The Death and Life of Mexican Jazz – it started in LA
Banner: The Lincoln Theater, Los Angeles, the home of Black-Mexican jazz. . Photo: Los Angeles Conservancy
My newspaper is teaming up with a Guadalajara radio station to produce a jazz festival in one of Mexico’s 177 “Magic Villages,” Ajijic. The town has already hosted two jazz fests this year, and regular jazz performances and clubs host both local and touring jazz men and women. And there are major jazz fests in other Mexican towns like Polanco, Playa del Carmen, and Mexico City, which would lead you to think jazz is a big deal in Mexico, and you would be right.
But where did it come from? From Los Angeles, mostly. As a Los Angeleno, I know that there is a bit of a Chicano/Mexican jazz scene in LA. And I know about the golden age of jazz in the 20s and 30s, and 40s in LA that included Mexican and Chicano jazz. So what is the story?
If you look up the history of West Coast Jazz, you’ll likely find 1950s white “cool jazz” musicians playing relaxed, breezy melodies at the Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach. Think Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, and Dave Brubeck. But that is not the story. It begins much, much earlier
West Coast jazz was never a solo act, and it started way before the Lighthouse Café. It was a wild, multi-ethnic laboratory created by segregated neighborhood boundaries. During the early twentieth century, racist real estate practices, strict housing rules, and segregation forced Black and Mexican-American residents into adjacent, overlapping neighborhoods like Watts, South Central, and Boyle Heights and East LA. Central Avenue was the one place Back jazz musicians could play, and boy, did they. Central Ave became the Bourbon Street of jazz on the West Coast, jam-packed with clubs, after-hours clubs, recording studios, even a record label, Dial Records.
The Black musicians invited the Mexicans and Chicanos in, mostly as sidemen, dance band and studio musicians, creating a vibrant, multi-ethnic middle ground where artists routinely crossed racial lines to shape the sound of American swing and early bebop.
At the time, the American Federation of Musicians was strictly split into separate white and Black unions. Mexican-American musicians, trapped in a confusing middle ground, often stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Black artists, joining AFM Local 476—the Black musicians’ union—or spending nights trading riffs with Black innovators in packed after-hours clubs.
The heart and soul of this historic musical alliance was the Lincoln Theater, which opened its doors in 1927. Nicknamed the “West Coast Apollo,” it was the largest and most famous theater built for Black audiences on the Pacific coast, hosting jazz royalty like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Lionel Hampton. For young, aspiring Mexican-American jazz players coming over from the East Side, the Lincoln was the ultimate live classroom. Prodigies like brass player Chico Sesma and a teenage Don Tosti (born Edmundo Martínez Tostado) hung out at these packed shows and neighborhood benefit concerts, studying the timing, rhythm, and stage presence of Black musical giants.
Further down the strip, next door to the historic Dunbar Hotel, was the legendary Club Alabam, a wild hotbed for loose, late-night experiments hosting legendary midnight jam sessions where formal union rules, racial labels, and daytime worries melted away into the smoke (of various kinds). Mexican-American players routinely jumped on stage alongside Black masters like Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, and Charles Mingus. In these late-night sets, Mexican-American musicians brought their own careful classical training, multi-instrument talent, and Latin and Mexican rhythms.
The absolute peak of this cross-pollination arrived in 1948, when Don Tosti released a record called “Pachuco Boogie,” the first Latino record to sell a million copies, capturing the fast-paced energy of Black jazz while creating an anthem for a whole new generation of Mexican-American youth culture. At the same time, artists like Chico Sesma were bridging straight-ahead jazz with Latin big bands, helping launch the Afro-Cuban and Latin jazz waves that swept through L.A. Unfortunately, the record stores put their music into the Latin bin, not the Jazz bin.
But the wrong bin was not what killed Black and Mexican jazz in LA it was bulldozers. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, aggressive urban renewal projects and the construction of the Santa Monica and Harbor Freeways cut directly through Black and Chicano neighborhoods like a physical wall, slicing up the neighborhood footprint of the West Coast jazz scene, tearing down beloved local venues, and forcing out the crowds that kept them alive. As the Club Alabam and the Lincoln Theater were reduced to rubble, Central Avenue’s jazz scene vanished, and the untouched, wealthy white coastal venues became “West Coast Jazz.”
But music does not die; it just gets bigger and better. Decades after the freeways tore their neighborhoods apart, West Coast Mexican-American jazz is making a loud, defiant comeback. Today, a new generation of artists are back all across Los Angeles. New labels like Jazz Is Dead, led by Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, regularly produce projects and live showcases with Latino jazz masters. Modern torchbearers—from Grammy-winning visionaries like Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra to local L.A. favorites like Gilbert Castellanos and the folk-infused fusion of my friends Las Cafeteras—are playing from East LA to Silverlake to Wilshire to Hollywood to Inglewood and even in Santa Monica.
And it went to Mexico and found very fertile soil which had been cultivated from the 1800’s. In 1884, a massive Mexican military band performed at the New Orleans World’s Fair with highly trained Mexican instrumentalists. Many stayed in the Delta, teaching African American musicians precision instrumentation and introducing the habanera and waltz rhythms that Jelly Roll Morton famously termed the “Spanish Tinge.” By the 1920s and 1930s, as Central Ave in LA became the West Coast center of jazz, the music officially migrated south. It traveled along shipping routes from New Orleans directly into Mexican port cities like Veracruz and Tampico, while fluid borderlands allowed northern musicians to pick up swing and Be-Bop trends directly from U.S. radio broadcasts.
As these border and port musicians migrated inland toward Mexico City, jazz quickly wove itself into the fabric of Mexican nightlife, classical traditions, and the mainstream entertainment industry. The genre reached a peak between 1955 and 1965, flourishing across upscale hotels, nightclubs, and university campuses. Rather than just copying American records, iconic local groups like the Luis Arcaraz Orchestra, La Mancha, and Kelvinator Orquesta blended complex jazz improvisation with regional rhythms like danzón, mambo, and son jarocha. From there, it grew to today’s proliferation of jazz clubs, jazz fests, and jazz musicians. Jazz innovators like Juan Castenon, Eliazar “Cuco” Soto, Jenny Beaujean, Lucía Gutiérrez Rebolloso, and Magos Herrera today carry this evolution forward in Mexico. You can pave over a neighborhood, but you can’t kill the music – it just moves.
Patrick O’Heffernan
