Articles by Con Chapman
Give Your Regards to Broadway—and Hollywood
by Con Chapman
Those who recognized the complexity and beauty of jazz early on--such as twentieth century French critic Hugues Panassié--rightly characterized it as American's unacknowledged classical music. Their sentiment came to fruition in the wrong way by the end of the century when the genre had fallen from its peak to its current lowly status, tied for last with European classical music in terms of popularity. This downward plunge has been blamed on everything from Elvis Presley and the coming ...
read moreA Tale of Two Jazz Humbugs
by Con Chapman
"Humbug" is a little word of great utility that has unfortunately passed out of general usage. It means, according to Webster's Dictionary, “a person who does not live up to his claims; impostor." While it carries the connotation of deception or trickery, it was more generally applied to what we would today call--with less compactness--a pious fraud; the fellow who claims to have principles, but upon closer examination fails to live up to them. This is a tale of two ...
read moreThe Rat Pack vs. the Kids in the Kitchen: Are Those Our Only Choices?
by Con Chapman
It was a more important anniversary than most so we decided to splurge on a local restaurant that always gives me buyer's remorse when I get the check. My wife and I are both getting up in years and we eat out at what she used to jokingly refer to as “blue hair hours," when you can get the early-bird special if you want. In that time slot the crowd consists of senior citizen guys and their wives, ...
read moreShut Up, He Explained: On Talking Heads In Jazz Flicks
by Con Chapman
As an avid watcher of jazz documentaries, my thoughts on the genre may be summed up by the words of two of my favorite writers, Raymond Carver and Ring Lardner. Carver named his first short story collection “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?--the words are spoken by a character named Ralph to his wife Marian, who has confessed to cheating on him in the story of the same name. From Jazz by Ken Burns and Geoffrey Ward to ...
read moreWhich Came First—Jazz or Baseball?
by Con Chapman
Baseball and jazz rank high among the objects of my affection, and have several things in common: Both are distinctively American products with foreign roots; both are inexhaustible sources of enjoyment, at least to me; and both are popular in the best sense of that word, with broad appeal across ages, races and classes. That doesn't mean they're related, although a school of thought has developed that the word “jazz" originated as a baseball term. The genesis of ...
read moreKansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good
by Con Chapman
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 2 “Stomp to Swing" and Chapter 3 “Bennie Moten and His Competitors" from Con Chapman's Kansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good (Equinox, 2023). Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once wrote that he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. In jazz, the same deference to the senses applies in the case of the word “stomp"; musicians and critics alike throw up their ...
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