Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Remembering Central Avenue, L.A.’s jazz oasis

'Central was like a river. A mighty river like the Amazon or the Nile, or in this case the Congo. And all the streets were tributaries that branched off from this great river.' — — Clifford "King" Solomon, jazz musician My first exposure to the influence of jazz on Los Angeles was in 1965 when I was a freshman attending UCLA. Edgar Lacey, a junior and fellow player on the basketball team, took me to the It Club to see John Coltrane . As a teenage jazz enthusiast growing up in New York City, I had listened to all of Coltrane's records. Jazz was the soundtrack to my life. It was in my blood thanks to my father, who was a transit cop by day, but by night a Juilliard-trained musician who played trombone with many of the jazz greats and introduced me to my childhood heroes, like Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis . I also had spent a summer in a high school journalism program in Harlem researching and writing about the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, when the greatest African American lions of politics, art, literature and jazz roared loud enough to make Black voices heard… Read full this story

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