Play On

For most people in my generation, jazz music is like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We’ll never go there (instead we’ll see a few pictures of representative caribou), but we’re comforted by the fact that the place exists. All that beauty protected by law. To trample nature by drilling for filthy oil is unthinkable. Likewise, we like having jazz around because it seems somehow important. But go into any nightclub and ask a woman what her favorite jazz album is, and maybe — just maybe — she’ll say, “Uh, Norah Jones?”

No disrespect, but jazz just isn’t cool anymore in America. To younger generations, it’s a dorky baby-boomer thing, like the blues or Branson, Missouri. One problem is that we haven’t had any adequately hip jazz musicians since Miles Davis.

I have a half-committed relationship with jazz that goes back to my early adolescence, when I began listening to a public-radio show in my hometown hosted by a medical doctor who called himself Dr. Jazz. He was an adorable cheeseball with an incredible music library. That music, especially the hard bop and the yearning, baleful music of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, always seemed so spiritually metropolitan — rainy city streets and run-down apartments lit by bare light bulbs; men who looked like schoolteachers and car salesmen channeling some higher spirit through their instruments; the heavy-lidded eyes and gentle, ghostly voice of Billie Holiday, the most beautiful tragedy ever to take female form.

But that was then. Today I struggle with even the classic recordings. Now kids get their kicks from hip-hop, indie rock, punk, metal and, occasionally, an enlightened club DJ who mixes in some Charles Mingus.

But a series of events last weekend, September 8 through 11, shined a tremendous beam on the current state of jazz in Kansas City. It’s needless to point out that Kansas City is famous for its jazz scene in the 1930s, which was quashed by a crackdown on vice and the joyless conceptions of urban renewal. But renewal is exactly what’s going on now.

That much was evident at the September 11 dedication of the Goin’ to Kansas City Plaza at 12th Street and Vine.

Thanks to efforts by barbecue king Ollie Gates, a once-vacant lot is a new, grassy, piano-shaped park at the corner immortalized in the song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller — the song that every Kansas Citian knows at least three lines of: the title line, the one after it, and the bit about the crazy little women and/or way of lovin’. Thanks to a unanimous City Council vote last month, “Kansas City” is now our official song — so if you’re already sick of it, it’s time to quit being a killjoy and grab a bottle of Kansas City wine (if you can find any).

The music scene, however, needs way more than a few energetic philanthropists and council members to get it anywhere near how it was in the era that made this town different from other Midwestern snoozevilles.

“We are literally going to be the jazz capital of the world,” an excited Anita Dixon told an audience at the Bruce R. Watkins center the first night of the dedication weekend. Dixon is a member of the Kansas City Sisters of Jazz and president of the less catchily named Cultural Convention and Visitors Services, a nonprofit that aims to attract tourists interested in seeing the vestiges of KC’s golden age — such as the 18th and Vine attractions and the few clubs where live jazz can still be heard. Dixon, who could get a 90-year-old banker on his deathbed excited about Kansas City jazz, did all the marketing and planning for the dedication weekend, netting reporters from Downbeat and Jazz Times to come check things out.

The most exciting thing that Dixon has devised is the Artist Relocation Program, which is designed to lure professional musicians to move to Kansas City for playing and teaching opportunities. Her first immigrant is Los Angeles alto saxophonist Bobby Bryant — and let me say that if a dozen more artists like him suddenly arrived on the scene, this city would never sleep again.

Bryant is amazing. He blew every day of the long weekend, backed up by locals Everette DeVan (organ), Arnie Young (drums) and Ricky Anderson (bass), bringing to town the kind of aggressive, fiery sophistication that turns instrumental jazz from background music into a narcotic.

Now longtime local hero Bobby Watson (who also performed the first night) has a little help.

Bryant says that the New York and Los Angeles scenes are on their last legs. Musicians in those markets have to be willing and able to play more than just jazz — Rod Stewart still needs a horn section occasionally, and so do late-night talk shows. “Kansas City has the makings of doing everything right,” Bryant says. He’s not just talking about clubs — he’s talking about teaching opportunities and concerts as well. “Jazz is an intellectual art form — it’s never going to be back to the barrelhouse or the speakeasy.”

But there were some fine throwback moments over the weekend, especially Saturday night at the Mutual Musicians Foundation, where a jam session was assembled early (typically the foundation doesn’t get started until the clubs close, around 3), featuring Bryant and his band, young piano wiz Oscar Williams, the venerable tap-dancing and horn-blowing McFadden Brothers, and Haji Akhba, a strange old cat in a tux who played flugelhorn and sang.

It was a good weekend for jazz in Kansas City. But one thing was undeniable: At all the events I attended, I was one of only a few people younger than 40.

If this town really is going to become the jazz capital of the world, it needs a universal reinvigoration of interest in jazz — something that shifts its lifeline from nonprofits back to the nightlife, where you don’t have to shell out $50 and put on slacks to see great jazz.

How that’s going to happen is a baffler. We’ll just have to trust in the longevity of the art form, despite dwindling local scenes. And we can take comfort in knowing that, at this moment, some kid in Japan is learning to play the piano like Jay McShann.