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The Gem, Panama, Lincoln and Boone were originally ragtime venues that evolved with new musical developments. The historic jazz district at 18th and Vine was densely populated with theatres whose programs revolved around jazz. More than one-hundred nightclubs and dozens of dance halls existed in 1930s Kansas City.
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The speakeasies and cabarets where Kansas City jazz developed, were the domain of mobsters and corrupt politicians, just as they often were in Chicago and New York. For more than a decade beginning in 1925 and ending with his arrest for tax fraud in 1938, Pendergast exercised a sprawling control of the city and allowed vice to run rampant. The infamous Kansas City mayor and political boss Tom Pendergast established a dogmatic climate that allowed jazz to grow during Prohibition. Much of this musical development was influenced by those outsiders who lent their own take on the music. In contrast to the city's nearest source of talentNew Orleansthe Kansas City style of jazz was a bigger, more complex sound with roots in both rustic regional blues, and the related boogie-woogie form, as well as orchestrated ragtime. Traveling musicians from Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Dallas, San Antonio, Omaha and Wichita, saw Kansas City as a stop-over that provided opportunities to play and recruit from a growing talent pool. Kansas City's distinction as a jazz hub in the 1920s and 1930s was aided by simple geography. Corruption in Kansas City and racial unrest in Philadelphia and Los Angeles destroyed thriving jazz marketsmarkets that never returned to their previous status. In at least two cases, jazz scenes came to be completely obliterated by their own backstories. Tensions rose across the range of socio-economic issues from the beginning of the Jazz Age through the 1970s as segregated jazz venues represented a microcosm of the larger social issues. Black performers, typically working at the pleasure of white audiences, were the rule rather than the exception. Racial issues were a built-in detriment to permanency as well. It was a fundamentally unstable platform for promoting jazz and for longevity of clubs.
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The speakeasies, run by various organized crime families, took advantage of the popularity of Jazz Age music and presented that form of entertainment, often as the most thinly veiled approximation of legitimacy. It is not a coincidence that many jazz clubs in Chicago, New York and Kansas City were fronts for selling alcohol. The nationwide ban on the manufacture and consumption of alcoholic beverages began in January 1920 and ended in December 1933.
Kansas city jazz club series#
Through the first two parts of this series it was evident that there were common denominators that applied to most of the original jazz clubs in the major cities: prohibition and race. In some cases a jazz scene grew up around the migration of musicians, though not always for the long term. Jazz artists whose point of origin could not sustain multiple venues ventured to locations near and far to practice their trade. While New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City and New York City were the incubators of modern jazz, they were by no means the only locations with an appetite for live music.