Queering Kansas City Jazz

The Jazz Age, a phenomenon that shaped American leisure culture in the early twentieth century, coincided with the growth of Kansas City, Missouri, from frontier town to metropolitan city. Though Kansas City’s music, culture, and stars are well covered, Queering Kansas City Jazz supplements the grand narrative of jazz history by including queer identities in the city’s history while framing the jazz-scene experience in terms of identity and space. Cabarets, gender impressionism clubs, and sites of sex tourism in Kansas City served as world-making spaces for those whose performance of identity transgressed hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide a critical deconstruction of how the jazz scene offered a space for nonnormative gender practice and performance and acted as a site of contested identity and spatial territory. Few books examine the changing ideas about gender in the turn-of-the-century Great Plains, under the false assumption that people in middle-American places experienced cultural shifts only as an aftershock of events on the coasts. This approach overlooks the region’s contested territories, identities, and memories and fails to adequately explain the social and cultural disruptions experienced on the plains. Clifford-Napoleone rectifies this oversight and shows how Kansas City represents the complexity of the jazz scene in America as a microcosm of all the other people who made the culture, clubs, music, and cabarets of the age possible.

The Jazz Age, a phenomenon that shaped American leisure culture in the early twentieth century, coincided with the growth of Kansas City, Missouri, from frontier town to metropolitan city. Though Kansas City’s music, culture, and stars are well covered, Queering Kansas City Jazz supplements the grand narrative of jazz history by including queer identities in the city’s history while framing the jazz-scene experience in terms of identity and space. Cabarets, gender impressionism clubs, and sites of sex tourism in Kansas City served as world-making spaces for those whose performance of identity transgressed hegemonic notions of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide a critical deconstruction of how the jazz scene offered a space for nonnormative gender practice and performance and acted as a site of contested identity and spatial territory. Few books examine the changing ideas about gender in the turn-of-the-century Great Plains, under the false assumption that people in middle-American places experienced cultural shifts only as an aftershock of events on the coasts. This approach overlooks the region’s contested territories, identities, and memories and fails to adequately explain the social and cultural disruptions experienced on the plains. Clifford-Napoleone rectifies this oversight and shows how Kansas City represents the complexity of the jazz scene in America as a microcosm of all the other people who made the culture, clubs, music, and cabarets of the age possible.

The music later called "jazz" flourished in Kansas City from the 1890s until the end of World War II, when city boss Tom Pendergast's patronage of jazz clubs ended with his incarceration for tax evasion. The city was home to a wide array of clubs, cabarets and performers from every corner of America. As a railroad terminus, the jazz scene in Kansas City was the last stop on performance circuits such as the Theatre Owner's Booking Association (TOBA). While famous people and events of the jazz scene remain in popular memory, many other important aspects of the complex jazz scene were silenced by the grand narrative of jazz history. What about the lives and experiences of brothel madams, drag performers, table dancers, and other citizens who do not appear in the written history of Kansas City jazz? This dissertation will attempt to excavate the lived experience of those Kansas City jazz scene citizens through an analysis of its geography of desires. Geography of desires is an attempt to understand the complexity of life in Kansas City's jazz scene in spatial terms. It is also an approach intended to answer an important question: did citizens who considered themselves marginalized in the Kansas City jazz scene engage in what Jose Esteban Munoz termed "worldmaking" in spaces they identified as "theirs?" Through the geography of desires, I theorize that cabarets, drag clubs and brothels in Kansas City also served as worldmaking spaces. In order to explore the role that jazz scene spaces played in worldmaking, this work attempts an intersectional analysis of the performance of gender, sexuality, class and race in Kansas City. The first chapter focuses on the theoretical underpinnings of the geography of desires approach. The second chapter examines the grand narrative of jazz history as it represents Kansas City. The third chapter explores the intersections of identity in the Pendergast machine. Gender transgression in the jazz scene is the focus of the fourth chapter. Prostitution and sex tourism are the center of chapter four. Finally, chapter five investigates the life of table singer Edna Mae Jacobs.

Jazz is a music born in the United States and formed by a combination of influences. In its infancy, jazz was a melting pot of military brass bands, work songs and field hollers of the United States slaves during the 19th century, European harmonies and forms, and the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean. Later, the blues and the influence of Spanish and French Creoles with European classical training nudged jazz further along in its development. As it moved through the swing era of the 1930s, bebop of the 1940s, and cool jazz of the 1950s, jazz continued to serve as a reflection of societal changes. During the turbulent 1960s, freedom and unrest were expressed through Free Jazz and the Avant Garde. Popular and world music have been incorporated and continue to expand the impact and reach of jazz. Today, jazz is truly an international art form. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Jazz contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,500 cross-referenced entries on musicians, styles of jazz, instruments, recording labels, bands and bandleaders, and more. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Jazz.

Welcome to Kansas City—the best town this side of Hell. The Paris of the Plains. Home to the Wettest Block in the World. This collection celebrates a storied history of one notorious city. Meet the mobsters and victims, bootleggers, madams, political bosses and raucous entertainers who truly brought the party to the plains even during Prohibition. Witness the best parades, the wackiest costumes and the wildest scams. Kansas City’s sordid underbelly is full of surprises sure to delight and entice—the odd, macabre and delightful.

Since the 1990s, migrant musicians have become increasingly prominent in New York City's jazz scene. Challenging norms about who can be a jazz musician and what immigrant music should sound like, these musicians create mobile and diverse notions of jazz while inadvertently contributing to processes of gentrification and cultural institutionalization. In Jazz Migrations, author Ofer Gazit discusses the impact of contemporary transnational migration on New York jazz, examining its effects on educational institutions, club scenes, and jam sessions. Drawing on four years of musical participation in the scene, as well as interviews with musicians, audience members, venue owners, industry professionals, and institutional actors, Gazit transports readers from music schools in Japan, Israel, and India to rehearsals and private lessons in American jazz programs, and to New York's immigrant jazz hangouts: an immigrant-owned music school in the Bronx; a weekly jam session in a Haitian bar in central Brooklyn; a Colombian-owned jazz room in Jackson Heights, Queens; and a members-only club in Manhattan. Along the way, he introduces the improvisatory practices of a cast of well-known and aspiring musicians: a South Indian guitarist's visions of John Coltrane and Carnatic music; a Chilean saxophonist's intimate dialogue with the sound of Sonny Rollins; an Israeli clarinetist finding a home in Brazilian Choro and in Louis Armstrong's legacy; and a multiple Grammy-nominated Cuban drummer from the Bronx. Jazz Migrations concludes with a call for a collective reconsideration of the meaning of genre boundaries, senses of belonging, and ethnic identity in American music.

This collection analyses the remaking of culture and music spaces during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Its central focus is how cultural producers negotiated radically disrupted and uncertain conditions by creating, designing, and curating new objects and events, and through making alternative combinations of practices and spaces. By examining contexts and practices of remaking culture and music, it goes beyond being a chronicle of how the pandemic disrupted cultural life and livelihoods. The book also raises crucial questions about the forms and dynamics of post-pandemic spaces of culture and music. Main themes include the affective and embodied dimensions that shape the experience, organisation, and representation of cultural and musical activity; the restructuring of industries and practices of work and cultural production; the transformation of spaces of cultural expression and community; and the uncertainty and resilience of future culture and music. This collection will be instrumental for researchers, practitioners, and students studying the spatial, material, and affective dimensions of cultural production in the fields of cultural sociology, cultural and creative industries research, festival and event studies, and music studies. Its interdisciplinary nature makes it beneficial reading for anyone interested in what has happened to culture and music during the global pandemic and beyond.

Kansas City is often seen as a mild-mannered metropolis in the heart of flyover country. But a closer look tells a different story, one with roots in the city’s complicated and colorful past. The decades between World Wars I and II were a time of intense political, social, and economic change—for Kansas City, as for the nation as a whole. In exploring this city at the literal and cultural crossroads of America, Wide-Open Town maps the myriad ways in which Kansas City reflected and helped shape the narrative of a nation undergoing an epochal transformation. During the interwar period, political boss Tom Pendergast reigned, and Kansas City was said to be “wide open.” Prohibition was rarely enforced, the mob was ascendant, and urban vice was rampant. But in a community divided by the hard lines of race and class, this “openness” also allowed many of the city’s residents to challenge conventional social boundaries—and it is this intersection and disruption of cultural norms that interests the authors of Wide-Open Town. Writing from a variety of disciplines and viewpoints, the contributors take up topics ranging from the 1928 Republican National Convention to organizing the garment industry, from the stockyards to health care, drag shows, Thomas Hart Benton, and, of course, jazz. Their essays bring to light the diverse histories of the city—among, for instance, Mexican immigrants, African Americans, the working class, and the LGBT community before the advent of “LGBT.” Wide-Open Town captures the defining moments of a society rocked by World War I, the mass migration of people of color into cities, the entrance of women into the labor force and politics, Prohibition, economic collapse, and a revolution in social mores. Revealing how these changes influenced Kansas City—and how the city responded—this volume helps us understand nothing less than how citizens of the age adapted to the rise of modern America.