Review: Blue Whale Bar

Blue Whale Bar

Live jazz Thursday through Monday nights

By David MacNeal

Joon Lee points to the cerulean blue cubes scattered across his music venue’s floor and calls it improvisation. These box-sized chairs, some tantamount to roided-out ottomans, are there for you to move, morph, and create your own seating chart – even brush shoulders with a pianist or drummer, if you like.

“In the former setup of other jazz clubs,” says Lee, “there is always stage and audience.” He gestures the divvied groups with his hands. “And the audience misses the crazy energy musicians feel between each other while playing.”

Lee, the 36-year-old owner of the Blue Whale Bar in Little Tokyo, wants to bridge that gap. To do that, he has to reach Los Angeles’ reclusive jazz enthusiasts by delivering a rousing re-birth of cool on which his new venue can thrive. Honestly, not an easy task (heck, Spazio’s recently shut down after 16 years). But given Lee’s proclivity for name-dropping paired with a fresh, eight-month old club that rings back to classic New York venues, he just might succeed.

Tucked into an unassuming corner of the Weller Court Plaza, the Blue Whale Bar is what Lee calls a “grown-up’s playground.” Need proof? The wall parallel to the bar is one gigantic chalkboard. Besides the list of upcoming artists written on the wall is a portrait of a cheek-swelled John Coltrane blowing his sax, which a kid waiting for noodles next door at Orochon Ramen sketched fervently.

“He’s just random,” Lee says of the stranger. “He’s my draw-and-go artist in residence.” Eliciting poems or drawings on this jet-black wall is only part of Lee’s plan to harvest creative energy. The walls surrounding the performance area operate like a modern gallery from Downtown’s Art Walk. At the moment, photojournalist Sang Ho Tae’s stills from the Iraqi frontline are framed on the walls. It helps lend retrospect to current times. Lee jokes that next he’ll commemorate the decline of “pure music and pure art” by posting the mug shots of American Idol contestants.

Some people will get it,” he laughs. The prank’s irony won’t be lost, however, once juxtaposed with the commanding caliber of the musicians playing.

When shows start, usually around 9 p.m., be it bebop, cool, funk or fusion the Blue Whale churns out some transcendental grooves. Contemporaries to L.A.’s jazz scene like multi-reed player Bob Sheppard often play here. In fact, he, bassist Jeff D’Angelo, and drummer Matt Gordy were one of the first groups ever to play the Blue Whale when it opened in January.

“Sometimes the improv sessions won’t begin till midnight,” says Gordy, a veteran drummer of 45 years. “That doesn’t happen in the Valley.”

On Monday nights, the Kevin Kanner Quintet holds a jam session in a room teeming with studious USC musicians. Sessions can go into the late, late hours. Gordy says that’s uncommon in most venues – what he calls the “O Circuit.” Listed in the O Circuit are some restaurants where jazz becomes background or, dare we say, ambient noise. Joints like Spazio’s, Vitello’s, Vibrato’s, Charlie O’s, Colombo’s … hmm, get it? … The O Circuit.

Granted, Blue Whale has a bar (author’s note: try their Sazerac), but its bartenders, all who happen to be musicians, rarely make cocktails that disrupt the high-sheen melodies and solos being played. Just ask bar manager Mitch Heynen: “If I’m shaking a drink during a song, I better be shaking in time with the tempo.”

The venue’s priorities have garnered some word-of-mouth. Recently, an Austrian consulate rang Joon Lee. “At first I thought, what did I do wrong?” he laughs. The consulate informed him that Radio String Quartet Vienna would like to play his venue while touring stateside.

His reaction: “How did you hear about the Blue Whale?” But Lee, ever modest, sells himself short.

Originally from Seoul, Korea, Lee arrived in New York by way of Kentucky when he was nineteen. While studying sculpting at the Pratt Institute, he bussed tables at Choga in Greenwich Village. He first heard jazz through their overhead speakers. Since then he’s studied scatting under Cathy Segal-Garcia and jazz sage Mark Murphy; produced multiple albums, once for foreign artist Insooni (the Korean Aretha Franklin); and attracted musicians like Grammy winners John Proulx and Bill Cunliffe to Blue Whale’s stage.

Lee has created a family tree in the jazz community. The joint is different from the frills easily found in Little Tokyo (manga, and mochi, and robo-bears! oh, my!), but it pulsates with equal agility. As part of Lee’s visceral connection to the place, poetry by Rumi and Hafez is printed on trapezoidal slabs on the ceiling. “This way people can listen and play music underneath their energy.”

And much like his penchant animal, the blue whale, Lee has created a mysterious behemoth deeply hidden away. Kudos to those who find it. “How the blue whale is disappearing now because of humans,” Lee says, “is very much like jazz.”

Blue Whale Bar, 123 Astronaut E S Onizuka Street, Los Angeles, 90012. www.bluewhalemusic.com

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