A Jackpot for Jazz Fans at Hollywood Park Casino

For all its hype and bluster, Los Angeles often conceals its treasures--and it so happens that one of the city’s stellar jazz venues is off the radar screens of most Angelenos. Even inside the Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood on a Tuesday night, the brooding gamblers seem oblivious to the crowd of nearly 200 packed into the Finish Line Sports Lounge to soak in the fine sounds of multi-reedman John Bolivar and his quartet.

Fans have been showing up in droves now for five years, since a group of casino workers hatched the Tuesday After-Work Jazz Cooldown. Live jazz in L.A. is no sure bet, but the employees dealt a winning hand: top artists, affordable drinks and no cover. The ace in the hole, says Jazz Cooldown co-founder Don Bonseigneur, is the jazz devotee. “They’re starving for music,” says Bonseigneur, a card dealer known to one and all as “Duck.” The typical Cooldown regular, says co-founder Lettie Nash, administrative manager to the casino’s general manager, is African American, 55, retired or close to it, and a longtime jazz lover.

Like Duck, the regulars grew up at a time when South L.A. was rich with legendary haunts that disappeared long ago--the Casbah, the Parisian Room, Memory Lane. “This is the best thing to hit L.A. since the Parisian Room,” says Darryl Delgado, 52. Seated next to him at the bar is 76-year-old George Taylor, dressed to the nines and sipping his Champagne and orange juice. “I was here the first night,” declares Taylor, a retired bar manager. “I won’t go anywhere else on Tuesday.”

The Cooldown draws some of L.A.’s finest jazz artists, a who’s who that includes Barbara Morrison, Teddy Edwards, Ernie Andrews, Poncho Sanchez, Bobby Rodriguez and others. Along with a nice paycheck, the Cooldown offers them a rare L.A. commodity--a hard-core jazz audience, at least those lucky few in the know. “It’s the best-kept secret,” Nash says. “But we don’t want it to be a secret.”

DANNY FEINGOLD