)

Study of Willis Young and his family does reveal, however, the role of such music professors in Los Angeles's jazz history and the singular importance of family in the perpetuation and development of Black music culture. Such music teachers embodied the values expressed so eloquently by Buddy Collette's grandmother, who paid for his music lessons and expressed disappointment when he told her he was forsaking piano to take up saxophone: "I wanted you to be a great pianist, I wanted you to travel to Europe, I wanted you to do all those things.... Your music will take you all over if you would learn it and be something." (61) She and music teachers like her succeeded far more than they could ever conceive in directing a vibrant, powerful musical tradition that has taken its purveyors around the globe.

(1) Peter Tamony, "Jazz: The Word, and Its Extension to Music," Americanisms: Content and Continuum 23 (December 1968): 13, on the term's first appearance in print in the San Francisco Call Bulletin (March 6, 1913); the term was used not in a musical context, but in that of a baseball training camp, where it meant "to speed things up."

(2) Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); the author has not found any dictionaries of jazz that list Willis Handy Young. On the Black Los Angeles music scene, Tom Reed, The Black Music History of Los Angeles--Its Roots (Los Angeles: Black Accent on LA Press, 1993); and Bette Yarbrough Cox, Central Avenue--Its Rise and Fall (1890-1955) including the Musical Renaissance of Black Los Angeles (Los Angeles: BEEM Publications, 1993); also, Lawrence Gushee, "New Orleans-Area Musicians on the West Coast, 1908-1925," The Black Music Research Journal, 9, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 1-18. For one of the first works on New Orleans jazz, Frederick Ramsey and Charles E. Smith, Jazzmen (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939).

(3) Lawrence Gushee, "How the Creole Band Came To Be," Black Music Research Journal 8, no. 1 (1988): 83-100; Will Johnson and his Creole band were in Los Angeles in 1907, P. 93; by the end of 1913, four band members were in Los Angeles, p. 94. On Morton on the West Coast, Phil Pastras, Dead Man Blues: Jelly Roll Morton Way Out West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Also, see Gushee, "A Preliminary Chronology of the Early Career of Ferd 'Jelly Roll' Morton," American Music 3 (Winter 1985): 389-412 and Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1950), 159ff.; Arnold Genthe, As I Remember (New York: Reynal and Hitchco*ck, 1936), 175-76; Chris Ellis, "Some West Coast Bands of the 1920s," Storyville 21 (February/March 1969): 84-85; Philip F. Elwood, "The Role of San Francisco in Jazz History," Metronome 78 (August 1961): 11-15; George Schuyler, Black and Conservative: The Autobiography of George S. Schuyler (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1966), 49; Tom Stoddard, jazz on the Barbary Coast (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1998 [original 1982]); and Douglas Henry Daniels, Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 144-45, on ragtime and jazz in San Francisco in the early twentieth century. Hal Holly, "West Coast Jazz," Down Beat 22 (March 9, 1955): 5. Frank Driggs and Harris Lewine, Black Beauty, White Heat: A Pictorial History of Classic Jazz, 1920-1950 (New York: William Morrow, 1982), 182; the Driggs book is a good example of one that approaches the music city by city. Al Rose and Edmond Souchon, New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984) and Samuel B. Charters, Jazz: A History of the New York Scene (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962) are examples that focus on one city.

(4) Rose and Souchon, New Orleans Jazz, noted the number of Crescent City musicians who went to Los Angeles, pp. 93-96, 103, l05, 107, 110, 113, and 123; they included Jimmy Noone, Frank Pashley, Lionel Reason, Alton Purnell, Johnny St. Cyr, Cornelius "Zue" Robertson, and Arthur "Bud" Scott.

(5) Bricktop (with James Haskins), Bricktop (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 64; Driggs and Levine, Black Beauty, 182.

(6) Driggs and Levine, Black Beauty, p. 183; Spikes believed that Adam "Slocum" Mitchell introduced crying and whining in jazz by imitating these sounds on clarinet; he was credited with inspiring King Oliver and others to play similarly; Reb Spikes, Jazz Oral History Program interview, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, Reel 1, transcript p. 25 (hereafter, interviews from this collection are referred to as JOHP).

(7) Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (1921-1956) (Los Angeles: Rhino Records, 1999), compact disc set 75872, disc one, features "Ory's Creole Trombone" and "Creole Song" (and other selections) by Ory's Sunshine Orchestra and Ory's Creole Band, respectively. The trombonist recorded with Louis Armstrong on his Hot Five recordings in 1926 and then played with King Oliver; in 1930 he returned to Los Angeles to rejoin Mutt Carey; "Kid Ory's Creole Trombone" was popularized on an Armstrong Hot Five recording; John Chilton, Who's Who of Jazz: Storyville to Swing Street (New York: Time Life Records Special Edition, 1978), 248-249.

(8) The Sunshine label of the Spikes brothers was designed by the famous Black architect, Paul Williams: "he was crazy about music." Benjamin "Reb" Spikes JOHP, Reel 4, P. 5; Reel 1, pp. 31-32; and Reel 3, p. 33; Reel 4, pp. 3-4 and 109-110 for information on their jazz film; on Paul Williams, Reel 4, pp. 23, 129. "Reb Spikes--Music Maker," Storyville 21 (February/March 1969): 101-103; Reed, Black Music History of Los Angeles, 44. Los Angeles City Directory, 1930, p. 1651; this restaurant has the same address as the Club Alabam. See also John Bentley and Ralph W. Miller, "West Coast Jazz in the 20S," Jazz Monthly 7 (May 1961): 4-7. The vaudeville showman and journalist "Ragtime" Billy Tucker reported on the Los Angeles scene in the California Eagle as well as the Chicago Defender in the early 1920s; see "'Ragtime' Billy Tucker Takes His Follies to Honolulu," California Eagle (June 13, 1924): 8, which reported Tucker taking his show, "Darktown Follies," to Hawaii. On the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, see H. O. Brun, The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977). The landmark Dunbar Hotel was built by the dentist Dr. Alexander Somerville in the 1920S; see Anthony Charles Sweeting, The Dunbar Hotel and Central Avenue Renaissance, 1781-1950 (Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 1992). Bruce M. Tyler, From Harlem to Hollywood: The Struggle for Racial and Cultural Democracy (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992.

(9) Helen McNamara, "Pack My Bags and Make My Getaway: The Odyssey of Jimmy Rushing," Down Beat 32 (April 8, 1965): 22; Douglas Hague, "Jimmy Rushing Tells His Story," Jazz Journal 10 (September 1957): p. 1.

(10) For a contemporary account of Black Los Angeles, "Negro Cities Los Angeles," California Eagle (December 26, 1924): 1. "Humming Bird Cafe Will Have Brilliant Opening Saturday Evening," California Eagle (June 7, 1924): 10. Curtis Mosby was mentioned in the Indianapolis Freeman (July 31, 1915): 5, playing drums at the Lyric Theater in Kansas City, Mo.; in 1931 he celebrated his birthday at the Apex Club # 2 at Grant and Bush in San Francisco's Chinatown, but he refused to reveal his age and explained, "he had been in the night club business for 21 years"; Chicago Defender (July 8, 1931): 5. Marshal Royal discusses Mosby's importance in his JOHP interview, pp. 33-34. Lawrence Brown, JOHP, Reel 3, PP. 6-7 maintained that D. W. Griffith, William R. Hearst, and "everybody ... all those big directors used to frequent the club all the time.... it was a gorgeous life in those days." In 1940, the Los Angeles City Directory, p. 1405, listed Mosby as having a liquor store at 4253 S. Central, a block up from the Dunbar Hotel, and residing at 1167 1/2 E. Forty-second Street. Theo Zwicky, "The Curtis Mosby Story," Storyville 21 (February/March 1969): 87ff; "Club Alabam Cafe," California Eagle (December 22, 1933): 13 and (October 18, 1935): 4-B; Reed, Black Music History of Los Angeles, p. 183. When the Club Alabam reopened Halloween night of 1932, Ernestine Porter staged the floor show and the resort was "full of patrons of both races." "The real fun took place when most of the visitors had drifted on home and entertainers from night clubs began dropping in about 3 of the early crowing." The entertainers named that night were Les Hite, Baby Mack, Mae Diggs, Henry Start, and Flo Washington; Sebastian's Cotton Club sat people at "long ringside tables;" "Club Alabam Opens Again," Chicago Defender (November 19, 1932): 5. Marshal Royal, JOHP, pp. 33-34 and Lawrence Brown, JOHP on Los Angeles in the 1920s; Buck Clayton, with the assistance of Nancy Miller Elliott, Buck Clayton's Jazz World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) and Red Callender and Elaine Cohen, Unfinished Dream: The Musical World of Red Callender (New York: Quartet, 1985) on the Los Angeles jazz scene in the 1930s. Driggs and Levine, Black Beauty, P. 43. "Club Alabam Opens Again," Chicago Defender (November 19, 1932): 5. Dr. David Taylor kindly provided me with the information that Willis Young lived in Minneapolis in 1927, using the city directory to substantiate the family's oral history traditions.

(11) Author's interview with Lee Young (June 16, 1982); Los Angeles City Directory, 1932, p. 2331; Sarah Young (and presumably Willis Young) lived at 9406 Baird Ave. in 1931; Sarah Young, application # 5772 for Examination as Hairdresser and Cosmetician, Secretary of State, California State Archives, Sacramento, Ca. On Lester Young in Los Angeles, see Douglas Henry Daniels, Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester "Pres" Young (Boston, Beacon Press, 2002), ch. 11.

(12) Daniels, Lester Leaps In, ch. 3. Los Angeles City Directory, 1932, p. 2331. Author's interview with Henry "Buster" Smith (August 26, 1982).

(13) Willis was old enough to be the father of Papa Mutt Carey (1892), Sidney Bechet (1897), or Louis Armstrong (1898). It is clear he knew Henry Alien, Sr., Mutt Carey, and Alton Redd; who else he might have known among the Louisianans, such as Kid Ory or Bunk Johnson, remains to be seen. Leonard Feather, The Encyclopedia of Jazz (New York: Da Capo, 1960) was used for these years of birth. Using the U.S. Manuscript Census, Lawrence Gushee, "Would You Believe Ferman Mouton?" Storyville 95 (June-July 1981), pp. 164-166 corrected Morton's year of birth from earlier reports of 1886. James Lincoln Collier, Louis Armstrong: An American Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 20-21 on Armstrong's year of birth. Willis Young was a year older than the famous composer W. C. Handy. Peter Haby, "Oscar 'Papa' Celestin, 1884-1954," Footnote 12 (June-July 1981): 4 claims that Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer, Jr., A Pictorial History of Jazz: People and Places from New Orleans to Modern Jazz (New York: Crown Publishers, 1966 ed.), p. 11, list Willis Young as a member of Henry "Red" Allen, Sr.'s band, but the individual in the photograph of the band does not resemble Professor Young: others have placed Young in this photo, including Martin Williams, Jazz Masters of New Orleans (New York: Macmillan Co., 1967): 258-259. In Whitney Balliett, Such Sweet Thunder: Forty-Nine Pieces of Jazz (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1966): 346, Henry "Red" Allen, Jr., recalls that Young's father "and my father played together in New Orleans."

(14) Lee Young, JOHP interview ; author's interviews with Irma Young (1981, 1984) and Clarence and Leonard Phillips (1983)

(15) Author's interviews with Irma Young (1981, 1984).

(16) Author's interview with Leonard Phillips (1983) and Irma Young (1981, 1984). Information on the Minneapolis location in the Minneapolis City Directory, 1927, p. 948; more information can be located in the Department of Inspections, Office of the Inspector of Buildings (document #3167--"Permit to Wreck Buildings"), Minneapolis, Minn. An Inspector of Buildings form revealed that the house had electricity installed in September 1926.

(17). Lee Anderson, "Lee and Lester, Part 1," The Mississippi Rag 20 (December 1992): 4, Lee Young recounts the Apex experience and his years as a dancer, singer, and musician. most of which seems to come from the JOHP interview.

(18) Club Alabam Advertisem*nt, "Club Alabam Care," California Eagle (December 22, 1933): 13.

(19) Los Angeles City Directory, 1934, p. 1839; Los Angeles City Directory., 1935, p. 2617; author's interviews with Lucille (December 28, 1982), Alvin (February 19, 1983), and James (June 12, 1982) Tolbert. and Martha Young (February 15, 1982), grandchildren of Willis and nieces and nephews of Lester Young.

(20) Author's interviews with Lucille Tolbert, Irma, and Martha Young; see Driggs and Levine, Black Beauty, 191, where Don Byas and Lee Young are in the Barefield band.

(21) Author's interviews with Irma and Martha Young and James Tolbert. St. Paul's Baptist church was at 1385 East Twenty-first, and its pastor was Rev. S. A. Williams; Los Angeles City Directory, 1935, p. 1517.

(22) Author's interviews with Lillian and James Tolbert and Martha Young.

(23) Lawrence Douglas Harris interview (June 6, 1961), William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University', New Orleans; Harris was born in Texas and, like Willis Young, went to Mexico with a carnival band. He played with the professor for about a year (he is uncertain exactly when): Young played saxophone and some piano. Harris recalled the band's name as being related to New Orleans, that it was part of a "stock company." Amos White, in his Tulane interview (August 23, 1958, p. 5), remembered Billy (the professor's stage name) Young playing trombone in the seven-piece orchestra of Arthur and Albert Verrett in Houma, Louisiana, in the winter of 1917.

(24) Author's interview with Clarence Phillips.

(25) Author's interviews with Lillian and James Tolbert and Martha Young.

(26) Author's interviews with James, Alvin, and Lucille Tolbert and Martha Young.

(27) Author's interview with Clarence Phillips; Lee Young, JOHP interview, Reel 5, pp. 3-4.

(28) Author's interviews with Lee Young and James Tolbert.

(29) Author's interviews with Irma, Lee, and Martha Young and Lucille, Alvin, and James Tolbert. The Southern California Music Building was located at 808 South Broadway, Los Angeles City Directory, 1935, p. 1637.

(30) Author's interviews with Lee and Martha Young and James Tolbert.

(31) Author's interview with James Tolbert.

(32) Author's interview with Martha Young.

(33) Author's interviews with Lee and Irma Young.

(34) Dale Smook, "Rodney Richardson Interview, Pt. 1," Cadence 15 (November 1989): 16-17.

(35) Author's interview with Martha Young.

(36) Buck Clayton, Buck Clayton's Jazz World, p-79. Both Barefield and Whyte played with Lester Young in Minneapolis in the late 1920s, and Whyte belonged to Walter Page's Blue Devils with Lester Young--in fact, he claimed he played a role in getting Young to join this Oklahoma City band; author's interviews with Eddie Barefield and Le Roy Whyte.

(37) Ted Gioia, West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960 (New York: Oxford University, 1992), 8.

(38) Floyd Levin, Classic Jazz: A Personal View of the Music and the Musicians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 246-248, 251-254; Austin M. Sonnier, Jr., Willie Geary "Bunk" Johnson: The New Iberia Years (New York: Crescendo, 19771, chronicles the life of one old timer who was part of the revival. Driggs noted this revival in the context of Mutt Carey, Kid Ory, and Bunk Johnson in 1943 in San Francisco, Black Beauty, 196.

(39) Lucinda W. Pennington and William K. Baxter, A Past to Remember: The History of Calver City (Culver City: City of Culver City, 1976). Marshal Royal, JOHP Reel 3, P. 14; "Sebastian's Cotton Club Changes Name; Drops Colored Band, Chorus," California Eagle (July 2, 1937): 4B.

(40) Cab Calloway Arrives for Appearance," California Eagle (October 25, 1935): 5B. David Meeker, Jazz in the Movies: A Guide to Jazz Musicians, 1917-1977 (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1979), # 297. He was probably in Los Angeles to make his 1935 movie short, "Cab Calloway's Jitterbug Party," ibid., #298.

(41) California Eagle (October 25, 1935): 5B. "Cab Calloway Arrives for Appearance."

(42) Fay M. Jackson,"Clarence Muse leads Movie Contingent in Spectacle of Beauty," California Eagle (September 9, 1937): 1. "Cab Calloway Arrives for Appearance." It is interesting to note that paraders costumed as different characters in Black music: "Atwell Rose ... dressed immaculately in morning suit, top hat, spats and cane ... carried a physician's bag marked 'Dr. Cure D. Blues.' In white tails prancing in character of 'Papa Tree Top Tall' was C. B. Johnson--the animation of jazz." "The most colorful Labor Day parade in the city's history" was reported in "Thousands Parade Here," Los Angeles Times (September 9, 1937): part 1, pp. 7 and 26, which mentions the white union as leading off the parade but does not mention the Black union local.

(43) California Eagle (September 9, 1937): 1B.

(44) Author's interviews with James and Lillian Tolbert and Martha Young.

(45) Freddy Doyle, "Musicians and Orchestras," California Eagle (October 9, 1936): 10.

[46] See Cab Calloway and Bryant Rollins, Of Minnie the Moocher and Me (New York: T. Y. Crowell Co., 1976) and Earl Conrad (ed.), Dan Burleg's Handbook of Harlem Jive; A Dictionary of the Colorful Language that Has Emerged from America's Own Music (New York: Dan Burley, 1944); and Douglas Henry Daniels, "Lester Young: Master of Jive," American Music 3 (Autumn 1985): 313-328. California Eagle (July 31, 1936): 10 and (January 29, 1937): 10.

(47) Chris Sheridan, Count Basie: A Bio-Discography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986): 23, 28; in spring of 1937, Roberts left the Basle band because he wanted to return to California, but he rejoined it in 1942, pp. 29, 154; Albert McCarthy, "Basie's Other Tenor: The Herschel Evans Story," Jazz and Blues 1 (September/October 1971): 8-10. Count Basle (as told to Albert Murray), Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basle (New York: Random House, 1980).

(48) Clayton, Buck Clafton's Jazz World, 30-65.

(49) Ibid., p. 81.

(50) Personal communication from Alice McGrath, who worked on the case; "The Granz Stand," Metronome 69 (November 1953), pp. 21-22.

(51) Author's interview with Lee Young; Freddy Doyle, "Swingtime in Hollywood," California Eagle (January 8, 1942): 2B.

(52) Lee Young, JOHP, Reel 4, PP- 6-7.

(53) Author's interview with Lee Young; Valerie Wilmer (as told to), "The Lee Young Story," Jazz Journal 13 (August 1960): 5; Freddy Doyle, "Orchestras and Musicians," California Eagle (February 3, 1938): 10A on what may have been his first studio position; he instructed six-year-old Billy Lee in drumming for a movie role. "Lee Young in Studios," Down Beat 23 (May 20, 1946): 6. In the 1946 Jazz at the Philharmonic in Los Angeles, the two brothers jammed on the bandstand with Charlie Parker--perhaps the last time that they played together; it was recorded: "Jazz at the Philharmonic/ Bird and Pres: The '46 Concerts" (Verve VE2-2516). For several years in the 1950s, Lee Young was music director for Nat Cole and played drums for the pianist-turned-singer.

(54) Lawrence Brown, JOHP Reel 2, p. 14 and Reel 3, P. 6. See Arthur Knight, "Jammin' the Blues, or the Sight of Jazz, 1944," Krin Gabbard (ed.), Representing Jazz (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1995): 11-69.

(55) Leonard G. Feather, "Jammin' the Blues," Metronome (April 1945): 14; "On Coast, You Hop Before You Jump," Metronome (March 1945): 8, 31. Meeker, #955. Author's interview with Barney Kessel October 25, 1983.

(56) James McFarline Ervin, "The Participation of the Negro in the Community Life of Los Angeles" (Master's thesis, University of Southern California, 1931), p. 19; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994):161-182. See also Douglas Henry Daniels, "Los Angeles Zoot: 'Race Riot,' the Pachuco, and Black Music Culture," The Journal of Negro History 82 (Spring): 201-220; Gerald Home, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995).

(57) Lawrence Brown, JOHP Reel 5, P. 10; Reel 3, P. 10.

(58) Author's interview with Irma Young; Shanta Nurullah, "Vi Redd: Interview," Cadence 3 No. 3 (January 1978): 3; Los Angeles City Directory, 1937, p. 921, gave Alma Hightower's address as 1553 East Thirty-third Street.

(59) Buddy Collette oral history interview, Central Avenue Sounds, Special Collections, UCLA Research Library, 1, pp. 4 8ff, 51, 56, 75.

(60) See Marshal Royal, JOHP and Phillip Atteberry, "Marshal Royal: The Virtual Leader," Coda Magazine 263 (September/October 1995): 33-35.

(61) Buddy Collette, 1, p. 27.

RELATED ARTICLE: Central Avenue: "The Brown Broadway".

 "I'm in the land of sunshine, standin' on Central Avenue I'm in the land of sunshine, standin' on Central Avenue I was doin' allright, till I fell in love with you Never had so much sport, babe, anywhere in my life Never had so much sport, honey, anywhere in my life Till I fall in lone with you and found out you were somebody else's wife." (1)

Harry Levette, a columnist for Los Angeles's premier Black newspaper, the California Eagle, defined Central Avenue as "the 'Brown Broadway.'" And indeed from about 1910 to the 1950s, Central Avenue was the thriving lifeline that ran through the heart of segregated Los Angeles's Black community.

In contrast to oppressive conditions in the South and major urban centers in the North and Midwest, Blacks in Los Angeles could find jobs and buy their own homes, although not with the same freedom as European American residents. Confined to a corridor south of downtown Los Angeles by restrictive housing covenants that excluded Blacks (as well as Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican Americans) from buying homes in many neighborhoods, the African American population nonetheless developed economic opportunities in its own community.

Black-owned businesses included the Somerville Hotel (renamed the Dunbar Hotel in 1929), which was one of the finest hotels serving Blacks in the United States. "Big modern office buildings elbowing tumbledown shacks," Levette further described Central Avenue in 1932:

 "Eat shops, in rows--Chicken markets, chicken markets, chicken markets--Missions, Speakeasies, black frocked ministers--Flashily dressed furtive-eyed racketeers ... colored and white children arm in arm, no race hatred yet--An "Amos" lunch room--a "Madam Queen" barbecue stand--Second hand stores, gilded emporiums, colored banks--A wonderful colored life insurance building, colored gas stations--A score of colored drug stores." (2)

Banks, insurance offices, lunch rooms may have catered to residents during the day but it was at night that Central Avenue became a social and cultural magnet for southern Californians of all colors and ethnic groups. Its jazz clubs led musical taste through its influence on the entertainment industry and its contribution of band members to touring ensembles. Central Avenue's music scene weathered Prohibition and the Great Depression in style and boomed during the World War II economic upswing in southern California.

Pressured by a concerted campaign by LAPD chief William H. Parker, nightclubs were raided and closed down. Paradoxically, the relaxing of restrictive covenants in the 1950s led to the breakup of Central Avenue as a focus for the Black community. By then, Central Avenue had become "just another street." (3)

(1) Joe Turner, "Blues on Central Avenue," in Steven Isobardi, "Central Avenue: Where the Jive Was on the Slide," liner notes, Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (1921-1956) (Los Angeles: Rhino Records, 1999).

(2) Clora Bryant, Buddy Collette, William Green, Steven Isobardi, Jack Kelson, Horace Tapscott, Gerald Wilson, and Marl Young, eds., Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 20.

(3) Clora Buant et al., Central Avenue Sounds, 31

Dr. Douglas H. Daniels is a social and cultural historian. He was born and educated in Chicago and received his Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Berkeley. His publications include Pioneer Urbanites: A Social and Cultural History of Black San Francisco (1980) and Lester Leaps In: The Life and Times of Lester "Pres" Young (2002); he translated Charlemagne Peralte: Un Centenaire, 1885-1995 by Georges Michel; and edited (with Sucheng Chan, et al.) Peoples of Color in the American West. His latest book, One O'clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, was published in 2004 by Beacon Press. A version of this paper was delivered at the Routes of the Slaves conference at the University of California, Davis, in 1995.