Jazz Kaycee Style

Born in New Orleans around the turn of the twentieth century, jazz moved to Chicago in the early 1920s, then came of age in New York and Kansas City during the 1930s and 1940s. Kansas City spawned new style of jazz inspired by yet distinct from the other cradles of jazz. Count Basie described the Kansas City sound as “music you can pat your foot by.”  

The Kansas City style had roots in the wellsprings of jazz: ragtime, blues, and brass band music. During the 1890s, the city served as a major ragtime publishing center and home to many ragtime professors. In 1899, Carl Hoffman Music Company published Scott Joplin’s “Original Rags.”

The signature 4/4 beat of Kansas City jazz came from the blues, which had evolved from the call and response of work songs and field hollers found in Missouri and other southern agricultural areas. Early bandleaders, Major N. Clark Smith and Dan Blackburn trained young, would-be jazz musicians in the brass band tradition.          

Jazz surfaced in Kansas City in 1917. Initially, the New Orleans style of collective improvisation and use of blue notes inspired the early jazz bands. Local bandleaders, Bennie Moten and George E. Lee transcended the New Orleans influence and pioneered a new style of jazz distinguished by four-to-the-bar rhythm, voicing the reed and brass sections, and head arrangements, so-called because they were played from memory. 

To update their music, during the late 1920s, Moten and Lee recruited Count Basie, Eddie Durham, Jesse Stone, and other composers/arrangers from the territorial bands, who toured vast regions of the western United States playing music in a variety of different arrangements. Basie and the others introduced more formal arrangements to the Kansas City tradition, orchestrating a new hard swinging style of jazz distinguished by a driving rhythm punctuated by riffing brass and reed sections supporting solos. A short series of notes repeated through out a song, the riff had been used by Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington and other eastern bands in a restrained mode. By contrast, Basie and Durham accented their riffing sections giving the band a more aggressive and expansive sound. In 1936, Count Basie brought the Kansas City style to the national limelight, ushering in the Swing Era and the Big Band sounds.  

Since then, Kansas City has remained a vibrant jazz center on the national scene. In the 1940s, Charlie Parker along with Dizzy Gillespie and other young modernist created bebop, which revolutionized jazz with its small ensembles, extended, virtuoso solos, and complex melodies and chord progressions. During the next two decades, Kansas City clubs featured both national acts and local favorites like the Five Aces and the Scamps. Despite competition from popular music trends such as rock and roll and disco in the last quarter century, jazz in general and Kansas City jazz in particular have survived and experienced a great revival that continues today.  

Chuck Haddix essay