BEST CONCERTS OF THE YEAR!
Jan. 21, 2021 at 6:00 am
AND THE YEAR IS… 2019!
Three weeks ago I listed the best local concerts of the previous year. But it was a pretty short list: five shows, in a COVID-crippled year. NICOLE RECOMMENDS added nine more, and six of them were in one long weekend.
But the year before boy howdy! “What a banner year 2019 was,’ I wrote. “A cornucopia of amazing performances, large and small.”
Before the very notion of live music concerts becomes a fading nostalgia, allow me to cruise through the best of the last full year that we had. Perhaps it will rekindle my appreciation and yours for what we have lost, and what we hope so fervently will again be part of our lives. It certainly illustrates what I’ve been saying since I moved here 40 years ago LA: best live music city on the planet.
It did not take long for a booking at Little Tokyo’s Blue Whale to become a stamp of approval among music fans with an ear for improvisatory sounds. If you could get your name on the chalkboard marquee, it was a validation from the owner and booker Joon Lee that you were doing something interesting. Probably not commercial. Maybe a little hip. But definitely new and worth pursuing.
That approval was enough to keep the club as the centerpiece of L.A.’s imaginative and expanding jazz scene for more than a decade. But amid an evaporated source of revenue and unforgiving lease obligations during the COVID-19 pandemic, Blue Whale has permanently closed.
2020, YOU GAVE ME THE BLUES
There wasn’t a particular Day The Music Died, but, like coronavirus victims, it was taking painful last gasps by mid-March.
The music didn’t die, but it is on life support, in a deep coma. The COVID relief bill (still including, I trust, $15B specifically for live music and theater venues) has finally passed, through the grasping, small, tight, clumsy, incompetent, vengeful pale hands of the Monster of Mar-a-Largo
Hey, let up, will ya Charles? He’s almost gone. But I say, he did not let up on us for four years and he continues to fiddle on the golf course right up until the end, while Rome burns, people die, the economy collapses, families lose their jobs and homes and iconic music clubs ponder their very existence. The hundreds of thousands of lives lost because of his making the pandemic a political calculation instead of a life-saving one, cannot be forgiven.