Around Hear
In a city with a rich jazz history and an impressive pool of current players, it’s easy to lose perspective, to forget that the musicians who play in local jazz clubs could tour the nation instead of remaining in Kansas City. During his travels, Pat Morrissey drew rave reviews, such as the high praise he received from Bernard Jacoby, the owner of the Los Angeles club Lunaria, who called Morrissey “the best trumpet player we’ve ever had here.” Although he possessed national-scale talent, Morrissey stayed at home, entertaining regulars at the Phoenix Piano Bar & Grill with high-energy performances that peaked with his bar-walking rendition of “The Saint James Infirmary.” Kansas City audiences appreciated Morrissey, but many listeners might not have known what a remarkable player they were witnessing. When Morrissey died of a heart attack at age 48 on February 22, the jazz world lost an emerging world-class talent as well as an unfailingly classy man.
“This man, had he gone on, would have been one of the most prevalent jazz trumpeters in history,” says Artt Frank, a legendary be-bop drummer who has worked with everyone from Chet Baker (for more than twenty years) to Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. “He had that much talent, and he had that much depth.” The Connecticut-based Frank, who makes two trips a year to Kansas City, first saw Morrissey perform three years ago at the Plaza III. “I heard something in his playing that really moved me, and I think it was a poignancy, a sadness in his playing. When I met him, he was what we call a shriller, a screecher, a very forceful trumpet player, but something inside the playing was very tender.”
Frank approached Morrissey, who immediately recognized him and knew of Frank’s connection with Baker and asked him to get together for a jam session the following week. Impressed with the results, Frank gave Morrissey tapes of his collaborations with Baker to see how he would respond. “The next time I heard Pat play, it was almost a complete turnaround,” Frank says. “He had this great big, wide, fat, warm sound that wasn’t present when I first heard him. This told me this guy had an awful lot inside that was not coming out. I’ve been playing for 57 years, and there’s something you hear in a musician that you know he either has it or he doesn’t. Pat Morrissey definitely had it.”
Joined by Harold Danko on piano and Phil Bowler on bass (the other two-thirds of the rhythm section that backed Baker), Frank and Morrissey recorded Souvenir, a Chet Baker tribute CD. This disc surpassed the standard set by 1999’s excellent P.M. Time, showcasing Morrissey’s emerging smooth tone and strong sense of melody. “He began to soar,” Frank says. “What he had in him was making itself known.”
At the same time, Morrissey himself was becoming increasingly well known. “He had grown tremendously over the past fifteen years,” says Ron Rooks, owner of The Music Exchange. “He probably had the best tone, the most Miles Davis-style tone, of any of the current horn players around on a national scale. When he went out of town, he could play anywhere, but he chose to stay here. Kansas City is a very small town and a very tight-knit, closed society as far as music goes. All of us know each other, who plays what, who is reliable and who isn’t reliable. Pat was somebody that they could always depend on to give a quality performance at a gig.”
For Morrissey, a quality performance complemented stellar musical output with showmanship. Rooks recalls one Christmas program when Morrissey stood out from his nattily attired peers by donning a bright green sequined jacket. “He just looked cool,” Rooks says. “He wasn’t afraid to be noticed because his playing backed up what he projected as his image.”
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That image was aptly summarized by Frank’s wife, Lisa, a trumpet player and friend of Morrissey’s who noted he “was the epitome of class. He was always considerate of other people.” Artt Frank adds that Morrissey often went out of his way to ensure that his musical collaborators were comfortable. “When I was doing Souvenir with Pat, this man brought the musicians all kinds of food for the studio: cakes, pastries, coffees. That’s never done today by musicians. Pat had a warmth that permeated throughout his body. There was nothing false or phony about him. He was just honest, and he wore his honesty on his chest.”
Part of that honesty involved sharing his frustration about the concessions that must be made to secure regular gigs. “Pat was a musician who was always looking for new ways of expressing himself,” Lisa Frank says. “In the past few years, he started probing into musical areas. He always loved Chet’s playing. He never imitated him, but he loved that spare, thoughtful approach. But in a lot of the clubs, they wanted to hear the old-style Kansas City jazz. He had to make a living, so he ended up playing a lot of that — but if it were up to him, he would have played his own stuff more.
“It’s hard to introduce new approaches and new ideas when the crowd is expecting a certain style, and that’s what they want and really, in a way, demand,” she continues. “That’s not to put down the audience or the clubs in any way, because they were very supportive. Pat made his living playing for them, and he really loved to entertain people. It’s just that Pat couldn’t get any work doing the style that he really likes. He was more complex musically than he appeared to be in some of the clubs.”
The news of Morrissey’s passing has inspired many listeners to seek out his recordings and discover this other side of the performer. But Rooks offers an admonition. “I hope that it doesn’t take somebody dying to make people realize how good somebody is,” he says. “There comes a point when you say, ‘Who cares about selling product?’ You care more about the person — your last thoughts on that person, your spiritual sense of who that person is.” Rooks couldn’t care less about “selling thirty more Pat Morrissey CDs because he’s dead, but I would like to sell them because people realize they missed out on his music and they want to hear it.”
“I don’t want to see a man with that much talent be forgotten just because he was underground,” Artt Frank adds. “The man’s music will live forever. He was that good a player.” To help preserve that legacy, Frank hopes to raise funds for a Pat Morrissey scholarship for budding musicians. He’s also working as a consultant to Miramax on a proposed Chet Baker biopic, which he hopes might feature some of his own music, including his work with Morrissey. But for now, his voice still regularly breaks and wavers with emotion as he struggles to come to terms with Morrissey’s death. “When a man gets snuffed out so early in life when he’s got so much to offer, it still staggers my imagination,” he says. “A man like Pat Morrissey comes along once every hundred years, and I don’t know that we’ll ever see his like again.”
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Dick’s Blue Heaven
For a Westport club owner, few occasions are more festive than the Big 12 basketball tournament, which brings thousands of sports- (and alcohol-) crazed out-of-towners into the area for game-viewing and late-night revelry. But Dick Schulte, owner of Blayney’s, has even more reason to celebrate; his March 10 birthday falls right in the middle of this mini-March Madness. Helping him to better enjoy this double-dip of good fortune for the tenth year in a row is the Iowa-based group The Blue Band, which has made an average of four visits a year to Blayney’s for the past eighteen years. The streak dates back to 1983, the lone year the group appeared on the venue’s marquee as Bobby’s Blue Band. “A lot of people did not get the joke,” founder/band leader Bob Dorr says of the play on vocalist Bobby “Blue” Bland‘s name, “and the people that did thought we were ripping him off.” The club was equally green at the time, Schulte having started it only a year earlier at age 29. Now Schulte plans to ring in his 48th year with style, with his “number-one favorite band” performing in front of some hometown fans. (Iowa State followers travel well.) “Every show just gets better and better,” Schulte says. “One day, we’re not going to have them in the little club scene, so we’re glad to have them as much now as we can get them.”
