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At the Sunset Club on 12th Street the joint never closed. Big Joe Turner tended bar and shouted the blues while he poured, Pete Johnson pounded the piano, and by sunup there could be fifteen musicians on the stage jamming. The club had a speaker out on the sidewalk, but Joe didn’t need it. Andy Kirk said he never had to go to the Sunset, because the Sunset came to him - he lived a few blocks away and could hear Joe through his apartment wall.
Host Nate Wilcox talks with Chuck Haddix, co-author with Frank Driggs of “Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop - A History,” in a conversation first released in 2020 and returning now as part of Let It Roll From the Beginning..., in which the whole Let It Roll archive is being re-cast in chronological order by topic. This is the story of how one wide-open Midwestern town got from ragtime to bebop in twenty years, and set up swing, jump blues and rock and roll on the way.
As Chuck tells it, it all runs on vice. Boss Tom Pendergast’s political machine let the gambling, the liquor and the bordellos run, and that opened hundreds of clubs and ballrooms - Mary Lou Williams counted fifty clubs with live music in six blocks. Kansas City was a railroad hub and the first stop out of the Deep South, so through the Depression the territory bands kept coming in from the Southwest to where the work was. Chuck traces the walking bass from Blind Boone’s sheet music to Walter Page’s string bass, the switch from two-four to four-four that became the Kansas City signature. Then he turns to Bennie Moten, the father of Kansas City jazz and a better businessman than pianist, and Moten’s flashier rival, George E. Lee, whose first recording of “St. James Infirmary” was a local hit before Cab Calloway took it national.
Also: Count Basie’s coup against Moten, and what Basie’s own memoir leaves out; Dave Dexter - the Capitol Records villain of the Beatles story - as the hero who steered John Hammond to Basie at the Reno Club; Jesse Stone and Big Joe Turner rocking and rolling on 12th Street in the 1930s; the bandleader at the Backbiters Club so scared of the gangsters he carried a gun and shot his own toes off; Pendergast’s fall in 1938 and the reformers who dried up the work; and Charlie Parker in the Reno Club balcony with the ladies of the night, listening to Lester Young through the reefer smoke, before Jay McShann got him out of town.
Let It Roll is dedicated to the memory of Ed Ward, Russell Thomas and Danny Park.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
* “Twelfth Street Rag,” Bennie Moten
* “Jumpin’ at the Woodside,” Count Basie
* “St. James Infirmary Blues,” George E. Lee
* “Swingmatism,” Jay McShann with Charlie Parker
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