Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop--A History

Due largely to my desire to learn more about the context of Bennie Moten's music in the 1920s and 1930s, I read the history of Kansas City jazz by Driggs and Haddix. Beginning with ragtime, white dance bands, and the social and economic conditions which led to Kansas City, Missouri becoming a "Paris of the Plains" in the 1920s and 1930s, before the fall of the Pendergast political machine, the history ends with the demise of big band and the rise of newer musical forms (bebop, R&B, rock). As one of the few histories of Kansas City's important role in the development of jazz (a simple perusal of the prominent jazz musicians who were schooled there demonstrates its significance), the history is quite detailed. The authors take great pains to demonstrate how the Pendergast political machine's flagrant violation of gambling, prostitution, and alcohol prohibitions favored a lively musical scene in the city's various bars, brothels, saloons, and nightclubs. Even in a racially segregated city such as this one, the amount of opportunities for gigs and the city's vibrant nightlife made Kansas City the premier city for jazz in the West. 

While at times the text throws so many names and abruptly shifts its focus from one musician or band to another, the reader cannot help but feel attached to black Kansas City and the musical world of 18th & Vine. Bennie Moten, Andy Kirk, Jay McShann, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Count Basie, and Mary Lou Williams are among the most well-known names in this history, but a plethora of sidemen, arrangers, and lesser-known artists like Eddie Durham and Gene Ramsay shine. These artists attempts to make it big locally and within the Southwestern and Midwestern territorial circuit, as well as compete with the nationally-known eastern bands from New York illustrate how the "Kansas City" aesthetic to jazz and swing deserves it place in the accolades of jazz history. Their impeccable sense of rhythm, use of riffing and the blues helped define the swing sound so immortalized by Count Basie. Indeed, without influential Kansas City-based artists like Bennie Moten, whose music bridged the ragtime era and age of Swing, whose management and incorporation of early swing aesthetics blended eastern sounds (like that of Fletcher Henderson) with home-grown elements, there would have been no Basie.

As is the case with Chicago, New Orleans, and New York, jazz in Kansas City is irrevocably linked to a racist Jim Crow music industry, segregated venues, and thriving criminal underworld which seized most of the profits while African American musicians and entertainers had to make do with less. Of course, the addition of Jim Crow travel accommodations, the impact of the Depression, and the demise of big bands after WWII impacted Kansas City's jazz scene, culminating in the "end" of the Kansas City sound. It lived on through Count Basie's orchestrated jazz and transformed in the bebop of Parker and the R&B of Big Joe Turner, but its "traditional" sound is not cultivated in the same way that New Orleans preserves Dixieland. It's a shame, since so many of the most important jazz artists of the swing and bop eras either started in or perfected their art in Kansas City: Mary Lou Williams, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Count Basie. And these artists, although forced to establish themselves in New York or other cities, prove that Kansas City was not a peripheral region when it came to jazz creativity.