Kansas City Lovin'

THE VERY THINGS that make jazz documentaries attractive to jazz fans can make them intolerable to anyone else. "Authentic footage" usually means endless sequences of grainy, incompetently-shot film and crackling, poorly-recorded sound; the phrase "candid interview" may warn of mumbled, half-unintelligible reminiscences of the dead and the hopelessly obscure. If the music and the musicians absolutely enchant you, then you can easily overlook all this, and even enjoy it, but if jazz only casually interests you, these distractions become boring and unforgiveable.

The Last of the Blue Devils, first-time director Bruce Ricker's movie about Kansas City jazzmen, gets around these limitations of jazz cinematography better than any film I have seen. Jazz purists may balk at the liberties Ricker has taken--solos are cropped from longer performances, music is cut up and excerpted, "vintage" Kansas City clips are few and far between--but they can't argue with his results. The entire film rushes along to Kansas City 4/4 time; a spare 91 minutes long, The Last of the Blue Devils is one sweet breath of Kansas City air, heady enough for rabid jazz fans and casual filmgoers alike.

The twenties and thirties saw the scandalously corrupt reign of cement baron and political boss Tom Pendergast, when Kansas City thrived on a depression economy of gambling, prostitution, and bootleg booze. Ricker establishes early on the pointlessness of trying to recapture that milieu: Big Joe Turner sings "I was standing on the corner of 18th and Vine," and he shows us the barren parking lot that now occupies this intersection, once crowded with nightspots. He succeeds in capturing the unique camraderie that still exists among the men who made the Kansas City sound nearly 50 years ago.

This is no mean feat. In the man-eating jazz business, those musicians who survive to enjoy advanced age have usually developed a ring of impregnable defenses which make it difficult for anyone, especially young white filmmakers, to get too close. Viewers saw Count Basie's legendary reserve during an appearance on 60 Minutes last year. His laconic performance--"Drugs? You can't use drugs and play jazz. Maybe rock musicians can, but jazz musicians, never"--was a model of Spartan deportment. Ricker quickly learned that direct questions would yield direct answers--"yes," "no," or on occasion a poetic "uh-huh"? so the director applied a fail-safe formula of good friends, familiar surroundings, and free-flowing booze to create a relaxed, open, and totally upbeat encounter with these musicians.

THE SETTING OF Blue Devils--a series of "reunion" jazz parties Ricker organized at the Musician's Mutual Foundation, Kansas City's old Black union hall--recalls No Maps On My Taps, which revolved around a similar reunion of old jazz dancers, but Blue Devils has little of the sadness and sentimentality that are at the heart of Taps. As Ricker is quick to point out, the golden years of Kansas City were good, happy times for jazz musicians, and the surviving Kansas City jazzmen have learned how to deal with the disappointments of the intervening years; when they get together, they share joy, humor, and open affection. Jazz fans already know about the tragedies of Kansas City--how Charlie Parker died an addict, destitute and disillusioned at 35, how a disastrous gig with the U.S. Army ravaged Lester Young's unique and delicate personality. Bitter recollections of these stories would not touch anyone not already familiar with them.

The artificial, documentary nature of the proceedings actually makes for some of the film's most precious moments. Pianist Jay McShann grins and mimics a journalist's banal patter: "Joe Turner, you know that you are a Kansas City figure. You're a backbone of Kansas City, so tell us something about yourself." Later, Basie sits down at the foundation's scarred piano and improvises a few bars of two-fisted stride, then looks up, deadpan, at the camera: "That'll be $4!"

Ricker uses vintage Kansas City material sparingly enough to leave his audience hungry for more. Sublime recordings of "South" and "Moten Swing" by the Benny Moten Orchestra, descendant of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils and ancestor of the Count Basie band, play under the opening and closing credits; the only other period music accompanies the brief snippets of antique footage--Basie, Turner, Young, Parker--that pepper the body of the film. These are truly gratifying. "We were doing rock and roll before anybody heard of it." Turner grumbles. We have all heard this sort of talk before, but a 1955 clip of Turner performing his "Shake, Rattle, and Roll" (later covered by Bill Haley, Chubby Checker, and Elvis himself) makes the connection between KansasCity swing and rock 'n' roll strikingly clean. When talk turns to Charlie Parker, the opening chorus of "Hot House" rumbles in the background, and Ricker treats us to the only two minutes of Parker footage in existence. This 1952 clip, with Bird's serene brilliance and Dizzy's inspired mugging, by itself makes The Last of the Blue Devils compulsory for fans of any kind of jazz.

The film's contribution to jazz mythology will be modest. Eddie Durham tells of how Basie's "One O'Clock Jump" was renamed when radio censors vetoed the original title, "Blue Balls." McShann provides yet another anecdote about how Parker came to be called Yardbird. Ricker's 24 hours of rough footage doubtless contained many more interesting stories, but as a movie, not an oral history project, the film's wonderful sense of pace easily offsets an occasional choppiness in cutting from one bull session to another.

The halcyon days of Kansas City jazz have gone forever, and the sad scraps of film that survive--hokey period pieces which show these great musicians transformed by the miracle of Hollywood into grinning antebellum darkies who sway to the beat of their most commercial pieces--obviously fail to recover the real spirit of the era. The Last of the Blue Devils is no substitute for the films that a more perfect world would have made in those days. Most of the Kansas City players have passed their prime, and much of their music has become cliched and formulaic. But Ricker's affectionate tribute does afford a fleeting glimpse of long friendships, shared joys, and proud memories, that must soon cease to exist.