JAZZ by NIGHT.(Review)

Los Angeles is like my Grandpa Willy: Don't remember nothin'," muses trumpeter Sam Washington, the lead character in Stephen Sachs's Central Avenue, at Hollywood's Fountain Theatre through Dec. 16. Named after that once-vibrant boulevard now peppered with empty lots and torndown buildings, Sachs's play portrays a 1940s L.A.

strictly segregated by grim economic policies and ugly social practices. Yet at night, the jazz scene brings blacks and whites together as musicians and patrons in an edgy and exciting underworld that holds very different meanings for its participants, who ...

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