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Kansas City became the hub of the music world at that time because it
was the port for the center of the continent, the crossroad of commerce
for one-sixth of America. All the airlines went through there, all the trains.
You went from East to West, you went through Kansas City. It was the base
for all musicians who traveled in what was called "The Territories",
the Western territories. The bands would make up in Kansas City, travel
through Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, California, and back to Kansas City through
Nevada, Colorado. They played one-night stands. They'd go in a bus, usually.
Many times, the bands would go broke, the guys ended up back in Kansas City
and new bands were formed.
Between 1926 and 1936, Kansas City was run by Tom Pendergast, who had in
his pocket both the political machine and the racketeers, led by Johnny
Lazia. Pendergast never listened to music and was always in bed by 9:00
P.M. He made sure, however, that the town never did. It was a wide-open
lawless town of dance-halls, nightclubs, honkey-tonks, clubs and brothels
-- K.C. had the largest red light district in the country. The bars were
always open, so musicians were always employed.
On their night off, which was Monday, everybody would come together from
those different clubs and a jam session would occur that would go on for
days! The day WE're talking about in the film was the Monday before an election.
Of course, on Election Day, they wouldn't work.
The "cutting contest" between Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young
that we describe in the film actually happened. Charlie Parker was there,
too. But he played so badly that Joe Jones, who was the drummer, threw a
cymbal at him. And Parker was kind of laughed off the stage.
"Cutting contests" happened all around, but Kansas City was particularly
known for the energy of its jam sessions. The principle is simple, it originated
in tap dancing. One guy would get up and do so many steps, the other guy
had to do something different, and they just kept going till one guy ran
out of ideas. And they did that in music as well...
There was a time, possibly, when a high-level aficionado could tell the
difference between K.C. jazz and Chicago jazz. I wouldn't know how to describe
the Kansas City sound. They weren't taking solos the same way as anywhere
else. As the big bands began to grow -- Bennie and Buster Moten, Bill Basie,
who wasn't yet nicknamed "Count" -- they came up with a certain
kind of drumming... and swing was born. A particular brand of swing.
The jazz scenes didn't exist as such in the script. We put the bands together,
made a 50-minute film with just the music. It's not a documentary, it's
a performance. Like an album. Only, it's a visual album. And we integrated
it in our narrative. There is nothing but live jazz, here. Sometimes you
see the musicians, sometimes you don't. But that was always the intention,
not one "incidental" note has been added.
From writing to editing, the film, to me, is constructed like jazz. Here
you have Miranda Richardson and Jennifer Jason Leigh doing a riff, then
Harry Belafonte cuts in with his own riff... They're doing improvisations
off of the same theme. If you just stuck to the story --which would be the
song, "Solitude" -- it could be done in three minutes: "Girl
kidnaps a woman, hoping, with the ransom to pay off the debt her boyfriend
has vis-a-vis a local gangster who owns the jazz club where Coleman Hawkins
and Lester Young are engaged in a 'cutting contest' the Monday before Election
Day." But put a jazz spin to "Solitude", and it could go
for twenty minutes. Or two hours, depending on your performers.
I would say Belafonte was a brass. A trumpet, perhaps. And the two girls,
Miranda and Jennifer, are kind of like two tenor saxophones. On the shooting,
therefore, I acted less as a "director" than as an orchestrator,
the arranger of the band. I'd write the charts and say, "Okay, you
are going to play so many bars of this, and then the trumpet is going to
do so many bars of this, and you're coming back in, and we're going to end
with just a soft cello bass/fiddle duet." Which is another rendition
of "Solitude".
I grew up in Kansas City. The housekeeper that kind of raised me was a black
woman named Glendora Majors. She kept the radio on all the time. One day,
I was about eight, it was the middle of the afternoon, and the two of us
were in the house alone -- she said, "Bobby, come over here and listen
to this." She sat me in front of the radio. "That's Duke Ellington's
'Solitude'. It's the best music there is. Now you sit and listen to it."
And I remember I remained glued to my chair. "Solitude" is the
first piece of music that I really remember. And it's the last piece of
music in the film...
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