5/30/2023 0 Comments Kansas city jazz museum hoursOne musician-pianist Bennie Moten-became the most successful bandleader in Kansas City on the basis of his ties to Pendergast, his organizational and business skills, and his sense of musical tastes shifting from the two-beat structure of ragtime to a more fluid four-beat structure. Americans patronized speakeasies and, since jukeboxes hadn’t been developed yet, a need for live music to accompany the flow of liquor was filled by musicians who came to Kansas City where nightclubs stayed open due to Pendergast’s control of law enforcement while they were closed elsewhere. Kansas City was controlled by a politician-Tom Pendergast-who had owned saloons and a wholesale liquor business before prohibition, and he continued his operations after Prohibition more profitably than before as illicit liquor sales weren’t taxed. The political changes that created the environment in which jazz thrived in Kansas City are described in 1920, America embarked on an experiment in self-restraint, banning the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages, a reform that came to be called “Prohibition.” People didn’t stop drinking, however, and illegal bars known as “speakeasies” sprang up around the country to serve alcohol surreptitiously. These bands were featured along with minstrel performances and developed a musical tradition of their own that combined the typical brass bands of the 19 th century enhanced by African-American musical touches of their own, such as syncopation. Third, circuses developed “side show” bands that featured African-American musicians apart from the “Big Top” tent where the main attractions performed. Louis, Missouri, where the opportunities to profit from their compositions through publication of sheet music were greater than in rural areas. The principal practitioners of this style came from the Southwest, particularly Texas, Oklahoma and southwest Missouri, and gravitated towards Kansas City, Sedalia, and St. ![]() Second, the piano style known as “ragtime”-because of its “ragged” syncopated rhythm-developed into a national craze as Americans responded to its contrasting beats in the treble and bass. ![]() After the Civil War, freed Blacks began to replace white performers, and the prior musical styles performed in minstrel shows-“thinly disguised Irish reels, hornpipes and English country dances”-disappeared as African-American musicians introduced their own original music to the entertainment form. First is the tradition of minstrelsy, which originally consisted of white entertainers in blackface imitating African-Americans’ music. The roots of the music that came out of the Southwest and flowed into Kansas City are described. Kansas City Jazz focuses on the broader themes and the stories of the major personalities whose individual talents came together to create the larger whole of Kansas City’s distinctive brand of jazz. The first comprehensive work on the subject in over 15 years, this book draws on new research to delve deeper into music of the American Midwest that evolved into Kansas City jazz, and includes profiles of individual musicians who developed very different styles within or beyond the framework of the sub-genre. Kansas City jazz has inspired the creation of a museum and has been the subject of a feature-length film, Robert Altman’s 1996 “Kansas City,” and even a sentimental rock song, “Eternal Kansas City” by Van Morrison. Kansas City’s brand of jazz has been described as “the most straightforward and direct style which has been developed outside New Orleans,” by Hughues Panassié and Madeleine Gautier in their Dictionary of Jazz. The brand of jazz that developed in the Kansas City area in the period from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is recognised as both a distinct stylistic variation within the larger genre and a transitional stage between earlier forms of African-American music, such as ragtime and blues, and later, more modern forms, up to and including bebop. His writing on jazz has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, Syncopated Times, and Brilliant Corners, among other publications. ![]() Con Chapman is the author of Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Jonny Hodges (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Book of the Year Award by Hot Club de France, and a 2020 Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections.
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