The Jazz Society of the Philippines, USA, a nonprofit org devoted to Filipino jazz, puts on an annual Filipino-American Jazz Festival at Hollywood’s Catalina Bar & Grill Jazz Club. The concerts are reliably entertaining and often revelatory. Who knew Pacific Island immigrants could swing so hard and have so much soul? The latest edition in...
This space has previously catalogued a pantheon of Badasses, the bad-to-the-bone boys and girls whose badness makes them (and what they do) impossible to ignore and glorious to witness. The past two weeks, we’ve had the pleasure of experiencing two of the world’s very baddest musicians at Hollywood’s Catalina Bar & Grilll Jazz Club, one...
Those of us who live in Los Angeles and appreciate jazz music like to think of ourselves as part of an eclectic and passionate family, an intimate clan united in our love for America’s greatest contribution to global arts. We’re part of something we call the Los Angeles Jazz Community. The evidence, though, suggests there’s...
Bob Popescu, the founder and co-owner of Los Angeles’s leading jazz club, Catalina Bar & Grill, died last week of a heart attack. He was 77. Even among the ten-of-thousands of patrons who have frequented his establishment over the past 20+ years, Bob was not well-known. Although wry and gregarious among his family and friends,...
Last night I saw my friend Linda Hopkins, the legendary blues singer, whose star on the Hollywood walk of fame commemorates her lifetime of entertaining on Broadway, record albums, and in concert halls around the world. She looked luminous. Her big smile illuminated the room, a nightclub on the Sunset Strip where once a month...
Last night, the Tierney Sutton Band gave a Grammy nomination celebration concert at Catalina Bar & Grill, in Hollywood. The place was packed with music lovers, some of whom “knew her when” she was performing in front of six people, others who had been faithful fans since her first Telarc album, and some recent converts...
An Open Letter to Councilmember Hugo Soto-MartinezDear Councilmember Soto-Martinez,
The man you replaced, Mitch O’Farrell, was perceived by many as a cynical politician who placed the desires of wealthy real-estate developers over the concerns of the people he was supposed to represent. Sensitive to any perception of impropriety, you’ve made it a point to not accept…
For more than forty years one of our favorite writers, Detroit-based Peter Werbe, has been publishing provocative essays about capitalism, technology, religion, politics, and popular culture in the anarchist journal The Fifth Estate, where he’s long been an indispensable member of the editorial collective. Some of his best work is now organized in a compulsively readable...
