A Eulogy for The Blue Whale
Growing up in Seattle, the only jazz club that could regularly pay artists enough to make a trip out from NYC worth it was Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley. When players like Brad Mehldau, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, Roy Hargrove, or any number of modern era jazz greats came to town, that was the spot to see them in a more intimate club environment. The problem for anyone without excess spending money, is that in order to get seats within reasonable distance of the stage or with any decent sound quality, you need to buy expensive food that quickly turns your night out to see a great artist into a hundred dollar plus expense.
It’s exceedingly difficult to feel the mental and emotional connection to live music when you are having numerous conversations with waiters, listening to people clank their dishes as servers mill about the show floor, and worst of all dealing with rich jerks who are coming out for a fancy night out on the town that could care less who is playing and just talk throughout the show. These sorts of clubs are doing their best to pay artists to perform an objectively less popular genre of music, so by no means do I blame the owners, but it’s an absolutely depressing standard for one of America’s greatest cultural and artistic contributions to the world.
The Blue Whale was an exception to this rule, both in the city of Los Angeles and more broadly in all of the astronomically expensive metropolitan cultural centers in America. Tucked away in a corner on the third floor of a strip mall in Little Tokyo, there was a wonderful lack of pretentiousness and couples on fancy date nights. People came out to the spot because they loved the music. The business model wasn’t centered around selling the music as a backdrop for extravagance or overpriced food, but rather in creating a space for music lovers to gather in a far more affordable and respectful listening environment. Being a US based jazz music fan outside of New York City hasn’t been particularly easy for some time, but The Whale was an exception to the rule in a city filled with overpriced venues and expensive rents. The landscape of great American jazz clubs just became even bleaker with the announcement of its closure.
The Whale’s owner and manager, Joon Lee, clearly cared deeply about the listening experience in his venue. I’m not exaggerating when I say the sound mixing at most jazz shows is horrendous 70% of the time. If you are ever hoping to hear the notes on an acoustic piano in a quartet setting, good luck! Even when I went to the Monterey Jazz Festival, I was shocked at the number of professional sound booths that failed to make every member of a group audible. Seeing artists on stage frustrated with their monitor output is all too common. At The Whale, Joon and his team were exceptional at filling the room exactly as it should be filled, and that left the musicians to focus on making great music instead of fretting over sound issues.
It felt as though you had found a secret spot, where rather than being on commercial life support, live instrumental music attracted a diverse array of cool listeners that formed a vibrant scene to rival that of any other modern genre.
Most nights the headlining band would play two sets, with a 30 or 45 minute break in between. At that point the audience, and usually the band, would mingle out on the smoking patio sharing cigarettes, drinks, and conversations. I would sound like I’m trying to name drop if I listed all the amazing musicians who I got to hang with casually out on that patio, but it made the scene feel even more approachable and familial. Not only that, but I met like-minded music fans who I would later go see music with throughout the city.
When you’re a millennial jazz fan in the US, you end up going to quite a few shows by yourself. Going to mid sized theatre gigs alone feels isolating among the crowd, not to mention far less interpersonal with the musicians on stage. I’ve experienced plenty of nights where my handful of jazz listening friends were booked up, sending me off to a table for one at a dinner service jazz club. When one of those shows ended up being special, I would leave a little bummed that I didn’t get to share the experience with anyone. But even if you were alone at The Whale, you left feeling like you had a communal experience, including with the band itself.
The best musicians in the country clearly started to dig the venue as well. You began to see fantastic artists recording “Live at The Blue Whale” records, or filming their sets at The Whale instead of anywhere else. All of a sudden, LA became somewhere I could see many of my favorite NY based jazz musicians with a far greater regularity, run by someone who actually cared about getting the sound mixing right, and who wasn’t trying to squeeze me for every penny I had each time I visited the club.
But an additional beautiful wrinkle in the fabric of The Whale was that its run coincided with what can only be described as a renaissance within the LA jazz scene. At the center of this musical explosion sat the band “Knower,” founded by Louis Cole and Genevive Artadi, the group found a fan base on YouTube, making strange videos with an Adult Swim-esque aesthetic. The group often featured an immaculate rotation of musicians like Sam Wilkes, Sam Gendel, Dennis Hamm, Jacob Mann, Nate Wood, and more. These musicians spanned groups like Kneebody, Thundercat’s touring trio, Bad Bad Not Good, and other major acts that toured internationally. But when you showed up at the Blue Whale, you could see them playing mind-bending sets in an intimate setting, for less than you had to pay at any other medium sized venue in town.
Louis has gone on to be signed by Flying Lotus’ “Brainfeeder” label, and his star rose somewhat in concert with The Whale’s emergence as the hub of the new pulsing scene. He generated major buzz among New York jazz circles when he put together a “Louis Cole Big Band” featuring some of the most killing jazz players in the world. And lucky for all of us in LA at the time, many of these musicians were beginning to show up to The Whale, where they knew there was a rapt and attentive audience. Artists like Ambrose Akinmusire, Walter Smith III, and other luminaries in the scene were playing sold out gigs at affordable prices.
I reached out to Louis Cole to get his thoughts on the closing of the venue: “It didn’t really feel like a venue, it felt more like a home” he said. “Just a really comfortable place for people to create and see each other. It was just kind of a home or a hub for the creative LA music scene…I don’t really know what will replace it.”
When I first moved to LA, before I had many friends, I found myself going to The Whale alone. Driving from West LA to Little Tokyo as rush hour was starting to dwindle, and being welcomed into a home where the music scene was hanging and creating. As a former aspiring jazz musician who was never really exceptional enough to do anything with my music outside of some small time bar gigs as a teenager, it felt crazy to be rubbing shoulders with the greatest artists in the scene.
Like Louis said, the best musicians in LA were in a comfortable environment just creating and hanging out, in a performance space that blends the stage into the same floor that your little leather seating ottoman is placed on. It just wasn’t something you could find anywhere else.
The unique combination of genres and styles that fueled this new version of LA’s jazz scene was reflected in the audiences one would find attending shows at The Blue Whale. Typical jazz fans were certainly in attendance, but as more buzz built around the Whale and the new artists performing there, you began to see the music scene “cool kids” showing up, who you would previously find at DJ sets and hip-hop gigs around the city. By creating a room that wasn’t so stuffy and overpriced, The Whale created a space for instrumental music centered in the jazz tradition that felt happening and attractive to younger, more diverse audiences.
This is what I’ll miss most about the Whale. Being a jazz fan has involved going to quite a few overpriced venues by myself, surrounded by a bunch of folks who are several generations older than me, often not in a sold out room. I would leave an incredible show vibrating from the music, but sad that there didn’t seem to be an audience or a community to support the artists outside of random rich folks looking for a fancy night out. Hanging at the Blue Whale made me feel like the music I love was alive, and that there are more listeners out there than I thought.
There are far too many clips and videos to share of incredible moments from the Whale, but one of the shows from late in the Whale’s run was a perfect example of what made it so great. Louis Cole was playing a packed show, and as it turns out, one of the greatest living jazz guitarists, Kurt Rosenwinkel, happened to be in the audience. Towards the end of the set, he grabbed his guitar and dropped in for an impromptu couple songs. Bringing together the new young vanguard of creative instrumental music with a legendary jazz great is the ideal illustration of The Whales’ unique position within the scene.
When people ask me if I enjoyed living in LA, the first thing I mention is The Blue Whale. It represented what was so cool about the city to me. A not so hidden gem in one of many LA strip malls, where a genuinely diverse community gathered to see some of the best artists in the world in one of its cultural capitals.
The Whale’s owner, Joon Lee is back in South Korea helping his family during the pandemic, but his vision, sensibility, taste, and love for good music is going to be so vital once nightlife resumes in LA and around the country. I can only hope that The Blue Whale’s incredible run has a successor with Joon at the helm. LA, and the American jazz landscape won’t be the same without it.
