Undoubtedly the epicenter of the jazz scene in Los Angeles, the Dunbar Hotel was built in 1928 by Drs. John and Vada Sommerville as a place where black travelers could stay in style and comfort. The luxurious hotel soon attracted the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and Billie Holiday. Journeymen jazz musicians hung against the outside wall or in the lobby or cocktail lounge, waiting to catch a break or a glimpse of their heroes.

“That’s my favorite spot on Central Avenue,” saxophonist Jackie Kelso recalled, “that spot in front of the Dunbar Hotel, because that to me was the hippest, most intimate, key spot of all the activity. That’s where all the night people hung out; the sportsmen, the businessmen, the dancers, everybody in show business, people who were somebody stayed at the hotel.” Norman Bowden recalled walking by the hotel as a youth, his trumpet in hand as he walked past his hometown idols. “When I passed in front of the Dunbar Hotel, they’d be hanging around talking,” he remembered. “On my way back from school [trumpeter] Claude Kennedy—he came from Houston—would say, ‘When are you going to give somebody a headache with that horn?’”

The music continued inside the hotel, in The Turban Room piano bar, where  acts like Art Tatum and Gerald Wiggins played. Traveling big bands like Duke Ellington’s band and the Count Basie Orchestra would take over huge swaths of the hotel, rehearsing and partying, with “chicks and champagne everywhere.” Trumpet player Buck Clayton recalled what occurred when Ellington’s band heard their record, “It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” playing on the jukebox in the Dunbar restaurant for the first time:

So much rhythm I’ve never heard, as guys were beating on the tables, instrument cases or anything else they could beat on with knives, forks, rolled-up newspapers or anything else they could find to make rhythm. It was absolutely crazy.

Today, the Dunbar Hotel is known as “Dunbar Village.” It operates as a low-income apartment building for elderly tenants.

By far the most legendary of all jazz venues on the Avenue, this glittering nightclub was located right next to the Dunbar Hotel. In the 1920s and early ’30s, the space was a nightclub called The Apex, and it was run by bandleader Curtis Mosby, “the mayor of Central Avenue.”

“It was the club,” alto saxophonist Marshall Royal recalled. “That’s where the people from Hollywood and Beverly Hills came to go slumming. It was a black-owned place that would have 90 percent white audiences. The blacks didn’t have the money to spend. That was during prohibition, and you had to hide your bottle underneath the table... periodically the federal’s would come in, raid the whole joint, and take everybody to the hoosegow.”

In 1934, Mosby opened the Club Alabam in the same location. In October of that year, Fess White and his Rhythm Gentlemen played the grand opening, with two “smart and snappy floor shows.” Along with dancing and drinks, dinners of fried chicken and Chinese dishes were served. “Club Alabam quickly became the hottest and ritziest nightclub on Central Avenue,” according to Sean J. O’Connell. “Oh God, we had people like Myrna Loy, George Raft; Loretta Young; they were down there all the time,” Norman Bowden remembered. “All the big people came down to Club Alabam.”

Over the years, people like Billie Holiday, Johnny Otis, and Gerald Wilson would perform at the Alabam. Trumpeter Clora Bryant remembered Holiday babysitting her daughter, while she rehearsed on stage. The Alabam also hosted comedians like Moms Mabley, and had a famous chorus line, choreographed by film choreographer Norma Jean Miller. Overseeing all of it was Mosby, a rather shady character who wasn’t big on paying his performers. “They finally caught him and put him in jail for taxes, I think it was,” Bryant remembered. “He still owed me.”

“The Downbeat was the hot spot on the Avenue,” jazz flautist and clarinetist Buddy Collette recalled in Central Avenue Sounds. “Man, it was jumping in 1946.” That year, Collette joined with Charles Mingus, John Anderson, Britt Woodman, Oscar Bradley, Spaulding Givens, and Lucky Thompson to form the short-lived “Stars of Swing,” a lost (they never recorded), fabled all-star group that played at the Downbeat for a short time. . Clora Bryant recalled hearing bebop at the Downbeat for the first time. “This was the first time I’d heard bebop live in L.A.,” she recalled. “I couldn’t figure out what they were doing… I said, ‘My God, what is this?’”

This cramped bar, said to be a regular hangout of gangster Mickey Cohen, would feature numerous jazz savants over the years, including Wardell Gray, the tragic tenor saxophonist who “straddled the swing and bebop periods.” One legendary night, the equally tragic saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker made his return to the stage after a stint in prison in Camarillo. “Everybody was there, man, everybody,” Teddy Edwards told the Los Angeles Times. “It was a night to remember.”

In the post-war era, swing and big band jazz was morphing and changing into the bebop made famous by Charlie “Bird” Parker and Thelonious Monk. Intellectual and improvisational, it developed at places like Jack’s Basket Room, which hosted some of the most famous late-night jam sessions in Los Angeles history.

 “The major place for jamming was the Bird in the Basket,” Clora Bryant recalled. “It was a restaurant. There were tables with the checkered cloths. It wasn’t too big of a bandstand, but the atmosphere was tremendous. It was conducive to jam sessions because everybody came there and they were listeners. They had done their research.”

Regulars would listen for hours as tenor saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray did “battle” with their horns.  ”Most time we’d end up there after a gig,” tenor saxophonist Teddy Edwards remembered, “and we’d play until daybreak. All the different guys—Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon, Charlie Parker, Lucky Thompson, Howard McGhee, Erroll Garner, Hampton Hawes. The list goes on and on.”

Considered the “West Coast Apollo” and designed by John Paxton Perrine, Lincoln Theater was the largest African-American theater (2,100 seats) on Central Avenue. In 1927, Curtis Mosby’s Dixieland Blues Blowers opened the new venue, which would welcome stars including Nat King Cole, Lionel Hampton, and Sammy Davis Jr., as well as large-scale musical productions from New York City. Performing at Lincoln Theater could make or break a career. Big band singer Ernie Andrews started out as the head usher at the theater, soaking up the scene. His career was made when he won a talent contest there, earning the chance to record the hit “Soothe Me.”

“The Lincoln Theater was a big-time place for blacks in town,” alto saxophonist Marshall Royal recalled, “because that was the first theater that was run by blacks in that area. You couldn’t get into that place on Saturdays and Sundays. Just loaded. On top of that, they had probably twelve of the most beautiful black girls in town as usherettes.”

Today, the theater is a church, the Iglesia de Jesucristo Ministerios. It is a city of Los Angeles historic-cultural monument.

The life of the Los Angeles jazz musician often revolved around the headquarters of their local, all-black musician’s union, founded in 1920. “A gathering place for generations of musicians,” according to The Dark Tree, “767 also served as a social and cultural center and offered a range of activities from casual affairs to barbeques and parades.” Not only did the union help jazz musicians get jobs and negotiate pay and contracts, it was also “a favorite hangout for young aspiring artists who wanted to be part of the scene and meet their heroes.” In upstairs rehearsal spaces, young musicians would often simply walk in and listen to superstars like Duke Ellington rehearse. They were  encouraged to ask questions, and occasionally sit in and jam.

“Every black musician in the world would pass by there, slap you upside the head, and say something smart to you,” Horace recounted in The Dark Tree. “Me…and the other young guys were sitting there all the time, during all those years… It was just rich, very rich.”

New Orleans bred bandleader, composer, and pianist Jelly Roll Morton, the “self-proclaimed inventor of jazz,” helped kick-start the Central Avenue scene when he swung into Los Angeles in 1917. The fascinating entertainer and club owner Ada “Bricktop” Smith remembered counseling the irrepressible Morton at Central Avenue’s Cadillac Café (one of the first jazz spots in LA) during this period. “He couldn’t decide whether to be a pimp or a piano player,” she said. “I told him to be both.”

It seems he took her advice. According to Sean J. O’Connell, Morton and his wife ran a small hotel at 1013 1/2 South Central Avenue, which he also used as his pimping office, trafficking women for a group called the “Pacific Coast Line.”

He played up and down the Avenue, teaching West Coast musicians how to swing New Orleans style. Morton also taught music lessons to many kids on the Avenue during his residency (roughly 1917 to 1922) and would breeze into town for the rest of his life, rehearsing and playing at venues including the Elk’s Hall. Morton made quite an impression on everyone he met. “That’s the most sophisticated man I ever met in my life,” Central Avenue trumpeter Norman Leland Bowden remembered. “Jelly Roll Morton didn’t open his mouth unless he said the word ‘I.’ ‘I am the great Roll. I am still the master,’ he used to say. He never spoke unless he spoke of himself. At all times.”

This glamorous three-story nightclub was an integral part of the legendary Bronzeville, which flourished in Little Tokyo briefly during World War II. With the shameful relocation of Japanese-Americans  during the war, black entrepreneurs moved into businesses that they had been forced to leave behind.

Operated by Gordon Sheppard, a former movie cameraman, Shepp’s took the place of Kawafuku Japanese Restaurant and soon became the hottest ticket in town, with elaborate floorshows and showgirls. “On the second floor they had a cocktail lounge, and on the third floor, where we played, they had the lounge and the dancing,” trumpeter and bandleader Monte Easter recalled. “Eddie Heywood used to work in the cocktail lounge, with Emmett Berry playing good trumpet.” Signaling the changes coming to jazz, as it moved from the swing era to electric blues and bebop, T-Bone Walker played his electrified guitar during gigs at Shepp’s.

However, the magic only lasted until 1946. “When the Japanese came back, the blacks were out. It all closed up down there [Bronzeville]. It was good while it lasted. Capacity crowds every night. You couldn’t get in there,” trumpeter Norman Bowden remembered. “At Shepp’s, we played in sharp company. Coleman Hawkins had a good band… and Eddie Heywood was down there with us, too.”

In late 1946, Shepp’s reopened as Kawafuku Japanese Restaurant.

“Enjoy your taste at my place!” was the tagline of this swinging upstairs cocktail lounge, which was owned by Ernest Bendy, aka Dynamite Jackson, former 1931 heavyweight champion of California.  “Dynamite, he was a funny type of guy,” jazz drummer William Douglass recalled. “An ex-prize fighter, he’s just about as tall as I am and bigger, you know, an enormous, scary-looking type of guy.” Douglass remembered that Jackson liked to run his mouth, and the musicians who worked for him weren’t scared to run theirs right back. “’He was saying, “I so-and-so and so-and-so. I never mess with nobody. I don’t bother nobody. Gerald, do I ever bother you?’” Gerald [Wiggins, a diminutive pianist/drummer], says, ‘You’d better not bother me, you big m*****f****r!’”

Despite his intimidating presence, Dynamite threw a good party, and eventually opened a second location at 4456 Adams Boulevard, near the secondary jazz hub centered around Western Avenue.

This tiny restaurant and jazz venue was opened in the 1940s by Ivie Anderson. Anderson, an accomplished singer who had served as chanteuse for Duke Ellington for more than 10 years, helped to popularize standards like “Stormy Weather” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” “Ivie can sing a song so that the audience gets every word, and at the same time make cracks at Sonny Greer, tease Duke and wink at the boys in the front row,” the California Eagle wrote of her performance in Jump for Joy in 1941. “Wednesday night she went into a dance routine that would have slayed you.”

But severe health concerns eventually sidelined her career. Not long down for the count, Anderson reinvented herself as a business owner and presided over nightly jam sessions in her small restaurant. “Charles Brown and Art Tatum would come by and play for customers or just for their own amusement,” historian Sean J. O’Connell writes. The small space served as an after-hours option for those still looking to make the most of their night well into the morning.” Anderson died in 1949 at the young age of 44.

This small city park, directly across from the former Dunbar Hotel, celebrates the rich history of the Avenue. The park features a colorful, educational mural created by the local community that features some of the most famous performers to grace the Avenue, including Billie Holiday, (female) jazz trumpet player Clora Bryant, blues shouter Big Joe Turner, and Paul Bryant- “the Central Avenue Kid.”