Kansas City After-Hours Jazz Clubs of the 1930s Explained

Introduction: Kansas City's Unique Jazz Environment

This paper examines what would have happened to jazz had there been a crackdown on illegal after-hours clubs in Kansas City during the 1930s. To that end, it surveys the scholarly literature on Kansas City's role in jazz development during that decade.

In the 1930s, while the rest of the United States was in the grip of the Great Depression, Kansas City was producing jazz around the clock. The city was, for all intents and purposes, under the control of a local political boss and entrepreneur in the form of Jim Pendergast, who upon his death passed his power to his brother. The brother, though less honest or ethical than Jim, sustained an economic boom in Kansas City at the very height of the Depression, shielding the city's entertainment industry from the enforcement that shuttered clubs elsewhere.

Social and Cultural Origins of Jazz

To understand how Kansas City and jazz became so closely integrated, it is necessary to look to the rural South. Nathan W. Pearson, in his work Goin' to Kansas City, explains that "Saturday night was often the time for six-day-a-week farmers to relax and attend a supper put on by a local family. For a small admission charge, people ate, drank, gambled, sang, and danced to the music of the local songster—a musician who could satisfy nearly any song or dance request" (Pearson, 1994). This versatility "characterized most jazz bands of the twenties and thirties; their ability to play in a variety of styles enriched the music of that period and allowed the bands to find employment in a variety of settings" (Pearson, 1994).

Lewis A. Erenberg, in Swinging the Dream, notes that jazz musicians of the 1920s, operating "between the poles of Harlem and Broadway, black and white," were sometimes dismissed as cultural "mongrels"—a term that reflected the music's interracially forged vocabulary (Erenberg, 1999). This music, "forged by blacks and children of immigrants," was a new art form "unmediated by moralist and governmental desire to uplift the music," and it helped form a new diverse culture "in the vernacular arts" (Erenberg, 1999). Jazz expressed, for many, "a new model of pluralist democracy capable of challenging classical music for the mantle of cultural legitimacy and American national identity" (Erenberg, 1999).

Kathy Ogren, in The Jazz Revolution, elaborates on jazz's deepest roots, writing that it emerged from "a cultural tradition" termed "an Afro-American vernacular," shaped by "the material conditions of slavery in the United States," in which the rhythms of Afro-American blues "combined and emerged from an ancestral matrix that has produced a forceful and indigenous American creativity" (Ogren, 1992).

Prohibition, Rebellion, and the Underground Club Scene

The audience for jazz in the 1930s was, as Ogren notes, "inadvertently stimulated when Congress passed the Volstead Act," which banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in 1919. Illegal clubs operated underground and after hours and were "often tied to bootlegging rings. Jazz was immediately associated with the carnal pleasures of the cabaret" (Ogren, 1992).

Supporters of Prohibition based their campaign against alcohol on the preservation of "traditional American values" (Ogren, 1992). Yet the sights and sounds of the jazz band excited American youth who were "in revolt against what they saw as stuffy prewar society, and their critique joined that of young dissenters including writers and critics such as Malcolm Cowley and Ernest Hemingway." This generation was labeled "The Lost Generation" by figures such as Gertrude Stein (Ogren, 1992). Ogren characterizes jazz as "a powerful new music, characterized by syncopation, polyrhythms, improvisation, blue tonalities, and a strong beat" (Ogren, 1992). Jazz arose during social change and was in many respects a direct expression of that change.

During the era of Prohibition, Erenberg relates, dance halls and nightclubs folded one after another across the United States—in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis—and "only Kansas City, protected by the Pendergast machine, ran unchecked" (Erenberg, 1999). The "decline of live entertainment adversely affected musicians," and the Depression "also crippled the music business." Sheet music sales bottomed out in 1932, as did record sales. While jazz collapsed across surrounding territories, "Kansas City jazz flourished, attracting black musicians from the entire region to its nearly fifty mob-run night spots" (Erenberg, 1999).

Conclusion: Kansas City's Legacy in Jazz History

The works reviewed in this study enabled the researcher to envision the dark, smoky nightclubs where jazz musicians played until exhaustion. It is related in these works that when one shift of musicians tired, others would be called from their beds to take over—such was the jazz scene in Kansas City, where music could be heard churning out twenty-four hours a day. The informal and unstructured playing atmosphere of the jam session enabled jazz to develop in ways that would not have been possible had the Pendergast machine not shielded Kansas City from Prohibition enforcement, and had the diverse musicians who flocked to the city not arrived to share and compete with one another.

The political tensions of the era contributed to jazz's development, as jazz was both an outward sign of inner social change and a symbol of rebellion among American youth. While Kansas City did not give birth to jazz, it certainly provided fertile ground for the music to flourish—and flourish it did, spreading to New York, Chicago, and cities across the country as Prohibition came to an end. Jazz has many cultural and social contributors, but Kansas City stands as a primary factor in the music's history and development.

References

Erenberg, Lewis A. (1999). Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. University of Chicago Press.

Driggs, Frank, & Haddix, Chuck. (2005). Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History. Oxford University Press.

Gottlieb, William P. (1995). The Golden Age of Jazz: Text and Photographs. Pomegranate.

Ogren, Kathy J. (1992). The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz. Oxford University Press.

Pearson, Nathan W. (1994). Goin' to Kansas City. University of Illinois Press.

Schuller, Gunther. (1991). The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945. Oxford University Press.

Shaw, Arnold. (1989). The Jazz Age: Popular Music in the 1920s. Oxford University Press.