And for his latest surprise, City Councilman Scott Malsin, who practically has agreed to drive the entrepreneur Gary Mandell to the city limits, sprang the widely admired Jazz Bakery, of all unlikely candidates, on his open-mouthed colleagues last night.
Swap Mr. Mandell for the Jazz Bakery?
“The Jazz Bakery would bring tremendous synergy to our concerts,” said the surrogate father of the hometown idea no one else even had remotely considered. “It’s a natural.”
This little nugget, however, has not been finalized — not even close. In two weeks, the discussion of this summer’s prospective concert producer — Mr. Mandell? The Bakery? A split card? — will resume. But first, City Hall staffers informally were directed by the Redevelopment Agency to check out the heartbeat and the interest level of Jazz Bakery founder/owner Ruth Price.
Although a formal Redevelopment Agency vote never was taken, Agency Chair Mehaul O’Leary and Jeff Cooper supported Mr. Malsin’s suggestion. That carried the evening and provided City Hall staffers with a roadmap on how to proceed.
By a figurative body count, every person in Council Chambers and four out of four Council members were drop-dead shocked when Mr. Malsin unveiled his grand scheme that has been percolating in his restless mind for more than a month.
His Last Idea
Wasn’t it just last autumn that the wily, intrepid Mr. Malsin reached his imaginative hand into the night sky above City Hall and plucked the name of the hip Santa Monica FM station KCRW as a prospective longshot replacement impresario for summertime Thursday night concerts? Last November, City Hall, at Mr. Malsin’s behest, began winking at and trying to court KCRW, a bigger player than they ever had attempted to woo.
Three months later, though, when KCRW hadn’t even agreed on punctuation in correspondence, much less doing productions, City Hall, like a lovesick teen, slowly, grimly concluded the enthusiastic lover and the reluctant lover never were going to be a match.
Mr. Malsin often seems to have a Plan B in one hip pocket and Plan C½ in the other.
Going into the meeting, the Redevelopment Agency appeared to be confronted with two transparent options: Endorse Mr. Mandell for the full eight-week season, or approve him for four and an unnamed alternate producer for the other four.
You did not need a scorecard to tell who won the night.
And on the Other Side
Easily the most disconsolate man in the building was slender, popular, haggard-looking Mr. Mandell. His shellshocked appearance magnified his vagueness because his eyeglasses were dangling from a cord about his neck.
By ironic contrast, permanently peppy Susan Obrow, the city’s special events coordinator, bouncily approached him in the lobby of Chambers in her ineradicable cheerleader mode. Sporting an authentic smile the width of Fatty Arbuckle’s bulging belt buckle, she thought about consoling him, hesitated, and instead said, winsomely, that she would be in contact with him, via email.
Mr. Mandell did not feel like moving, talking or thinking.
Persons who are not keen about his routinely agreeable personality have been chasing him down a narrow, dark sidewalk since early in his decade-long, extremely successful reign as the architectural brain of the 16-year-old Summer Music Festival series.
There seems to be something about the owner of Boulevard Music that a small cluster of people strongly dislike, although no two critics don’t necessarily concur on what is wrong with a series that packs in a capacity crowd of family-types and young people for the eight Thursdays of July and August. Most Thursdays, you could not shoehorn one more family into the City Hall Courtyard.
The two most common refrains heard from critics: “This is a great series that we can make even greater” and “we need more diverse genres of music.” Since only the latter charge is defendable, Mr. Mandell frequently has sought to prove that the range of genres is desirably broad. The mix obviously works because the crowds are out to the sidewalk most Thursdays.
If Mr. Malsin’s soft-shoed but unrelenting ABM* campaign to remove Mr. Mandell and his Producer chair from the Summer Music Festival series were a Broadway play, it would be a smash because it has been running longer than “My Fair Lady” and “South Pacific.”
(*Anybody But Mandell.)
Even though the exotic, mysterious, historically fuzzy Jazz Bakery — a 19-year-old dream and reality birthed by the jazz vocalist Ruth Price — is presently untethered (a classy label for homeless), that seems to be a hand-flicking detail. Last month, they entered into a preliminary agreement with the Agency for a new location in the 9800 block of Washington Boulevard, not far from their old home. But that deal remains openended. A sophisticated but low-key fixture off downtown Culver City, the Jazz Bakery lost its lease last year in the old Helms Bakery complex. While their website (jazzbakery.org) characterizes their present plight as a “moveable feast,” playing off one of Hemingway’s titles, the Jazz Bakery still is staging jazz shows in available, ever-changing venues.
Gauging the Heat from the Bakery
Mr. Malsin confidently assured the rest of the Redevelopment Agency members that Ms. Price is “very interested” and that she understands the relatively modest financial constraints.
“What everybody is trying to get at,” Mr. Malsin said, “is how, exactly, they think they can make the Festival even better than it is.”
At the end, you needed a butcher knife to slice through the emotionally dense, dramatic atmosphere as the unexpected vote-counting unfolded — some would say unraveled.
Mayor Chris Armenta and Andy Weissman voted to give Mr. Mandell control of a full season of concerts for the 11th year in a row.
Despite the unexpected interjection of the Jazz Bakery, Mr. Weissman was not prepared to alter his position by more than a smidgen, especially after digesting the response that Ms. Price sent to Mr. Malsin after he inquired about her degree of interest.
Did Mr. Malsin oversell Ms. Price’s purported enthusiasm?
Saying that the issue is far from decided, Mr. Weissman added: “I read the email as less than ‘oh, yes, we would love to produce the concerts.’”
