Central Avenue Jazz: Community, Arts and Activism - 7/25/2022

Conversation Overview

Independent researcher and award-winning author Dr. Steve Isoardi will join UGS Faculty member David Tripp for a conversation about the intersections of jazz, community arts and activism in Los Angeles.

Dr. Steven L. Isoardi received his Ph.D. in political science from UCLA and is currently an independent researcher/writer. Before retiring from full-time teaching, he taught at UCLA, UC Irvine, Antioch University, and the Oakwood School.

From 1989 to 1999, he was the researcher/interviewer for the “Central Avenue Sounds” project of the UCLA Center for Oral History Research, and from 2000 to 2003 for their “Beyond Central” project, compiling forty-seven life-history interviews with Los Angeles jazz musicians. He authored and edited Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 1998), which won the 1999 Oral History Association Book Award, as well as editing Jazz Generations (Continuum, 2000) and Songs of the Unsung (Duke University Press, 2001), the autobiographies of L.A. jazz greats Buddy Collette and Horace Tapscott. For Rhino Records, he produced the 4-CD set Central Avenue Sounds, and edited/authored the accompanying 100-page booklet. In 2006 his history of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and community arts movement of South Los Angeles -- The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles -- was published by the University of California Press.

Dr. Isoardi has also contributed articles to various publications, including the revised edition of the Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Current Research in Jazz (for which he also serves on the editorial board), Grove Dictionary of American Music, and Il giornale della musica.

He has served as a consultant on documentary films on tenor saxophonist Big Jay McNeely (in production) and alto saxophonist Frank Morgan (The Sound of Redemption, 2016), on the feature film Flock of Four, 2018, as well as the feature-length film on the African American community arts scene – Leimert Park: the story of a village in south central Los Angeles – produced and directed by his partner, Jeannette Lindsay, 2008.

From 2013 to 2018 he was the organizer for a series of jazz concerts for the Mayme Clayton Library & Museum in Culver City, CA. He has also worked on projects for the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles and on an exhibition of black arts in Los Angeles for the Venice Biennale.

Currently, he is writing scripts for major documentary films on the history of jazz on Central Avenue and another on the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the community arts in African American L.A. He is also researching and writing a series of essays on oral history, the community arts, and jazz in African American Los Angeles.

David Tripp, PhD taught at USC, CSULA, Southwest CC, and Glendale CC before teaching his first course at Antioch in the summer of 1989 and he's been here ever since. He served as chair of the BA program (1998-2002) and was the Founding Director (1999) of the Bridge Program. Always passionate about teaching and suffering from an "infinite curiosity problem," over the years he has designed over 40 courses or workshops for undergraduate students.