Kansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good

Kansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good
Con Chapman
358 pages
ISBN: # 978 1 80050 282 6
Equinox Publishing Limited
2023

In January 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution came into effect, ushering in 14 years of Prohibition and, inadvertently, a golden age for organised crime. As Harry Truman, not yet the president, observed in a letter to his fiancée, things were looking pretty good for the moonshine business. In fact, several states had been theoretically dry for years, but Prohibition made them genuinely dry. In Kansas City, a wholesale liquor dealer called Tom Pendergast saw the opportunity Prohibition presented and diverted his flow of booze underground, avoiding tax and supercharging profit. Under his patronage, Kansas City openly flouted Prohibition. Nightlife boomed and the flourishing speakeasies cried out for entertainment. Musicians flocked to Kansas City from all over the Southwest. If Kansas City was the crucible and illicit booze the bellows under the fire, the musical alloy it produced was, for a time, unrivalled.

Chapman starts at the beginning, providing a detailed and insightful account of the birth of jazz in the Southwest, catalyzed by the local musicians finding inventive new uses for the substantial stocks of European brass instruments abandoned by the bands of the Confederate army. The author makes the point that, without formal tuition, those musicians had no concept of the traditional limits of the instruments. With no one to tell them how to play, they played however they liked.

The opening chapters take us through travelling bands and the rise of ragtime to the possible invention of jazz as we know it by Jelly Roll Morton (an assertion Morton made loudly and repeatedly and against which Chapman puts up little argument). Soon we come across Walter Page being encouraged to pick up a string bass (or "bull fiddle") and, through his thumpingly loud technique, securing its position in the jazz band rhythm section. Leaving his first band leader, Bennie Moten, he forms the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, and that is where the scene setting stops and the story of Kansas City jazz as we know it begins.

Within a few years, the Blue Devils were attracting all manner of talent, including Eddie Durham, Jimmy Rushing, Hot Lips Page and Count Basie, who had written to Page to express his admiration after hearing the Devils and who was only able to join through an arrangement that had everyone else in the band chip in a little of their wages to pay his. Humble beginnings indeed.

The thriving marketplace of talent that existed between the bands of leaders Moten, Page and Basie reads like a roll call of Kansas City jazz royalty and sets the scene for a number of genre defining events. Coleman Hawkins? Check. Lester Young? Check. Charlie Christian? Freddie Green? Check. Herschel Evans? Buck Clayton? Billie Holiday? Harry "Sweets" Edison? Check, check, check. The famous names rack up with dizzying speed.

Chapman organizes his extensive material semi-thematically. The contents are generally chronological, but with substantial sidesteps into other areas of interest as they come along. We get a chapter charting the development of the music from boogie-woogie to bop, then one devoted to the great Kaycee tenor players. There are chapters devoted to trumpeters and trombonists. For most of us, at least some of the names will be obscure and without knowing who's who, it can be a little hard to keep track; unless this entire subject absolutely fascinates you and you are already something of an expert, this might not be a book best read from beginning to end. Occasionally, the momentum drops a touch and it can feel that we are in a fallow period of; this person did this, then that person said that; this happened here, then that happened there. Because of the way the book is constructed, however, there is no need to start at the beginning and read through to the end. The chapters overlap in many places, and you don't necessarily need to have read one to get the full enjoyment from another.

And that is a real strength of the book. As a strictly chronological narrative history, we would not see the myriad links and interconnections between people, events and places. Instead of a strict timeline, we get a rich sense of how messy and unpredictable and desperate and joyous life in Kaycee was for those determined to live their life through jazz. We see musicians that we recognise in their successful, well-fed, well-groomed form, before they made it, when they were struggling, down on their luck, drunk, hocking their instruments and gathering around a pot to share a stew of maybe chicken, maybe squirrel. Glamorous it is not.

What is more, because the depiction of the tightly knit jazz community in KC is so very painstaking, it throws up a lot of moments of inflection when we glimpse what might have been. Could Bennie Moten have beaten Count Basie to the top spot if he had only made a few more astute choices about the deals he signed? If Lester Young had never heard a rare C-melody sax and tried to imitate it on the tenor, would his ground-breaking tone ever have developed? If Billie Holiday had adored Herschel Evans and despised Lester Young, rather than the other way round, how would that have changed things?

Perhaps the most fascinating and frustrating episode is the tale of how, because Freddie Green's rhythm playing was so central to the swing of Basie's band, Young, Evans and Edison took it in turns to sabotage his amplifier and prevent him from soloing. "Whenever Freddie would lay out of the band to take a solo, the whole rhythm section used to fall apart. So it got to the point where we had to do something about it." They cut off the plug, snapped some wires and eventually removed all the working parts from the amp, leaving just a box. Green was furious but helpless and doomed to go down in history as probably the best jazz rhythm guitarist ever, when he could have been renowned as a fine soloist too. We can only imagine what his career might have been if he hadn't spent the huge majority of it pumping out four beats to the bar behind Basie.

This being a book about Kansas City, many readers will be waiting eagerly for the pages dealing with Charlie Parker. They won't be disappointed. There is much to say about this uniquely talented, singularly dysfunctional character and Chapman marshals his material with care. We meet Parker as a school bully, pushing others out of the way as he reaches in the cupboard for the saxophone. We see him as a cocky teen trying to make it on the bandstand way too soon, and we see his remarkable determination as he goes away for scant months of woodshedding and returns the toast of the town. We are also shown, without sentiment or apology, the seeds of his self-destruction as, at even that early stage of his career, he stumbles barefoot on the stage, playing the wrong parts and vomiting on the microphone.

Like any specialist interest area, books about jazz are sometimes written by people who think that a surfeit of enthusiasm can make up for a lack of professionalism. Not so here. Con Chapman's Kansas City Jazz is a serious, scholarly book which is both exhaustively researched and exactingly referenced. No one who wasn't a massive fan of the music would or could have written this book, but Chapman maintains a balanced authorial viewpoint throughout, which means that on the rare occasion he lets it slip, it is all the more engaging. The odd phrase betrays a more relaxed, informal author, such as when he describes the way Lester Young "hung" the nickname Sweets on Harry Edison.

This is a book which gives again and again. A thorough reading is rewarding and revealing, and even the most devoted fan of Kansas City jazz will learn something from it. As a reference work, it is impressive and will no doubt go onto be listed in the bibliographies of many books yet to be written. Perhaps most importantly, though, it is likely to become an old friend as you return to favorite passages—maybe to read again how Lester Young bested Coleman Hawkins after an epic battle that exhausted all the available pianists, or how a pre-success Count Basie talked his way onto a gig playing organ in a cinema. There are very many small, intimate stories in this large work which deserve repeat reading. As Prez apparently said to the Count, "Let's go back in there and get us another little taste..."

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