Images of Vine

This tour starts at Nineteenth and Vine.

This is the Roberts Building, at the northwest corner, in 1929. The white building at the right of the photo, on Vine Street, was the first auto dealership in America owned by a black man. A December 23, 1929 article in one of this city’s black newspapers (in 1929, Kansas City was home to the Call and the American) reported:

“That a negro business man has bought outright a substantial building on a 70-foot frontage at 1826-30 Vine street for a location for his company was considered an event of major importance in the business district in that vicinity and along nearby Eighteenth street. Homer Roberts of the Roberts Company, a motor car agency selling only to negroes, has done this. He bought last week a 2-story building from John T. Sears for $70,0000.

“The structure was erected last spring for occupancy of the Roberts Company. A 10-year lease written then included a purchase option, which was exercised last week. The lease called for an annual net rental of $3600.

“The Roberts Company handles about ten lines of cars, this being permitted by manufacturers because the selling field is limited to negroes. Fifty-four workers, all negroes, are employed by the company….

“The purchase of the business property is to have a holiday aspect. The deed will be given the buyer on Christmas eve.”

Ads promoted an Oldsmobile Six Coach for $1075 (“With its Fisher body, Dueo finish and Balloon tires it looks the part of a winner”), or a Rickenbacker for $1595 (“Speed! The fastest train between New York and St. Louis takes twenty three hours eleven minutes. Cannon Ball Baker drove a Six cylinder Rickenbacker in seventeen hours, thirteen minutes”).

Homer Roberts died in Chicago in 1952.

Today both buildings still stand, boarded in plywood painted red.

Next to the onetime auto dealership, at 1822-24 Vine, stands the facade of the second most historic jazz structure in Kansas City, the Eblon Theater, later the Cherry Blossom nightclub. I wrote about it here.

The night Kansas City saxophonists took down Coleman Hawkins in an infamous jam session at the Cherry Blossom began when Hawkins walked across the street for his horn, to the hotel where he and Fletcher Henderson’s visiting orchestra were staying, and where visiting bands commonly stayed, the Booker T.

This is the Booker T Hotel, at 1821 Vine, in 1936.

This is the site of the Booker T today, a parking lot. The building at the left of the 1936 photo still stands.

Cross back to the west side of Vine. Two houses stood next to the Eblon / Cherry Blossom. From 1940, here is the house at 1818 Vine.

Today, an empty lot sits next to the Cherry Blossom facade. The building at 1816 Vine still stands. The DeLuxe sign on it is a remnant of when this block served as a backdrop for Robert Altman’s film, Kansas City.

An all-black fire company, founded in 1890, was stationed at Engine House No. 11. Here it is, at 1812 Vine, in the 1920s. This company rescued victims of Kansas City floods in 1903 and 1909, and helped fight the 1900 fire that claimed Kansas City’s convention hall. In 1931 the company moved to a larger facility at 20th and Vine. This building reopened as a service station in 1935.

Today, the site is a gravel lot.

At the northwest corner of Eighteenth and Vine stood Fox’s Tavern, in this undated photo.

Today you’ll find a parking lot there. And a sign welcoming you to the 18th and Vine Historic District.

It Continues

One night the owner was drunk or high, I’m not sure which, and talking obnoxiously loud right in the middle of the room, at a table up front, near the stage. The speakers dangling from the ceiling in there were never all that great. Sitting at the bar, I couldn’t enjoy the singer or the band. Dismayed, I left.

Some weekends, that was the late night experience at Jardine’s. Nevertheless, I would often make a point of being there the Saturdays that Shay Estes and Trio ALL took the stage around 10:30, maybe 11, and played until 1:30 a.m., maybe 2.

This was some four years ago and I was rediscovering Kansas City jazz. An extraordinary group of young musicians was storming the scene, more jazz talent than this city had seen since Karrin and Kevin left nearly a decade before. Something special was building here and I wanted to know it.

Friends told me I needed to hear them: A new generation performing jazz in Kansas City. Some graduated from Bobby Watson’s program at UMKC. Some grew up here with the music. Some moved to Kansas City from elsewhere. And they were stretching jazz’s ties into other music they knew, into hip-hop and Michael Jackson and Brazilian music and American Independent music. Here was a generation growing, and broadening, Kansas City’s culture of jazz.

That was four years ago.

And the growing hasn’t stopped.

*****

Friends told me I needed to hear them.

It’s been some time since I’ve been to The Phoenix for music. I don’t work all that far from there, and I’ve stopped by for lunch. But since their music offerings switched to predominantly blues, The Phoenix doesn’t often come to mind when I think where to head for jazz.

Yet, the fact is that for three years now, Everett DeVan’s trio has hosted a jazz jam there every Tuesday night. And at least this past Tuesday, it drew a full house.

Two young vocalists are jamming with Everett’s trio these Tuesdays: Kelley Gant and Dionne Jereau. Both sing standards with a personable and vivacious presence. Last Tuesday, Dionne also branched into jazz-infused pop.

Here’s a pair of excellent voices, with personalities to capture the crowd. Here’s two young singers early in their careers ready to be heard even more. I don’t know where else they perform. But here’s two ladies who should be booking their ensembles into more of this city’s jazz clubs and building their audience.

Because these are two talented jazz vocalists in a city full of jazz mentors. Everett has always been one of the best.

*****

A friend told me I needed to hear her.

I wasn’t familiar with Allie Burik. I didn’t know her name, But last Friday night at Take Five, this bundle of raw saxophone and vocal talent took the stage backed Clint Ashlock on trumpet, T.J. Martley on keyboards, Karl McComas-Reichl on bass and Sam Wisman on drums.

And at the end of the first set, Kerry Strayer’s baritone sax drove the night into something special.

Kerry pushed Allie to jointly swing a riff with him behind Clint’s trumpet solo. Riffing didn’t occur to her. That will come with experience.

Just as her sax solo bent and grew just that much better when Kerry and Clint riffed behind her and inspired her to propel it further.

Word is that Allie is headed to Berkley for college in the fall. But with Kansas City mentors like Clint and Kerry, Friday provided a glimpse at a future star saxophonist sent off to the right start.

*****

It’s fun to watch. Young jazz talent continues to introduce itself to Kansas City. Those musicians I started discovering four years ago are mostly still here. Some test new directions. Shay will be spending June in Portugal with the Portuguese ensemble Fado Novato.

But new talent stands ready to sparkle. Outstanding musicians looking to perform with other outstanding musicians, and educators and mentors and a culture of jazz reside here, ready to help.

I remember a guitarist, many years ago, excitedly recalling something – I no longer recall specifically what – taught to him on the guitar by Claude “Fiddler” Williams. After learning it, “Fiddler” told him, “I also taught that to Barney Kessel.”

Knowledge is transferred. One generation passes on the jazz they know to the next.

And, excitingly, new generations keep coming.

This 'n That 'n History

Saxophonist Ben Webster was born in Kansas City in 1909. He performed here with Bennie Moten’s and Andy Kirk’s orchestras and recorded with both. But he first gained international recognition after moving East, as lead tenor in what was arguably Duke Ellington’s greatest orchestra in the early 1940s.

At least one member of that early ’40s Ellington band is still alive. And living in Wichita, Kansas.

Perhaps this is common knowledge, but I didn’t know. Herb Jeffries, singer with the Duke Ellington Orchestra from 1940 through 1942, and the voice on Billy Strayhorn’s composition, Flamingo, an Ellington hit which sold over 50 million copies, resides today in Wichita. This year, Jeffries turns 100 years old.

I discovered this fact on a radio report from the BBC, which sought Jeffries out to discuss his subsequent roles as a singing cowboy in black Western films. You can hear the story on the podcast of the program, From Our Own Correspondent, here. Scroll to 22:55.

(My favorite line from that BBC story: “Today, he’s largely forgotten but he’s not dead. He’s just moved to Kansas.”)

*****

Jazz grew in Kansas City in the late 1920s and early 1930s through a culmination of circumstances.

TOBA (Theater Owners Booking Association), the Black vaudeville circuit, started in the East and traveled as far West as Kansas City where it reorganized before heading back. Sometimes, performers found themselves stranded here in that reorganization. For instance, a piano player named Bill Basie.

The best known reason for jazz’s development here is that this wide open, gangster-run city of sin provided more opportunities for musicians to find work during the Great Depression, attracting the best from throughout the Mid- and Southwest.

Another accepted reason was the music program of Major N. Clark Smith at Lincoln High School. Regarded as a stern disciplinarian, Smith’s students graduated from his classes knowing music.

Saxophonist Bill Saunders, in the book Goin’ to Kansas City, recalled: “One day Major Smith told the class that music was melody, harmony and rhythm. Being a kid, I paid no attention. The next week, the first thing he said [was], ‘Saunders, stand up here and tell me what music is…. You don’t know, do you?’ He had a ruler and he said, ‘Put your head on the table. Music is melody’ BOOM! ‘Harmony.’ BOOM! ‘Rhythm.’ BOOM! ‘Now go home and tell your Mammy I hit you.’ But I know what music is.”

Among Smith’s other students was Walter Page, legendary bassist for the orchestra Count Basie brought out of Kansas City. Page remembered in a 1958 interview: 

“Major N. Clark Smith was my teacher in high school. He taught almost everybody in Kansas City. He was a chubby little cat, bald, one of the old military men. He wore glasses on his nose and came from Cuba around 1912 or 1914. He knew all the instruments and couldn’t play anything himself, but he could teach…. One day he was looking for a bass player and no one was around, so he looked at me, and said, “Pagey, get the bass.’ I said, ‘But….’ and he repeated, ‘Get the bass.’ That’s when I got started.”

I note all this after stumbling across this photo online. From The Lincolnian, here is the 1917 Lincoln High School Cadet Band and Orchestra. At the left, holding the bass, is 17 year old Walter Page. Standing centered in the back is Major N. Clark Smith.

*****

From the Kansas City Call of September 14, 1928:

“Local No. 627 of the American Federation of Musicians has 300 members in this city. Last year there were only 87….

“And why? Simply, it would seem, because under the leadership of its new president, William Shaw, well known here in musical circles, the Musicians Protective Union is doing more than giving itself the name – now it is living up to the name, and its members are profiting thereby as they have never profited in Kansas City….”

In this photo, from the 1940s, respected longtime Local No. 627 president William Shaw stands behind the table, facing the camera, reaching for the gavel. It was taken on the top floor of the union’s headquarters, in the building known today as the Mutual Musicians Foundation.

Here’s that building in a photo from the 1930s.

As pictured in the last full post, today this building might host an opera singer or, every weekend, jam sessions which span the night.

A Week Sans Post

My goal is to offer a new blog post each Monday. But family matters kept me away from both jazz clubs and the computer this past weekend. Hopefully, next week the new blog post goal will be met.

A Day in the Life of the Mutual Musicans Foundation

It closes at sunrise.

So let’s place the start of the day, last Saturday, at noon. Maybe twelve-fifteen. That’s about when Denyce arrived.

Denyce Graves, says The Kansas City Star, “has belted out grand operas at the Metropolitan Opera and opera houses around the world and has given command performances for presidents and Supreme Court justices….” She was in Kansas City to perform with the Lyric Opera.

On Saturday, she chose to explore Kansas City’s connection to jazz.

So she visited the Mutual Musicians Foundation.

*****

Count Basie jammed here. So did Lester Young, and Mary Lou Williams, and Jo Jones. This was their union hall. Charlie Parker met Dizzy Gillespie upstairs.

Today the Mutual Musicians Foundation is recognized as a National Historic Landmark for its contributions to American history.

Musicians still rehearse here. Weekend jam sessions still last the night.

And a day can start with a visit from an internationally renowned Mezzo-Soprano.

*****

Downstairs, Denyce greeted guests, graciously introducing herself to every one. She examined the walls, covered with graphic panels explaining the Foundation’s ties to jazz history. She recognized names, asking about their association with this building.

Upstairs, engulfed by photos and portraits of musicians who performed here, Denyce chatted. She was told about youth programs and arranged for the children to be photographed with her during intermission of a Lyric Opera performance.

Then, when one young attendee summoned enough courage to take the stage and sing for her, tepidly, Denyce grabbed her phone to record his performance.

“This,” she said, “is how it begins.”

*****

Shortly after Denyce left, musicians walked upstairs to rehearse. Young musicians. These were the Foundation’s Young Jazz Masters.

Each Saturday, the Foundation offers free lessons to any student who cares to participate. This day, a group was competing in a student festival at the Gem Theater, just down 18th Street. But first they returned to the Foundation’s stage to practice.

For more than eighty years, young jazz musicians have practiced here, in this room. Charlie Parker was one.

Later, this night, the room will fill with people listening to live jazz. Every chair will be taken by guests who will have paid $10 each to come and party and drink and talk and hear and enjoy.

But right now, a future generation is on the stage, practicing.

In the Mutual Musicians Foundation, this is how it begins.

*****

About 1 a.m., the music starts. The doors open at midnight, but 1:00 is when the jam session starts. It will continue all night, just as it has virtually every weekend night since the early 1930s.

Matt Otto commands the stage on sax, with Andrew Ouellette on piano, Ryan Lee on drums and Karl McComas-Reichl on bass. Each one, an outstanding musician playing his best.

Other musicians wait in the back of the room to join the jam. These musicians are in their twenties. That’s the age Basie and Lester and Mary Lou and Jo were when they jammed in here.

By 2 a.m., the room started to fill.

By 3, empty seats were scarce.

At 5, the jam concluded.

By 6, the crowd cleared and staff – board members – started cleaning up.

*****

Somewhere around sunrise, Saturday at the Mutual Musicians Foundation came to a close.

This 'n That 'n Two Big Bands

It's true, the majority of the audience is of a certain age when they collectively gasp at the announcement that the next number will be Tiger Rag.

But put it in perspective. This was a special performance. Every seat sold was an individual ticket, not sales built on top of a season ticket base, and cost $40 or $50. The Kansas City Jazz Orchestra (KCJO) sold 800 of those seats for their April 4th show, A Tribute to Benny Goodman’s Historic 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert, in the Muriel Kauffman Theatre at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

That’s a hundred more seats than were built into the brand new concert hall in the acclaimed SFJazz Center. That San Francisco auditorium couldn’t have seated KCJO’s crowd.

Some will hold their nose skywards at a concert full of music that was new 75 years ago. But they wouldn’t be the ones who heard a big band full of outstanding musicians, a couple of whom are also at home with the completely contemporary People’s Liberation Big Band. They wouldn’t be the ones who heard Doug Talley’s wonderful solo on Don’t Be That Way, sparked with phrasing foreign to 1938. And that was just the opening number.

They also wouldn’t be the ones who heard visiting guest Jerry Dodgion join the band for a couple of solos. Or who smiled when ailing artistic director Kerry Strayer took the stage to an accompaniment of cheers (and proceeded to solo wonderfully).

They also wouldn’t be the ones counting the cash on what was, from all appearances, a highly successful fundraising event for KCJO’s 10th anniversary year.

There is an audience for this music, an audience which will pay for a night where the goal is fun. And where the goal is met.

*****

Two nights later, it was The Blue Room’s turn to swing. Last week’s post pictured Bobby Watson’s 18th and Vine Big Band. This was a group originally assembled to join the Kansas City Symphony for a Pops concert. But this Saturday night, tuxes were traded for untucked shirts.

The opening number, Satin Doll, was an arrangement by KCJO’s artistic director. Solos by trombonist Jason Godeau, trumpeter Hermon Mehari, saxophonist Steve Lambert, pianist Roger Wilder, bassist Bob Bowman and leader Bobby Watson established this big band as second to nobody.

Only one member of Bobby’s band also claimed KCJO’s stage. The two nights offered a chance to hear a broad sampling of Kansas City jazz talent swing. The two nights offered the chance to hear two bands excel.

Even so, maybe it was looseness unencumbered by black suits and spit-shined shoes. Maybe it was playing in a genuine jazz club rather than a plushly seated shrine to the arts. Maybe it was playing right on top of the audience, tripping over the front row tables, rather than seeing an orchestra pit of space separating the audience from the stage. Maybe it was the interactions with a younger crowd. Maybe it was just having a drink in hand.

But while Thursday night was unquestionably fun, Saturday night was a blast.

*****

Two weeks ago, I wrote about young musicians who, beyond the Mutual Musicians Foundation, have never known the connections to Kansas City’s jazz past. Many play a more progressive, contemporary music, and draw an audience to jazz clubs.

A week and a day after Bobby Watson’s 18th and Vine Big Band performed, the insanely progressive People’s Liberation Big Band of Greater Kansas City premiered new compositions at The Record Bar.

The range of jazz which can draw a respectable audience in Kansas City today, including more people than they built seats for in San Francisco, speaks broadly to its vitality in this city. Sure, it’s a niche. No jazz artist is going to fill The Sprint Center. But Kansas City can boast an active and diverse jazz community.

*****

Several tidbits:

•  This Saturday night, Beyond the Blues is a fundraiser for Mental Health America of the Heartland. It features performances by the Blues Notions, Todd Wilkinson and Mille Edwards. More information is available here.

•  Kansas City Kansas Community College and The Kansas City Jazz Orchestra team up for the 12th annual Jazz Camp, June 3rd through 7th. Among the faculty:  Doug Talley, Steve Molloy, Everett DeVan, Rod Fleeman, Mike Ning and James Albright. Students can sign up now. More information is available here.

•  Johnson County Community College has announced the lineup for their 2013-14 Performing Arts Series. Among the notable dates: Saturday, January 25th, 2014, when Arturo Sandoval plays Yardley Hall at 8 p.m. as part of Jazz Winterlude.

Bobby Watson's 18th and Vine Big Band at The Blue Room

About a month and a half ago, when they performed with The Kansas City Symphony, they wore tuxedos. This time, Bobby said, they were wearing their slippers.

I didn’t actually see anybody in slippers at The Blue Room last Saturday night. But with Bobby Watson’s 18th and Vine Big Band, I saw a stage filled with a who’s who selection of some of Kansas City’s best jazz musicians. I saw jazz legend Joe Chambers play vibes then drums. And I heard Bobby Watson swing a big band to rival any since Basie left town.

Face it: When you look over a stage and see musicians like Horace Washington, Steve Lambert, Charles Perkins, Gerald Dunn, Jason Goudeau, Hermon Mehari, Al Pearson, Roger Wilder, Bob Bowman, Ryan Lee – I’m not naming everybody – and Bobby Watson out front, you’re seeing a premiere mix of young and veteran Kansas City jazz talent in 2013.

You’re about to hear the big band Bobby assembled to play with the Symphony.

And then they start swinging a packed Blue Room with Kerry Strayer’s arrangement of Satin Doll.

Follow that with a version of Corner Pocket that may make you wonder if the roof’s coming off.

And that’s just the appetizer, because then Joe Chambers joins the band.

If you’re sorry you missed it, well, you should be.

But at least I can show you how a bit of how it looked. Below are photos from last Saturday night at The Blue Room with Bobby Watson’s 18th and Vine Big Band. As always, clicking on a shot should open a larger version of it.

Bobby Watson with his 18th and Vine Big Band, plus Joe Chambers on vibes

Joe Chambers

Bobby Watson

Charles Perkins

Al Pearson

Gerald Dunn

Hermon Mehari

The 18th and Vine Big Band

Watching Joe Chambers solo

Bobby Watson's 18th and Vine Big Band

Jazz Beyond Links

One of his favorite stories was of New Year’s Eve, 1932. He paid Kansas City vice squad members $10 each to raid his club at 12:30 and 3:30 a.m., to clear the joint out and turn the crowd.

In 1974, a writer for Atlantic Monthly described Milton’s like this:

“For more than 20 years, Milton Morris’ dark vault of a bar has been a way station for suburban kids who sensed there had once been some ineffable richness to this city and that if any of it still existed, Milton would know where.”

I was one of those suburban kids.

A 1989 cover story in The Kansas City Star’s Sunday Star magazine described Milton Morris like this:

“Milton Morris was about five feet, six inches, and though most people today remember a skinny little man, he once weighed close to 240 pounds and looked very much like the comedian Lou Costello. Back then, as late as the 1960s, he drank a case of beer every day, usually Heineken’s.

“In his later years his drink was Cutty Sark with a splash of water. He drank from his own special glass, a 14-ounce ‘Texas size’ highball glass. Though his choice of liquor had changed, his consumption remained prodigious. He drank at least a fifth of Scotch each and every night. He smoked huge Macanudo cigars – $2 each – and bought six or eight boxes at a time. He truly loved those cigars….

“Milton talked something like a hip W.C. Fields, sprinkling his conversation with musician’s jargon. When a patron left the bar, Morris always muttered, ‘Later.’ His advice to one and all: ‘Drive fast, talk back to the cops – and tell ’em you know me.’

“The last part of this oft-repeated slogan took on new meaning to those underage drinkers astute enough to notice an interesting pattern. There were times when the phone rang and then [Milton’s wife] Shirley quietly walked around the bar telling the underage customers they had to leave. Such calls were always followed – after a decent interval – by a police visit.”

For many of us, Milton Morris was the link to Kansas City’s illustrious past of gangsters and jazz. He sold “medicinal” whiskey from a drugstore at 26th and Troost during prohibition.  When prohibition ended, he opened the Hey Hay Club at Fourth and Cherry. He employed Count Basie and Charlie Parker and Ben Webster and Jo Jones when they called KC home. And until his death, he told us stories about the Kansas City that was, stories often grounded in dubious truth, from a stool at the front of Milton’s Tap Room at 3241 Main Street.

Next November will mark 30 years since Milton Morris passed.

This past Friday night, I enjoyed Eddie Moore and his group The Outer Circle at Take Five Coffee + Bar in Leawood. The audience was fairly small. I suspect more Kansans were watching, then mourning, KU’s NCAA Tournament basketball game than were out listening to music. But the performance of Eddie Moore on keyboards, Matt Hopper on guitar, Dominique Sanders on bass and Matt Leifer on drums was outstanding, riffing on Eddie’s original compositions.

Most, perhaps all, of these musicians were born after Milton Morris passed.

For many of us, Kansas City jazz began with that link to the past. It was a given. It was part of Kansas City’s jazz life. Kansas City and booze and mobsters and the origins of swing would always clutch a historical bond.

Which sometimes leaves it striking to hear jazz in Kansas City musically unbound and unlinked.

But that shouldn’t surprise when recognizing that jazz in Kansas City today is dominated by young musicians, most born after some of those most vital links were gone. These musicians could not have heard, first hand anyway, the stories I was told. Their interest in jazz is more purely musical, without taints of the the culture and history which fascinated me.

(It also shouldn’t surprise when realizing I was hearing the music in a location which was probably a wheat field an hour outside the city in Milton’s day.)

Friday night’s music fits just one definition of Kansas City jazz: It is music composed and performed by outstanding Kansas City jazz musicians.

True, Matt Hopper’s guitar sometimes riffed on the blues. But mostly, this group’s music held a contemporary, fresh feel while maintaining that accessibility some modern jazz performances lack. It doesn’t rage. Rather, it offers a hook to reel a listener into a vivacious, progressive feel.

It’s not music I would have heard in Milton’s. It doesn’t obviously tie back to Kansas City’s gangster-and-jazz past.

It is jazz by terrific musicians still evolving and growing the music three decades beyond the direct ties to the past I knew. It is a statement on jazz’s continued vitality in Kansas City some thirty years later.

Looney No More

The Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ) headlined the 1985 Kansas City Jazz Festival. A stage was built on the south lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (the lawn was more open then, with less landscaping and no Bloch building), just in front of the portico, facing what was then Brush Creek Boulevard. MJQ almost didn’t go on. The airline lost Percy Heath’s bass. But they found and delivered it to the festival grounds shortly before the group was scheduled to perform.

MJQ musicians Milt Jackson, John Lewis, Percy Heath and Connie Kay remain among the most respected names in jazz history. We were thrilled to book them that August. But their often intimate music demanded a listener’s attention. Maybe, we later realized, that wasn’t the right type of act for a large, outdoor stage.

Everyone in the crowd who listened heard a magnificent show. But the reviewer for The Kansas City Star compared the Modern Jazz Quartet’s performance to Muzak. Tom Leathers, publisher of The Squire, then a popular Johnson County weekly, wrote that we should give up on jazz and stage a free festival Kansas City would appreciate, one with country music.

The same month, a concert at The Music Hall to raise money for building an International Jazz Hall of Fame in Kansas City, with ticket prices up to $150, attracted just 500 patrons. Afterwards, the Count Basie Orchestra, which in 1984 publicly announced plans to relocate to Kansas City, reconsidered its intention to move.

A May, 1987 cover story in The Kansas City Star’s Sunday Star magazine proclaimed its version of “The truth about Kansas City jazz.” An editorial inside declared:

“Who gives a honk. Jazz is and has always been – in my lifetime, at least – an esoteric music form. If it can’t exist in the free marketplace perhaps it should disappear. Sort of America’s musical dodo bird. Let jazz buffs (who as a whole are sort of looney anyway) buy old records and dream of what might have been.”

A few months later, I would take over as chairman of the Kansas City Jazz Commission after a former treasurer of the Commission was accused of (and would later plead guilty to) stealing city money from the Jazz Commission. The chairman of the City Council’s Finance Committee made plans to give the Jazz Commission’s funding to other civic organizations.

Meanwhile, City Hall and underfunded organizations feuded over whether that International Jazz Hall of Fame should be located at 18th and Vine or at 83rd and Holmes.

*****

Last Saturday night, in March of 2013, The Gem Theater at 18th and Vine was nearly filled for the Monterrey Jazz Festival 55th Anniversary Tour. Across the street, Everett DeVan and a pair of vocalists entertained at The Blue Room. Downtown, Grand Marquis defied the snow at the Kill Devil Club while Bram Wijnand’s trio played the downstairs speakeasy at The Majestic. A little bit south, in the Crossroads district, jazz filled the Green Lady Lounge. And quite a ways south, in Leawood, Rich Wheeler’s quartet filled Take Five.

The night before, one of the best jazz groups you’ll hear, Matt Otto’s sextet with Shay Estes, Gerald Dunn, Jeff Harshbarger, Michael Warren and T.J. Martley, played The Blue Room.

*****

There was always an edge back then. Back when I discovered the jazz community, jazz in Kansas City seemed teetering on crisis, constantly.

Jazz is an integral piece of Kansas City’s history. And to those of us who abhorred the identity of a cowtown, jazz and barbecue represented Kansas City’s international renown. That’s why it regularly captured the community’s attention.

Today, though, a welcome calm prevails.

The situation isn’t perfect, certainly.

Jardine’s closed. But other clubs opened.

The community hosts two minor and no major jazz festival, and each of the last two years one succumbed to storms. But we have two jazz festivals.

There’s not sufficient opportunities for this city’s plethora of outstanding jazz musicians to perform. But we welcome an abundance of talent in part because Bobby Watson’s UMKC program keeps turning out magnificent young musicians.

Many of our elder statesmen of jazz, the men and women who created the music, have passed. But the Mutual Musicians Foundation still jams every weekend night, and sponsors its own free program teaching kids on Saturday mornings. At the Foundation, a culture of jazz lives.

18th and Vine remains in many respects an incomplete restoration. But it’s a district showcasing museums and offices and nightlife and wonderful new housing.

In Kansas City today, we enjoy jazz without a feeling of crisis.

Nobody associated with the community is stealing from the city. Nobody is feuding over a Hall of Fame. Nobody is suggesting the festivals be replaced with country music.

And to the best of my knowledge, nobody at The Kansas City Star has compared jazz legends to Muzak or declared jazz fans to be looney for over twenty-five years.

Not publicly, anyway.

Postless

I try to post new thoughts each Monday in this blog. But a busy weekend ended without time to muse on Kansas City jazz. So this week, I take a pass on a new post. I'll simply note to check out the calendar links in the right hand column of this page. They will reveal some outstanding jazz to be heard in Kansas City this week.