(We here at All Fried Up in the Big Smoke are doing our damnedest to adhere to a very strict American boycott policy. Since we don’t pay anyone for contributing to this site, technically speaking, we’re not purchasing a U.S. product with today’s post. And besides, our Los Angeles correspondent, Ned Teitelbaum, is one of the good ones. With the subject matter being public transit, a favourite topic of ours, look at it as endeavouring to build a bridge between two beefing allies, no tolls applied.)

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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. Places with names like Watts, West Athens and Willowbrook. While visiting the neighborhoods where the vineyards are located, I’ve gotten to know people. And I’ve heard some stories.

One of the stories 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 must have been like, with the musicians using the click-clack of the tracks as their natural 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 architectural critic who came to L.A. some 50-odd years ago to write Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, controversial at the time and still talked about in city planner circles.

I asked myself in which of the four ‘ecologies’ he would have included L.A.’s 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. 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 the city.

But I think just based on the sheer number of people riding transit then, and the amount of time spent transiting, he might have designated L.A.’s vast electric rail system its own ecology. Which he almost certainly would have christened Transitopia.

But was Los Angeles really unique in this regard? I was sure other great jazz cities with transit must have had something similar. So I looked it up. And sure enough, in New York, you had Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker practicing on (what else?) the “A” train. Art Blakey too rode the A. In Chicago, Louis Armstrong would take the South Side “L” from Bronzeville to gigs at Lincoln Gardens (later renamed the Royal Gardens Cafe before settling on, simply, the Royal Gardens). 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 Stephan Grappelli would work out tunes on the Paris Metro; and in London, while not jazz musicians, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page were known to take the Tube to recording sessions.

As for the Big Smoke, TTC’s Subway Musicians program has been going strong for 44 years.  And let’s not forget Bad Bunny underground appearance on the Tonight Show!

As for Autopia, it’s dead. Or at least one can hope.

Long live Transitopia!