On my way to Transitopia

Charles Mingus gave free concerts on the Red Car. Reyner Banham missed it.

For the past eight or nine years, I’ve been running around town, planting vineyards in South L.A. in places with names like Watts, West Athens and Willowbrook. While visiting the neighborhoods where those vines are located, I’ve gotten to know some of the people. And I’ve heard some stories.

One of the stories I heard recently was about Charlie Mingus, the Watts native who would take out his standing bass while riding the Red Line to gigs on Central Avenue and give impromptu concerts along with fellow bandmates Red Callender (bass, tuba, The Wrecking Crew) and Buddy Collette (sax, flute, clarinet, Chico Hamilton Quintet). ‘'Woodshedding,’ they would call it, and the passengers would toss in a few ducats.

I tried to imagine what it might have been like, with the musicians using the click-clack of the tracks as their metronome, keeping rhythm and trading eights, maybe playing No More Pork Pie Hat or Boogie Stop Shuffle. The urban tableau also made me think of Reyner Banham, the late British architecture critic who came to L.A. some 50-odd years ago to write Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. I'd read the book when I first came to L.A. and was trying to make sense of its polycentric, car-dominated logic. If there was a logic. The book was controversial at the time for its unusual take on the word 'ecology,' which Banham used as an organizational device to survey the city's sprawling infrastructure and architecture. It is still talked about today in city planner circles.

Thinking about the book, I asked myself in which of the four ecologies Banham would have placed LA’s vast network of urban rail had it not been torn up shortly before he arrived. I am reasonably sure he would not have included it in at least the first three — the Foothills, Surfurbia and Autopia, the last of which referred to the freeways. But what about the Plains of Id, the repository of everything else in the city not included in the first three ecologies? The rail system did function in that ecology. And yet, it was also, from a functional perspective, part of an ecology of movement, which Banham thought of as a main characteristic of Autopia.

But I think just based on the sheer number of people riding transit then, and the amount of time spent transiting, he might also have designated LA’s electric rail system as its own ecology, the fifth, one he might have named Transitopia.

Red Cars on the tracks in Watts. 1940s.

Still I wondered, was Los Angeles really unique in this regard? I was sure other great jazz cities with their own Transitopias must have had something similar. So I looked it up. And sure enough, in New York, you had Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Art Tatum practicing on (what else?) the "A" train; in Chicago, Louis Armstrong would take the South Side "L" from Bronzeville to gigs at Lincoln (Royal) Gardens, and Sun Ra and his Arkestra would ride the same line. In New Orleans, Jelly Roll Morton called the Saint Charles streetcar his 'office' and, three or four generations later, Wynton Marsalis would practice on the same line on his way to Jazz Camp.

In Europe too, Django Reinhart and Stephane Grappelli would work out tunes on the Paris Metro; and in London, while they weren't jazz musicians, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page were known to take the Tube to recording sessions. As for more recent entertainment in Transitopia, we need look no further than Bad Bunny busking on the Tonight Show!

Now, of course, LA has its own "A" Line, longer even than New York's. So the next time you think you're spending too much time stuck in traffic in Autopia, try spending it instead, cooling your jets in Transitopia. You might just run into the next Charlie Mingus.

And if you do, make sure to toss in a few ducats.