Tonight I’ll be ringing in the new year at the Blue Whale with Alex Rodriguez and some new friends at WBGO for the annual Toast of the Nation. Starting at 8pm E.S.T, you’ll be able to check out some pretty incredible jazz nationwide — starting in Boston with the Julian Lage trio at Berklee and making its way back here to my home in Los Angeles with the Billy Childs Quartet at the Blue Whale. For the full lineup, which includes Wynton Marsalis and Diane Reeves among many others, head on over here: wbgo.org/toast. We’ll have a live chat running there as well, so come stop by and say hello!
As I might have mentioned before, the Blue Whale’s remained my favorite place to go check out jazz in Los Angeles – although it’s relatively hidden away in Little Tokyo, its entire structure is devoted to and directed towards the music that’s happening on stage. (If you can even call it a stage, really — owner Joon Lee has box-shaped ottoman chairs set up in place of a more typical alternative to lessen the divide between the audience and the performers.) For the last year or two, the Blue Whale’s hosted everyone/everything from the Billy Childs Quartet that you’ll hear tonight to the late-night jam sessions that have many a night been populated by younger jazz students from nearby arts schools, high schools, CalArts, UCLA, and otherwise. So kudos to the Blue Whale for keeping an interest in modern jazz alive that’s otherwise pretty much missing from the Los Angeles jazz scene.
That aside, be sure to tune in to the Toast of the Nation tonight at 8 pm E.S.T. If you’d like to catch the Billy Childs Quartet at the Blue Whale, our segment will be starting at 11 pm P.S.T.
Thanks for all of your support this year — see you in 2012!
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: Arrows & Loops/Ari Hoenig/Lines of Oppression
