Jazz At LACMA: 30 Years Of Friday Night Jazz

For more than thirty years, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has been presenting a free, swinging jazz concert every Friday evening. During that time so many jazz clubs in the Los Angeles area have come and gone: the Vine Street Bar and Grill, Charlie O's, Spazio's and Cafe Metropol, among others, have all shut their doors. In 2009, landlord greed forced the Jazz Bakery out of their long-time home and, more recently, Covid killed Joon Lee's Blue Whale in LA's Little Tokyo. However, while the vicissitudes of modern life have caused so many jazz venues to shutter, the Friday night, free jazz series at LACMA has endured to provide opportunities for a multitude of LA based musicians to perform and jazz lovers to gather and share this great music.

For more than 17 years, Mitch Glickman has been the musical director at LACMA, and he has presented the very best musicians in Southern California to the program's loyal audience. According to Glickman, the mission of LACMA Jazz has been that: "music is the vehicle, community is the goal." And Glickman has brought many great musicians to the stage that faces Chris Burden's by now iconic "Urban Lights" installation and Wilshire Boulevard. World renowned artists like Wayne Shorter and Quincy Jones, guitarist Kenny Burrell, sax masters Azar Lawrence and Kamasi Washington, cornetist Bobby Bradford, keyboardist Les McCann, bassist Henry Franklin, and so many more have performed there at LACMA))) Over the years, the enthusiastic crowds that gather every Friday between April and November are incontrovertible proof that LACMA's mission has been a unqualified success.