They All Came to Kansas City
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
When New Yorker writer Lillian Ross covered the first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, she identified musicians by their instrument and their style; for instance, Lee Konitz was described as “alto, modern.” Only a generation earlier, however, the key element of a player’s style had been geographical: Where they came from determined how they played.
Nothing so vividly illustrates the importance of regional styles in early 20thcentury American music as the hot, swinging brand of jazz that came out of Kansas City in the 1920s and 1930s.Well before the swing era, Kansas City established itself as the fourth great center of jazz activity, along with New Orleans, Chicago, and New York.
During Prohibition and immediately after, the city’s corrupt political boss, Tom Pendergast, created an environment in which all the popular vices flourished: gambling, prostitution, drinking, and dancing – and jazz was the soundtrack to it all. On any given night, dozens of bands were playing in dozens of clubs. Jazz activity centered on the city’s prosperous black section. The hot spot was the corner of 18th and Vine, the Kansas City equivalent to 125th and Lenox in Harlem.
Just as New Orleans jazz was perfectly placed to absorb African, European, and Caribbean elements, Kansas City drew on influences from all over the country: from the advances in form and harmony from the East, the exuberance and rhythm of the South, and the blues-based style of the scrappy bands based in the outlying territories (most famously, Walter Page’s Blue Devils).
The city’s remarkable contributions to jazz are being celebrated this week in a three-concert festival at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Kansas City is also the subject of a detailed yet concise new history, “Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop, a History” (Oxford, 274 pages, $32) by Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix. Together, the authors show that Kansas City jazz was always a matter of give and take, not only between saxophones and brass, but among different regional traditions.
Mr. Driggs, the force behind the world’s best archive of jazz photos, has been researching the subject since the 1950s, and interviewed dozens of key figures who are now long gone. Work on this book began in earnest about 10 years ago, when he hooked up with Mr. Haddix, a Kansas City-based researcher and archivist.
Kansas City had figured in American music as far back as the Ragtime era, when James Scott and other prominent composers and publishers called it home; the title of “Twelfth Street Rag” refers to a street in that town. But the first Missouri band to achieve a national reputation was the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks, one of the great hot dance bands and purveyors of the snappy, syncopated sound of the 1920s. (The Nighthawks were also the last white band from the city to make it into the history books.)
If there is a single hero of Kansas City jazz, it’s Bennie Moten (1894-1935). This pianist and bandleader might be described as the Fletcher Henderson of Kansas City, except he had his act more together (both in musical and business) than Henderson did. Moten dreamed of taking his own band to national prominence and thus advancing the cause of Kansas City jazz itself.
Like Henderson, he hired the best talents he could find – drawing from major black players all over the Midwest and the South – and encouraged innovation. His own band, Kansas City Orchestra, made some of the most exciting recordings of Kansas City jazz, particularly between 1929 and 1932. Two of the other major groups of the era, those of Count Basie and Harlan Leonard, began as Moten spin-offs.
Messrs. Driggs and Haddix tell how Moten once sabotaged his own band on a visit to New York by trying to beat the Harlem bands at their own game, relying on the streamlined New York sound rather than the funkier, older-school approach Missourians refer to as the “stomp-down style.” Yet what made Moten’s 1929-32 band – as well as the subsequent Basie band – remarkable was the combination of the two styles: Lenox Avenue sophistication with Vine Street energy.
The story of Kansas City jazz climaxes in 1935, the year Moten died and, coincidentally, the swing era was born. Two Kansas City bandleaders, Count Basie and Andy Kirk, were able to take advantage of it and realize Moten’s dream of taking Kansas City jazz to a national level. Ironically, both were out-of-towners. Bill Basie (not yet “Count”) was from Red Bank, N.J., and pretty much stumbled upon the Kansas City scene by accident after learning the ins and outs of jazz in Harlem.
But two other bandleaders came close to success on a national level. Leonard – who would, among other things, give modern jazz arranger Tadd Dameron his first break – was done in by bad breaks and decisions. Pianist Jay McShann was poised to follow in Basie’s footsteps, but his career was interrupted by the wart and the draft.
One of the best sections in Messrs. Driggs and Haddix’s book shows the early evolution of McShann’s most famous sideman, Charlie Parker. He had already risen to the top of the Kansas City pecking order even before he began working toward the founding of bebop. Surprisingly, though, there’s comparatively little in the book about Lester Young, the Mississippi-born tenor player who rose to fame with the first great Basie band but, apparently, didn’t loom large in the history of Kansas City.
In the postwar era, most American cities lost their distinctive regional sound, and Kansas City was no different. But Messrs. Driggs and Haddix convincingly show that though Kansas City jazz was finished by the 1950s, its leading lights had played a decisive role in the creation of modern jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock. And even if Kansas City had given us nothing else besides the Basie band and Parker, it would still have made an immeasurable contribution to American music.