The corner of 18th and Vine stands as one of the most fabled intersections in the history of jazz, and it came roaring back to life over the weekend–more than half a century after its heyday.
To mark the opening of the Kansas City Jazz Museum, in the heart of this city’s once thriving entertainment district, jazz stars great and small converged on the town. Tony Bennett, Dianne Reeves, Al Jarreau, Kevin Mahogany, Pat Metheny, David Sanborn and George Duke shared the spotlight with such local icons as pianist Jay McShann and violinist Claude “Fiddler” Williams, both still swinging gloriously in their 80s.
Surely the old neighborhood hadn’t seen this much action since the days when Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, Andy Kirk, Charlie Parker and dozens of “territory bands” made 18th and Vine a focal point for the blues-drenched swing music still identified with this city.
Because of ferocious ticket demand, two marathon concerts took place Friday night in the restored Gem Theater (across the street from–and owned by–the Jazz Museum), its magnificent neon marquee glowing into the wee hours of Saturday morning. For the throngs who couldn’t get in, TV monitors were placed along two blocks of 18th Street, where men in black tie and women in glittering gowns dined under the Missouri stars.
Musically, the concerts (each with different program) proved almost ideal, emphasizing Kansas City’s illustrious jazz legacy rather than the celebrity of the artists who came to honor it.
To hear McShann unleashing “Hootie’s Blues”–his rough and raspy vocals accompanied by his exuberant, all-over-the-keys pianism–was to savor Kansas City jazz in one of its purest forms. It was McShann, after all, who gave Parker his first professional job, in Kansas City in the 1930s, and McShann never has lost the boisterous musical energy or blues-lament phrasings that put the town on the map early in this century.
Another local legend, violinist Williams, brought the same rough-edged tone and buoyant musical spirit to every riff he played. Jazz may have become a more slick and shrewdly packaged commodity in the 1990s, but the old maestro still regards it as a somewhat rustic music that wears its emotions openly in vigorous dance numbers and sentimental ballads alike.
It wasn’t just the senior citizens, however, who offered indelible work.
Reeves, a gifted singer who has blossomed in recent years, managed to turn seemingly mundane pop tunes into ornate jazz arias. Jarreau, a one-man band if ever there were one, proved as expressive in his eccentric body movements as he was in the novel vocal effects that he alone can produce.
And Mahogany, though blessed neither with Jarreau’s inventiveness nor Bennett’s interpretive originality, turned in a solid reading of the tune that was on everyone’s mind even before he sang it, “Goin’ to Kansas City.”
If Sanborn’s cloying sax solos and Metheny’s featherweight guitar passages were less than compelling, there was great consolation in Bennett’s “Fly Me to the Moon,” sung with heartbreaking simplicity–and without a microphone.
In the end, one hardly could have imagined a better sendoff for Kansas City’s new musical institution, which comes proudly billed as “America’s first jazz museum.”
Surely it won’t be the last.
