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The Joint That (fumpe
Perhaps you remember the old cafes where Kansas City jazz had a great, if dingy, day. WHB's authority on the jazz art gives you the sound-picture of Twelfth Street in its hey-hey-day.
by JAMES B. GANH
WHEN Kansas City jazz was flourishing along Twelfth Street in the early thirties there were two fountainheads of influence.
At Twelfth and Cherry, in what is now a cobbler's shop, the style was set by the way Mister Basic thought music should be played; a very fine way indeed and one destined to become nationally famous. From Sol's Reno Club the world learned much about the production of jazz and all along east Twelfth the lesson was not lost. Powerful drive was the earmark of the era. From 7 p.m. till daylight, the surging rhythm set the pace for Kansas City's night life. The myriad joints bounced widly to the four-four beat while Mister Basic made himself a name.
But west on Twelfth there was another spot from which an entirely different style was emanating. A style not dominated by one personality but created by the separate yearnings of the several individuals involved.
Unlike the always-crowded Reno Club, the place was not one to court the carriage trade and yet it remains in memory as one of the most inter
esting of the upholstered sewers that Twelfth Street sported.
We'll call the place "Lamb's Cafe." The hot beat was encouraged here; and ten years before boogie woogie had caught the puHic fancy, much of the native product was splattered off the walls.
The public never ventured into its dim myopic fog. The small space was peopled entirely with musicians, white and colored, and various denizens of the Twelfth and Broadway locale for whom social consciousness had not yet arrived. Those gentry who did not blow a horn but merely mingled in the murk perhaps often wondered about the frantic purveyance of noise which continued well into the dawn's oily light. To them it made no sense — the fine, dreamy wanderings of Earl Darrow's trombone, the raucous, pell-mell bellowing of Emmet Adam's fusty tenor sax — adorned with cellophane, chewing gum, hairpins and sheet rubber in lieu of a major overhaul — the embouchuric strife of Len Denby's dented cornet presided over by his one good eye (a kind of Cyclopian cacaphony) ; and the quietly chaotic keyboard acrobatics of Bill Chowning.