New documentary Sounds of the City is director Dustin Phillips’ love letter to KC’s music scene, major players, and forgotten stories
Sounds of the City plays the Uptown Theater on Friday, April 11, with a Q&A beforehand hosted by Jon Hart of The Bridge with Heidi Phillips of Frogpond, Flavorpak founder Jeremy McConnell, musical historian Chuck Haddix, UBI of CES CRU, and Tom Shipley of Brewer and Shipley.
There is also an after-party at the Encore, featuring Flare Tha Rebel, UBI of CES CRU, and a special acoustic performance by The Greeting Committee. Details on that here.
While the music of Kansas City has long been covered by ‘zines, websites, and the publication whose website on which you are currently on, a cinematic overview of the region’s music has thus far been limited to either the fictional, such as Robert Altman’s 1996 crime drama, Kansas City, or the focused, such as Brad Norman’s documentary, The Outhouse The Film 1985-1997, which looked at the legendary Lawrence punk club. Until director Dustin Phillips recently completed Sounds of the City, an overview of the city’s musical history from jazz to rock to hip hop and alternative hadn’t been attempted in a feature-length documentary.
That said, the film originally began as an idea for a YouTube series when the director first moved to town in the fall of 2019. Phillips did interviews with artists Til Willis and Nicole Springer in November of 2019, originally intending to cover up-and-coming musicians in the area.
“Then, I wanted to do some research on Kansas City, because I’m not from here,” explains Phillips, who was born and raised in Topeka. “Why is this so important for musicians and things like that?”
From there, he went down one rabbit hole after another. After beginning his research, Phillips discovered that, aside from different variations of jazz documentaries, there hadn’t been a comprehensive documentary on the history of Kansas City music.
Steve Tulipana. // photo courtesy Dustin Phillips
“When I did all the research and everything like that, I had a general outline–a guiding point, a direction I wanted to go,” Phillips explains, but further rabbit holes opened with every interview he did. Speaking with rapper Stitch81classic led him to Mac Lethal and Approach, with one person after another leading to the next. Sometimes, his lack of knowledge regarding the history of KC’s music scene led to some humorous interactions, such as speaking with Steve Tulipana regarding the impact of RecordBar and being wholly unprepared when Tulipana brought up his work as frontman for veteran post-hardcore act Season to Risk.
“We got there and he was so nice and he was like, so like, ‘So what are you going to ask me about Season to Risk?’” recall Phillips somewhat shamefacedly. “I was looking dumbfaced and I was like, ‘Yeah, we can talk about that,’ so then I just let him do the talking and all of a sudden, I’m like, ‘Oh, we gotta do another interview.’”
That led to an interview with Paul Malinowski, and from there, Frogpond’s Heidi Phillips. Interviewing Chuck Haddix led to Danny Cox and Lonnie McFadden and Dr. Bobby Watson.
Courtesy Dustin Phillips
“They would tell me, ‘Go interview this person,’ and when somebody says, ‘Go interview this person,’ [because] it’ll compliment them, I would go do that,” Phillips continues, saying that, by the end of it, almost three years later, he had ended up interviewing over 50 people for Sounds of the City. “I just felt this need that if I’m gonna tell the story, I have to do it justice and I can’t forget something. The movie is basically me making sure nobody’s forgotten in it because I wanted to do everybody justice.”
In Sounds of the City, while the film gives time to each segment of Kansas City’s musical history in their own segments, the way in which the film flows allows interaction, with hip hop artists explaining how they were influenced by the jazz scene, and where folk and country crossed paths with the rockers, making for an immersive viewing experience.
In the end, it took nine months to achieve the original rough cut after all the interviews were completed. During production, Phillips had used a recorder to capture all the rough audio separately, and then transcribed all that audio, and would then put it up on his office wall.
The wall of text. // photo courtesy Dustin Phillips
“Three months before I even started editing any film I went through and I highlighted everybody’s interview–the sentences and cuts and everything like that,” Phillips explains. “Then I put ’em in note cards on whiteboard, so essentially I had the entire movie laid out like storyboarding via text.”
From there, it took six months of taking all of those highlighted segments and cut them into the main timeline as he edited the film.
“And then, when I finished the film, the festival cut was two hours, five minutes,” Phillips says, noting that even that was cut down for its release on Prime Video, which needed to be one hour and 59 minutes. “Just trimming that last six minutes off for Amazon ended up taking me like two months.”
After a private screening for those who worked on the film last winter, the film is now ready to debut to Kansas City as a whole, and Phillips is excited.
“I’m just excited to let actual people see it,” enthuses the director. “Some of the people that I run into around Kansas City that just aren’t aware of the history and how impactful Kansas City was to what American music as we know it now. It’s crazy how we hear music is a direct correlation to what the city has done.”
Sounds of the City plays the Uptown Theater on Friday, April 11, with a Q&A beforehand hosted by Jon Hart of The Bridge with Heidi Phillips of Frogpond, Flavorpak founder Jeremy McConnell, musical historian Chuck Haddix, UBI of CES CRU, and Tom Shipley of Brewer and Shipley.
There is also an after-party at the Encore, featuring Flare Tha Rebel, UBI of CES CRU, and a special acoustic performance by The Greeting Committee. Details on that here.
Disclosure: The Pitch’s music editor does appear in the finished film as a specialist on the scene.
