JIJI's Jazz Club is the jazz party L.A. was missing

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Set us as preferred The crowd at El Cid is writhing and dripping in sweat.If not for the jazz onstage, the scene looks like it’s meant for a sold-out show headlined by a DJ with a cult following.

Instead, everyone in the main room is dancing under a glistening disco ball to the syncopations of Riva, a three-piece comprised of a psychedelic saxophonist, drummer and keyboardist.They engulf the floor of the Silver Lake nightclub in an electric surge of high-energy jazz fused with an array of other genres, including jazz-house and bossa nova, luring people to dance and howl after every solo.

It’s a standard party for JIJI’s Jazz Club, a roving pop-up series that hosts live jazz in warehouses, wine bars, speakeasies, cafes and other community-oriented spaces across L.A.JIJI’s founder, Tida Norasingh, curates jazz nights six times per month, filling a necessary music void in L.A.’s cultural firmament.She discovered this dearth after moving back home to Southern California in 2020 from New York, where she lived for three years and built a lifestyle around regularly consuming jazz in stoop sessions, open jams and pop-ups.

Jazz was financially accessible, the culture was alive and shows were abundant.But it wasn’t the same in L.A.“I had a really hard time finding jazz in L.A.

after moving back,” she says.“Everyone I asked couldn’t tell me where the good ‘spots’ were and the places everyone pointed me to felt very out-of-touch.”By “out-of-touch” Norasingh means expensive and boujee.

The crowds were mostly lifeless, largely because the majority of jazz venues in L.A.are seated only, and attendees remained silent even after a mesmerizing solo.

Venues require a two-drink minimum and shows are expensive to attend.So in 2024, she stopped looking for the music and culture she wanted to be part of and s...