' There were a handful of clubs in the late 1960s that were trying to keep the black jazz tradition alive in Los Angeles. Jazz drummer Roy Porter, in his autobiography There and Back, described the music scene in West Adams and Mid-City. Famed musicians like Duke Ellington, Ray Nance, blues legend Eddie Vinson, and Ella Fitzgerald were among the performers, and Ellington wrote the jazz classic Satin Doll within these walls. Marv Jenkins (Della Reese’s longtime piano man) recorded his 1961 release, Good Little Man, at the Rubaiyat Room. It was designed by Norma Harvey, Paul Williams’ daughter, and featured artists from “Babs” Gonzales and jazz/bebop alto saxophonist Sonny Criss to Lou Rawls. In 1952, Watkins opened the Rubaiyat Room in the hotel. That hotel was where all the entertainers stayed.” “It was the first black-owned hotel on the Westside. Watkins purchased a beautiful 1920s apartment building at 2022 West Adams Blvd., a block west of Western, and converted it into the 270-room Hotel Watkins. “This guy Bill Watkins had come from Chicago, I think he had been a numbers man or something, and he had a lot of money,” Bryant recalled.

The fledgling music scene’s future was cemented by the 1945 opening of a new Westside hotel catering to an African American clientele. That became the hub,” recounted jazz trumpeter Clora Bryant in an oral history interview documenting Los Angeles’s black music heritage. “When we left Central Avenue, we went straight to Western Avenue. This new nightlife center became home to at least two dozen clubs and cafes – featuring primarily African American musical acts – that flourished to the early 1960s (and some through the 1970s), but which are now a distant memory.

Yet even during the Central Avenue’s heyday, many musicians lived in what was then commonly referred to as “West Los Angeles.” Jazz luminaries Eric Dolphy, Vi Redd, Hampton Hawes, and Herb Geller all attended, for example, Dorsey High School.Īnd by the mid-1940s, as Jim Crow restrictions began to loosen their grip, there was also a burgeoning music scene on the “Westside,” centered on Western Avenue from Pico to Santa Barbara (now Martin Luther King Boulevard), and west from there on Washington, Adams and Jefferson. On the “Eastside,” the Lincoln Theater, Club Alabam, the Dunbar Hotel and myriad other spots showcased the best in African American music. Central Avenue is justly celebrated as the heart and soul of the jazz and R&B scene from the 1920s through the early 1950s.

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