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Postwar Los Angeles - Central Avenue and Watts

© Barney Quick

On any given night in the late 1940s, you could drive south on Los Angeles' Central Avenue and hear the music of such jazz and jump titans as Buddy Collette, Charles Mingus, Wynonie Harris, Big Jay McNeely, Joe Liggins and Johnny Otis. These wild sounds would waft from such venues as the Lincoln Theater, the Club Alabam, the Down Beat, and Jack's Basket Room (which featured fried chicken and biscuits by the basket). When you got all the way out to Watts, you could check out Little Harlem and The Barrelhouse. The Avenue was the place for good times, fast life and hot music.

Southern California experienced explosive growth in the early years of the twentieth century for a number of reasons. Industries such as agriculture, shipping, manufacturing, tourism and entertainment attracted a variety of Americans to Los Angeles, San Diego, Bakersfield, and smaller communities.

Central Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares running north and south through the Los Angeles area, underwent changes through the various decades of the twentieth century that reflected demographic and cultural shifts. Clusters of black population and musical activity sprang up and spread southward from downtown. During World War II, jobs in the munitions plants in the area lured many blacks from points east. Their disposable income created a market for nightclubs and new musical acts.

As late as the 1920s, Watts had been an isolated little village out at the end of the Avenue. Many streets were unpaved and people raised their own chickens. During the war years, the area melded into greater Los Angeles.

Jordan and Jefferson, two high schools that served Avenue neighborhoods, produced some of the greatest names in jazz and rhythm & blues. Art Farmer, Etta James, Charles Mingus, and the McNeely brothers, among many others, passed through their halls.

One of the key figures in the development of the postwar Avenue scene was Bardu Ali, the leader of the house band at the Lincoln Theater in the mid-1940s. In the 30s, while in New York as guitarist in Chick Webb's orchestra, he had discovered the teenage Ella Fitzgerald. Now, as the Lincoln Theater's musical director, he continued to have an eye for talent. In 1943, he employed Charles Brown, a pianist and singer in the smooth, subdued style popularized by Nat Cole. Brown went on to fame with Johnny Moore and his Three Blazers, cutting such cool blues classics as "Driftin' Blues" (1945) and "Black Night" (1951). Ali became the manager for Johnny Otis, a veteran of the territory-band circuit who took over the house band at the Club Alabam. The two men started the Barrelhouse in 1948.

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