![]() It seems like the entire milieu surrounding jazz has changed between 1930s Kansas City and now - how it's taught, presented, marketed, played, listened to - so how do you account for that? Is there enough population density, disposable income, even audience interest for this to be sustainable? ( Plastic Sax and kcjazzlark, looking at you.) How do cities actively market their jazz histories as a tourism or nightlife draw - while respecting the need for musicians to be creative now? Somebody get New Orleans on the phone. There's plenty here for the urban planner to analyze, but as a music fan, I see a lot of other rhetorical questions related to the "jazz" branding here. But many vacant storefronts still linger, looking for tenants and patrons. In the last 20-odd years, an influx of city cash has gone into redeveloping the "Jazz District" - 18th and Vine is now home to the American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, as well as a jazz club, a 500-seat theater and a few other businesses and venues. It fell into disrepair in the second half of the 20th century, the victim of the same forces that depopulated many urban centers. ![]() It might be noted that jazz is central to this particular story.Īs Brandon Reynolds reports, the part of town where Count Basie and Charlie Parker honed their talent in clubs was once the hub of African-American cultural life in Kansas City. Yesterday's story about Kansas City's 18th and Vine district in The Atlantic Cities should sound familiar to anyone who pays attention to the way U.S. Johnson, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Art Tatum, Dick Hyman, and the beautiful Dorothy Donegan to name a few.A mural in the 18th and Vine Jazz District of Kansas City. Kansas City jazz is a style of jazz that developed in Kansas City, Missouri during the 1920s and 1930s, which marked the transition from the structured big band style to the much more improvisational style of bebop. Notable musicians of the Harlem stride movement include James P. But Johnson’s greatest contribution to music may, perhaps, be that he and Jelly Roll Morton are considered the most significant bridge figures from the ragtime era to jazz. 2 Johnson’s most well-known songs are “Charleston” from his Broadway show Runnin’ Wild (1923), “If I Could Be With You One Hour Tonight,” and his 1921 virtuoso stride piano masterpiece “Carolina Shout,” one of the first jazz piano solos to have ever been recorded. Johnson was a prolific “invisible composer” of mostly unknown works, including an opera, piano concerto, symphony, sixteen musicals, 200 songs, and two-tone poems. 1Īccording to musicologist David Schiff, American self-taught stride piano pioneer James P. It is generally acknowledged that it was due mostly to the work of these pianistic jazz giants that stride piano style continued to be extremely popular into the 1930s and even the 1940s. Johnson, referred to often as the “Father of Stride Piano,” Willie “The Lion” Smith, Charles “Luckey” Roberts, and Thomas “Fats” Waller. Those most often mentioned as history’s greatest early stride pianists were James P. Additionally, in stride piano style, one began to hear greater incorporation of the occasional blues notes. While this motion was also seen in ragtime piano music, the tempos in stride piano were considerably faster, tended to feature more notes, and were harmonically more adventurous the right hand was also more inventive, improvisatory-sounding, and virtuosic than it was in ragtime. The name “stride piano” came from the look of the striding motion of the pianist’s left hand, with its constant alternation of bass note on beats one and three and mid-range chord on beats two and four. Attendees paid to be present at these “cutting contests,” and that was the way musicians raised rent money. ![]() ![]() It was in Harlem where this musical style was first created and developed-at rent parties, where pianists competed with one another and attempted to outplay their competitors. According to historian Mervyn Cooke in his book Jazz, the next step after ragtime in the historical evolution of jazz piano was 1920s Harlem stride piano. Commonly referred to as stride, Harlem stride piano is a style of jazz piano that is a derivative form of Kansas City jazz and an extension of ragtime.
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