Roots Report: Stormy Monday

Wallow in nostalgia (the current iteration of existence approaching peak inanity, your other option would be curling up in a ball in a dark corner) strolling down Central Avenue through the electro-pages of a Los Angeles book excerpt.

From the late 1910s until the mid-1950s the neighborhood surrounding Central Avenue was the heart of Los Angeles’s African American community. Restrictive housing laws and a web of oppression confined artists, doctors, ship welders, and jazz legends to a narrow strip three miles south of downtown. Proximity bred creativity and a scene of tremendous creativity developed. It was here that swing and bebop transformed into R&B and eventually became rock and roll.

For nearly fifty years, jazz legends like Charlie Parker and Lester Young passed through the neighborhood while budding local legends like Dexter Gordon and Charles Mingus took copious notes before setting off on careers of their own. The scene peaked during World War II, expanding to the newly formed Bronzeville neighborhood (formerly Little Tokyo) and offered swinging sounds 24 hours a day to appeal to defense industry employees who worked the nightshift. The scene became so popular that LAPD crackdowns became commonplace in an attempt to dissuade Hollywood stars like Orson Welles and Humphrey Bogart from “slumming it."

(How things work: Sean J. O'Connell thinks & types, a music video listicle is made, we read about it elsewhere, you get to snap your fingers to the devil-rhythms w/ the merest click of a finger.)

The rootsiest selection (Better version than embedded at Los Angeles, also.)Bonus entirely unavailable at Los Angeles despite this:

When he recorded it in 1942 under his own name, honking saxophonist Illinois Jacquet drove the performance into a ribald frenzy that was a touchstone for the rapid evolution towards rock and R&B that would follow.

Entirely available:Plus which The Penguins, Nat "King" Cole & "Open The Door, Richard".

[Sean J. O'Connell's Los Angeles's Central Avenue Jazz (Arcadia Publishing), the story of Los Angeles’s contribution to the development of 20th century popular music, came out on May 26 and is available online and at local bookstores.]