MUSIC-USA: ‘Kansas City’ Soundtrack Revisits Early Jazz

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 28 1996 (IPS) - When U.S. director Robert Altman presented his new film, ‘Kansas City’, at the Cannes Film Festival last month, the verdict was nearly unanimous: lousy movie, great soundtrack.

Critics dismissed the story of kidnapping and gangsterism in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1934, but enjoyed the stomping jazz music that revisited the glory days of Kansas City swing music.

What Altman and musical producer Hal Willner — famous here for his tributes to jazz and cabaret composers like Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Kurt Weill — achieved is an odd masterpiece: today’s hottest jazz musicians, playing as if it were still the 1930s.

Kansas City, along with New Orleans and Chicago, is one of the birthplaces of jazz music, and the movie pays a tribute to the era when Kansas City swing bands captured the imagination of the United States. In those days, black bandleaders like Bennie Moten, Walter Page, and ‘Count’ Bill Basie set up shop in Kansas City playing fast, propulsive music that could only be called ‘swing’.

The big bands of that era melded different sounds, from banjo- style guitar picking to growling trumpets, that meshed a variety of U.S. musical styles springing from the rural South. But it also featured dynamic individual performers, including the pianist Basie, saxophonist Lester Young and vocalist Jimmy Rushing.

Eventually, a young saxophonist named Charlie Parker got his start in Kansas City, and went on to reshape jazz music in the post-World War II era.

The ‘Kansas City’ soundtrack, available on Verve Records, captures swing music at its height, but with a difference.

“To re-create the Kansas City jazz sound and the atmosphere of a jazz club in 1934, we brought in some of the best young players who exist in the world today,” Altman explains in the album notes.

“These musicians, many of whom are from different schools and would never under any other circumstances play together, and may never play together again, are all leaders,” he writes. “We threw them together and after feeling a little out of period, they started jamming with each other.”

Instead of Lester Young, the main saxophone players are Harvard graduate Joshua Redman and romantic tenor player James Carter, two young musicians who bring a touch of modern soul music to their styles.

‘Queer Notions’, a song by famed saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, is played here by David Murray, a member of the avant-garde World Saxophone Quarter, who combines John Coltrane’s emotionalism with Hawkins’s more restrained blues.

Don Byron, a clarinetist who has adapted Yiddish kletzmer music to his unique, anarchic sound, and Olu Dara, a clarinetist from an earlier avant-garde period, meld their own sounds into the Kansas City Six’s ‘Pagin’ the Devil’. And Cyrus Chestnut, whose witty style recalls Fats Waller and Thelonious Monk, tackles Count Basie’s brilliant playing.

Altman is right: a band like this may never be seen again. The economics of jazz ceased to favour the big bands that dominated Kansas City by the 1940s, when musicians’ salaries increased and bandleaders had to opt for smaller groups.

After Charlie Parker revolutionised jazz with his highly improvised ‘be-bop’ style, big bands started to fade. With the exception of Murray, who leads his own, postmodern big band in New York, few of today’s jazz players have an experience in the teamwork — and constant competition — of a big band.

That is what makes special the experiment of having players as dissimilar as the bohemian Byron and the more formalist bass player Christian McBride share an album. For once, the modern musicians can experience how big bands melded unique personalities and brought out musicians’ competitive flair.

Among the stars of the album are Jesse Davis, a New Orleans native who brings a Southern touch to his saxophone playing, and Kevin Mahogany, who recalls Rushing’s bold singing on ‘I Left My Baby’, one of the album’s, and film’s, real show-stoppers.

“I don’t think the likes of it will be seen or heard again for a very long time,” Altman says.

MUSIC-USA: ‘Kansas City’ Soundtrack Revisits Early Jazz

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, May 27 1996 (IPS) - When U.S. director Robert Altman presented his new film, ‘Kansas City’, at the Cannes Film Festival last month, the verdict was nearly unanimous: lousy movie, great soundtrack.
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