Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop - A History

There were four major galaxies in the early jazz universe, and three of them—New Orleans, Chicago, and New York—have been well documented in print. But there has never been a serious history of the fourth, Kansas City, until now.  In this colorful history, Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix capture the golden age of Kansas City jazz, and bring us a colorful portrait of old Kaycee itself, back then a neon riot of bars, bambling dens, and taxi dance halls, all ruled over by Boss Tom Pendergast, who had transformed a dusty cowtown into the Paris of the Plains. The authors show how this wide-open, gin-soaked town gave birth to a music that was more basic and more viscerally exciting than other styles of jazz, its singers belting out a rough-and-tumble urban style of blues, its piano players pounding out a style later known as "boogie-woogie." We visit the great landmarks, like the Reno Club, the "Biggest Little Club in the World," where Lester Young and Count Basie made jazz history, and Charli