Through the Darkness, Kansas City Jazz

This is a creative, personalized research project. I like it--hence it is here. I think I might expand it with a deeper analysis and pepper the thing with photos, format it like a small coffeetable book--a small kickass coffeetable book. I've omitted works cited for this entry.
-----Learn Something.

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Through the Darkness, Kansas City Jazz


"Kansas City [. . .] has elements in common with histories of other notable artistic communities. [. . .] Some twentieth-century examples of these communities and their best recognized arts are: New Orleans in the teens, also for jazz; Paris in the twenties for literature; New York in the 1940s and 1950s for visual arts; and London and San Francisco in the 1960s for rock music." (Pearson, Goin’ to Kansas City xviii)

In the summer of 2006, I was in Kansas City for a concert at the Starlight Theater. I had never been to Kansas City before, though having driven through Kansas several times I had developed relatively low expectations for the city; expectations springing from the cowish monotony of the state itself. I was surprised then, despite my erroneous prejudgment, to discover that KC had high-rises, civic centers, and all the amenities that a city should have. But more surprising than this was a discovery I made while burning a few extra hours before curtain at the Starlight. While wandering through the streets, I and a few good friends of mine stumbled across the American Jazz Museum on 18th Street. Yes, culture, it seemed, had found its way into Kansas City along with the high-rises.
But a jazz museum in KC, a city quite literally in the middle of the country, as far removed from the cultural coasts as possible? As far as I was concerned, this building had no business being anywhere other than New York or New Orleans. I had to make sense of this. And so, led by curiosity and spare time, I passed through its doors, where inside I fell upon a series of exhibits that illuminated Kansas City as a former mecca of the jazz scene. There were names that I knew and recognized: Count Basie, Lester Young, Charlie Parker. These jazz masters were musicians who I associated with NYC, the place where they gained their broadest fame. I was stunned then to learn that these men, along with scores of others, came to musical fruition in the streets of Kansas City during the 1930s. My self-purported acumen for jazz was shattered.
However, I was slightly redeemed by my friends’ similar ignorance. We had never heard of the Kansas City jazz scene. But were we the only ones who had missed the train?
The question had been rolling over in the back of my mind for several months, forgone but not forgotten, before I thought to seek out an answer. We couldn’t be the only ones ignorant of this piece of musical history. And so I conducted a survey, rather informal, of a cross-section of my peers. In the survey I asked my subjects to name three American cities associated with jazz. My hope was that their first two answers would allow for the big players of New Orleans and New York City, and that the third city might reveal something more removed from the beaten path, something like Kansas City perhaps. Of the thirty people I questioned – I realize that the number is scant, but I could assume the results would be roughly the same with a larger pool – no one deviated from New York City and New Orleans. For the third city named the results are as follows: Chicago, 19 times; San Francisco, 4 times; Los Angeles, 3 times; Memphis, 2 times; unable to named a third city, 1 time; Kansas City, 1 time. (Iredale)
The results of my informal survey solidified my belief that I and my friends were not the only ones to overlook Kansas City as having an association with jazz. The thirty people I questioned also revealed a general knowledge of the jazz world, as nearly two-thirds of them settled upon Chicago, a reputable jazz city, as their third choice. I have to wonder what the results may have been should I have asked for four American cities associated with jazz. Might all of the people who said Chicago for their third choice have then chosen Kansas City as their fourth? But, speculation aside, the fact that of those thirty people, who on the whole seemed to possess a general knowledge of the jazz world, only one of them said Kansas City, lends itself to my point and question. Namely: why did Kansas City Jazz slide under the radar? Where did it come from and where did it go? What happened in Kansas City?


Love that Swing

Kansas City’s unique style of jazz developed from a great number of musical influences, due largely to its geographic location. Famed jazz commentator Ken Burns explains the centrality of Kansas City as having appeal to every traveling musician "between Chicago and Denver, Galveston and Minneapolis"(Burns). Musicians were arriving from every territory of the middle of the US, bringing blues from Texas and Arkansas, Dixieland from New Orleans, and integrating it into the traditional style of ragtime, which was native to Missouri.
These three distinct styles, blues, Dixieland jazz, and ragtime, came together at the crossroads of Kansas City to create a wholly unique style of music that began to emerge in the late 1920s. Ragtime, a fast paced, straightforward piano driven music lent its background of intricate melodies and "hot" syncopations to the mix. The blues offered a strong 4/4 rhythm and a twelve or sixteen bar backbone for soloists to work over. And the New Orleans influence, coming up by way of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, peppered the blend with a movement towards improvisation. The end result was the fast swinging, rhythmically driven, improvisational commodity of KC jazz (Pearson, "Political" 185).
Though, the style of improvisation prevalent in KC jazz of the late 1920s and early 1930s is not what we would think of as improvisation in the modern jazz sense. These musicians were not as freewheeling and avant-garde as a Miles Davis of the early 1950s. KC improvisation was much more structured, as the blues element would suggest. "What we hear in Kansas City jazz," Dr. Martin Williams of Oxford suggests, "is a disciplined dance music whose strengths lie in its energy, its ensemble verve – in that fine paradox between power and relaxation"(21). I believe this ensemble verve refers to the structure and size of the KC jazz band, most of which were between eight and fourteen musicians in number. To accommodate for the sheer bulk of instruments, Kansas City musicians developed the style of "riffing." Essentially, this was the creation of a brief, repetitive passage by one musician, which would then be picked up by others, and used as a harmonic backbone over which soloists could rip. Renowned KC jazz scholar Nathan W. Pearson explains:
"Setting riffs (creating the riff structure), building new compositions through riff-based improvisation, and using the base of swinging riffs for extended solos were all part of a musical ethos and were a splendidly effective way to blend dance music with improvisational jazz" (Goin to Kansas City 114).
"Riffing," with its endless supply of combinations, gave Kansas City jazz a real communal feel. Musicians would create continuing variations of a certain riff, while trading solos, and jam into the small hours of the morning. Jazz pianist Sammy Price recollects the atmosphere: "I remember once [. . .] I came by a session at about ten o’clock and then went home to clean up [. . .] I came back a little after one o’clock and they were still playing the same song" (qtd. Williams 23). This exuberance for creation, coupled with "hot" tempos and rhythms and the big band atmosphere developed Kansas City jazz into the premiere dance music of the late 1920s and early 1930s: swing jazz.
But, simply resting at a geographic crossroads was not the only factor in the development of KC jazz. The middle of the country could be the middle of nowhere if there weren’t some attraction for citizens, and more importantly musicians, to settle there. Above all else, the thing which drew musicians to Kansas City was the uncommon level of prosperity and vice that flourished there during the late stages of Prohibition and the onset of the Great Depression. These good times were made possible by political kingpin "Boss Tom" Pendergast (Haddix, "Tom’s Town" 12).


Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The powerful and corrupt political machine of Pendergast had held dominance in Kansas City as early as the mid-teens. By the early-twenties, Tom had decanted the practice of crooked elections, and a public generosity to please even the smallest man, to a science. With prohibition keeping the American mouth dry and desirous, Pendergast found it best to aligned himself with the bootleggers of the day, in return for kickbacks of course. The streets of Kansas City were flooded with booze, and with the bureaucracy letting things slide the city gradually became a magnet for all manner of vice. Underworld operated nightclubs and gambling dens sprang up, their numbers reaching in the range of the hundreds, and by the end of the 1920s, around the time of the Market crash, Kansas City had become a wide open town: the Paris of the Plains (Haddix, "Tom’s Town" 12).
As the Depression began to take hold around 1930, and the country floundered in economic turmoil, Kansas City with its booming, though illegal, flow of commerce shone like a beacon in middle America. Musicians who had been traveling throughout the heartland of the county during the 1920s now found work hard to come by in the wake of the Depression. Nathan W. Pearson explains: "With massive unemployment and lower standards of living for most Americans, few were comfortable paying [. . .] for an evening of dancing. [. . .] Musicians quickly realized that Kansas City was somehow immune from much of this" (Goin’ to Kansas City 77). KC offered a safe haven for these musicians because it operated in its own economic bubble. People had alcohol to drink, money to spend, and, hang it all, they wanted to dance.
Never before, and possibly never again, had a town been so primed for a musical explosion. With an abundance of nightclubs and performance venues available to them, and with organized crime looking out for them–because what’s good for the musicians is good for the clubs is good for the men in charge–the Kansas City jazz musicians had no trouble finding work and play. Pianist Mary Lou Williams, who arrived on the scene at the end of 1929, reflects on this period of affluence: "Politicians and hoodlums ran most of the nightspots, and the town was wide open for drinking, gambling, and pretty much every form of vice. Naturally, work was plentiful for musicians"(qtd. Haddix, "Tom’s Town" 12). It was this wanton environment that harbored the musical chops of pianist Bennie Moten, trumpeter Oran "Hot Lips" Page, tenor saxophonist Lester Young, and Kansas City’s most famous jazz musician, before the emergence of Charlie Parker in the late 1930s, pianist and band leader William "Count" Basie (Williams 21). All of these musicians bounced and "riffed" off of one another from the end of the 1920s to the middle of the 1930s, cultivating the KC sound and embracing a musical environment whose pinnacle and rapid decline would soon come to pass.


The Inside’s Out

With all the talent and musical energy booming in Kansas City during the first half of the 1930s, it would be a great oversight to assume that the rest of the country was ignorant of this scene. You can disguise great music with the Midwest, but eventually its echos will drift to the coasts. After all, what’s buried underground cannot stay hidden forever. KC was a cache of virtuoso musicians just waiting to spill into the national scene. Eventually, and not surprisingly, one act transcended. In 1936, the Count Basie Orchestra was discovered by Columbia Records executive John Hammond. By early 1937, the fourteen piece ensemble that carried the heart and spirit of the KC jazz scene began performing and recording in New York City (Williams 27). Basie’s steady, rolling rhythms and "hot" tempos and technical prowess were unparalleled. "Combined with several brilliant solists [. . .] all of whom were relatively unknown, Basie hit listeners and fellow musicians like a thunderbolt"(Pearson, Goin’ To Kansas City 134).
One might assume that such national exposure and reception could be nothing but a gain for KC jazz. However, Basie’s ascension to the top, more importantly his recording in New York, set the table for a period of massive migration. Hammond had found his newest musical tap in Kansas City, and was set on bringing that tap to the most lucrative market in the country. Mary Lou Williams explains Hammond’s reaction to KC jazz:
"He was knocked out by what was happening musically, because he’d never heard such a thing. And he began to get jobs for the musicians. [. . .] It was very beneficial what he did, but it left no one there that anybody could copy or to continue what was happening, because everybody that was playing left" (qtd. Pearson, Goin’ To Kansas City 184).
The prospect of "hitting it big" in NYC, as compared to simply skirting along through the dens of iniquity in Kansas City, was too palpable for most to pass up. As a result, the best of the KC swing scene hopped a bus and headed east. Their sound then gained recognition and prominence through the clubs and radio stations of New York, and little by little the KC jazz sound took on an association with its new home. Undoubtedly, this was a great benefit to the individual musicians, but it proved a bane to the city and scene that cultivated them.
A second layer lurks beneath the dissemination of Kansas City jazz, which may have been more influential than John Hammond in the musician migration. Count Basie and company were not simply going to where the money was, they were going where the work was.
Around 1937, the freewheeling, racketeering, open spirit of Kansas City began to gain negative recognition throughout the rest of the country. In response to the seedy image that developed under Tom Pendergast’s control, newly elected Missouri Gov. Lloyd Stark made it his top priority to bring this period of lawlessness to a close. In 1938 "Stark declared war on vice in Kansas City" (Haddix "Tom’s Town" 13). Through enacting a series of investigations and reforms Stark began a cleansing of the city and an ousting of Pendergast. One of the more devastating new pieces of legislature required that all bars and performance venues close their doors by 1pm. This greatly limited the business of nightclubs, and resultantly limited the amount of work available for professional musicians (Haddix, "18th & Vine"). By the end of 1938, most of the mob run clubs, gambling dens, and performance venues were shut down. Finally, in 1939 Tom Pendergast was convicted and jailed for income-tax evasion, a symptom of organized crime previously made famous by Chicago’s Al Capone (Pearson Goin to Kansas City 86).


Ain’t Nothing But a House of Cards

When Kansas City jazz began collapsing in on itself, when all the pillars that held the musical roof up either moved out or were imprisoned, a new talent emerged. A talent so genius and incomparable that, if he had chosen to do so, I believe this talent could have resuscitated the spirit of KC jazz, and drawn the music back. I’m speaking of course about saxophonist Charlie Parker.
But this talent did not, and would not, resurrect the Kansas City style, simply because his virtuosity was too great for the style to contain. You cannot bury a Charlie Parker in the works of a twelve piece ensemble. His level of skill and progressive innovation calls for a much smaller, more intimate collection of musicians, so that his music can take center stage. The rise of Charlie Parker, and the general rise of the individual talent, as opposed to the big band dynamic that flourished in KC, led jazz into its modern age. The ensemble "riffing" and steady rolling rhythms of swing jazz dissolved into the more free flowing, intellectual and uncompromising form which it is found in today. Effectually, when Charlie Parker came along, jazz stopped dancing. And when jazz stopped dancing the people stopped showing up. The broadly popular style characteristic of Kansas City in the mid 1930s was no longer the direction in which jazz was headed. The form that Parker initiated then waned in national acceptance and became relegated to a pure underground of jazz afficionados. Kansas City’s prodigal son, as it turns out, put the final board across the door of the KC jazz scene. That, along with the fall of "Boss Tom" Pendergast, the cleaning out of Kansas City’s underworld influences, and the contractual attention of Columbia Records executive John Hammond, led to the very rapid collapse of KC jazz.
However, fingers should not be pointed, and blame should not be placed. Neither Parker, nor Hammond, nor Basie, nor Pendergast should be faulted for the disappearance of Kansas City jazz, because each of these men, in their own way, wrote the history of what we call Kansas City jazz. They were all benefactors and victims of a beautiful and unrepeatable place in time. These men met on the windswept streets of Kansas City and played their cards out on the table, for all who wanted to see. It just happened that their cards piled up into the shape of a nightclub, which, for a short but glorious while, towered over the world of music. Whether they were unaware or unshaken by the infirmity of this house of cards is something only those who built it can know. Maybe they believed it would endure forever. Ultimately though, despite their sincerest wishes, the unbending prairie winds toppled Kansas City’s house of cards and carried away the individual pieces. By the end of the 1930s, the Paris of the Plains was merely a shadow of its musical past; just a ghost town of empty, echoing nightclubs.