We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
14 Sti
was found only in the transient sessions that blossomed unexpectedly in out-of-the-way places.
These were the places sought out by the boys from the big name bands playing the town. Here could be heard the fine, unwatered version of a fierce, powerful medium. The names that created this style — that made it live and without whose influence it quickly died — are lost to all but a few musicians who made this town their home during its hectic heyday.
Here is a listing of those who gave it most: Jack Mathis, trumpet; Bobbie Williams, clarinet; Emmet Adams, tenor; Earl Darrow, trombone; Gordon Means, drums; Bud Kelsey, guitar; and such piano men as Dick Brooks and Bill Chawning. There were many good men besides these but the real boot came from this group.
They were nearly all non-union, since the employers, north side racketeers, felt that the two bucks a night they paid the boys was far better than they could do elsewhere. The union business agents rarely gained entrance to their jobs and when they did so they were removed bodily and brutally by the management. The Kansas City local can claim little credit for the production of white ja;z.
Thus the hot man became an outcast — often communing with the reefer and the bottle. They looked pale, consumptive, and in many cases ragged — but theirs was also a fierce pride — a self-respect that they
February, 194S
would not sell, a standard of produc t tion that they would not lower. |^
Offers from name bands to take important chairs came many times to such artists as Bobbie Williams and / Jack Mathis, but they never com | promised. They didn't believe in the I regimented orchestration, couldn't . read it and wouldn't learn. They I knew what they wanted and were l| content with the small wages and I the proximity of the bar. They played j as if they knew it couldn't last long i and they lived as if nothing but their music existed in the world. It was a grimy, smelly, ill-lit ivory tower but they lived in it and made the world listen for the short, hectic time they lasted.
Tragedy dogged their path and since that time society has picked up the burnt out pieces, placed them in hospitals, jails, and square jobs, but they lived once — and don't forget, Kansas City had a white jazz style. I heard it.
( On Wednesday night, January 1 7, James Gantt initiated a series of record sessions for Kansas Citians interested in the art of "hot jazz." These sessions recur j on alternate Wednesdays at 8:1') at the Jewish Community Center. 1600 Linwood. Mr. Gantt has access to several record collections here in toum. His own stoc1{ of awtlientic American jazz recordings numbers well into two thousand, some dating hack, f'^r as 1908.)
"Chief, there's a recruit out here who says he used to be with a circus. He had k a special act— stuck his right arm into a h'on's mouth."
"Interesting. What's his name?" |
"Lefty."