JAM: August/September 2002 Issue: Correspondence

An Open Letter...
...To the KC Jazz Ambassadors, Jazz Lovers, Music Lovers, and All Who Profess to Support Jazz,

Some of you know me. I am the Artistic Director for the Topeka Jazz Festival, and I book the artists for the Kansas City Jazz Workshop series. I live in Topeka, some 60 miles west of Kansas City, and Virginia and I come to KC many times during each year to hear live jazz. On June 2, we attended the Don McCoy Memorial Scholarship jazz jam where the music was wonderful. Kansas City is so blessed with literally dozens of wonderful musicians. Thank you KC musicians, for giving of your time for a great cause. You are the best!

However, after reading the June/July issue of JAM with the articles about the apathy of Kansas City jazz fans who profess to support live jazz, I am very much concerned. Three major KC jazz festivals, the Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival, the Kansas City International Jazz Festival, and the Eighteenth & Vine Heritage Jazz Festival, have folded and are gone, all because they were not supported by the people who profess to support jazz. Virginia and I attended all of these festivals many times.

We drive the 60 miles to hear jazz in Kansas City numerous times each year. I have a great passion for this art form and want very much to share it with everyone. The level of musicianship at this year's Topeka Jazz Festival was as high as could be found anywhere on the planet. And please do not take my word for that! Ask Ginney Coleman, Bill Fogarty, Barb and Don Mathewson, Joe and Jac Gradinger, Carol Smith, the Kansas City musicians who played the festival, and the few KC fans who were there. I will absolutely cry if this festival goes down the drain for lack of support.

And we are very near that point of having to fold as did the three KC festivals! At our nearest count, there were six members of the Kansas City Jazz Ambassadors in attendance this time, and each year, more people come from California than come from Kansas City. These people pay for air fare, four nights in a hotel, plus the music! This is shocking!

People say they can't afford to pay to hear jazz. We offered a three hour concert with four bands, plus the Sunday morning Gospel session (which was dynamite!) with six of the world's best musicians... FREE! Yet, very few came.

What's the answer? It appears that nobody cares if this festival also folds. Where can you hear the Jeff Hamilton Trio, the Clayton Brothers Quintet, the Bill Charlap Trio, Rebecca Parris, Lynn Roberts, and on and on for some 30 hours, for only $205 -- or $6.83 per hour -- to hear the world's greatest jazz artists! It's the same price of a movie! I just can't believe that people who profess to love and support this art form, will let this festival die.

I plead with you -- I beg you -- to be here Memorial Day weekend 2003. Come for just a single session -- three hours! -- for only $25!

Please help us to keep this festival in existence!

A city like Kansas City, of a million population, surely should have a couple hundred people who want to keep the world's best jazz in the area. Forget that it's in Topeka. Please, just come!

Jim Monroe
Artistic Director
Topeka Jazz Festival
Topeka, KS

p.s. It's the same distance from Topeka to Kansas City as it is from Kansas City to Topeka!

Remember: Have Fun
I hope to use this forum to extend the thanks of the McCoy family to all the musicians, technical people, Kansas City Jazz Workshop members and fans for their participation in the Don McCoy Memorial Benefit Concert on June 2. Dad would have enjoyed every minute of the event, and he would have been honored by your talents, efforts and generosity. I think he'd be very pleased to know that aspiring jazz musicians will benefit from the scholarship fund you have supported in his name.

When we were younger, Dad would often use one of his precious Saturday or Sunday afternoons to take us to a ski slope or pull us around behind a boat for hours on "surfboards" or water skis. No doubt it was a good way for a country doctor to get away from the telephone for a few hours; but I sometimes wondered what "fun" he got out of the experience. I know now that he really enjoyed watching us having fun together.

And I think that's what he truly loved about being part of the Kansas City jazz community. To be sure, he and Mom loved listening to the music, but I was interested to learn that they made special efforts to attend live performances whenever possible, traveling several hundred miles at night to hear Count Basie in some out-of-the-way venue, or venturing into some pretty questionable neighborhoods to hear an up-and-coming artist in a basement bar. To hear the music and watch the musicians having fun together was their ultimate pleasure.

Although it was emotionally difficult for Dad to stay involved with the jazz community after Mom died (all those songs bring back all those memories), you all were truly his "family" these last few years; we can't thank you enough for all the kindness you've shown.

So, as you continue to play or listen to that special Kansas City Jazz, remember to have fun. Dad'll be there watching!

Sincerely,
Judy McCoy Krohn
Stockholm, WI

Some Provocative Theories
I found Mike Metheny's column "Another Festival That Once Was" (June/July 2002) to ring very true. It seems that there is something different about people these days. They just don't want to come out and hear live jazz and blues like they did even five years ago. I have a few theories;

1) the internet and cable TV have created a group of people who rarely leave their homes for entertainment;

2) young people who attend live music events as part of their social rituals and partying scene only want to hear rap, punk-based rock, or light dance pop, which are types of music that provide no frame of reference to even approach jazz or blues. Without this segment of the population, you have to rely on older people with families and careers to come out en masse, which is a real stretch;

3) global warming -- and I'm not kidding! The heat at the 2001 Kansas City Blues & Jazz Festival felt like the surface of Venus to me. The air was shimmering with heat. In the early 1990s it was hot, but you could grin and bear it. I went to the two International Jazz Festivals under the white tent at Crown Center, and when the heat was trapped under there, it was like a torture chamber. The audience had to be so dedicated to music that they were willing to withstand considerable discomfort, or they had to be young and so intoxicated that they did not care about the heat or anything else about their general surroundings (see #2, lack of young party people);

4) many of the great national musicians in jazz and blues -- including the ones who were either originators of the music or played with those originators -- have been dying out or retiring, and the young ones coming up are not as exciting and compelling. There is a particular lack of younger jazz and blues artists who can creatively speak to the 15-25 year olds of today while maintaining credibility in blues and jazz music. There are exceptions to this, of course (see Pat Metheny, for one), but there is a grain of truth to it. If the programming of acts is not done with great care, a dull lineup can easily be assembled these days. With the lack of exciting, unique younger musicians comes a lack of young audience members who want to hear someone their own age, which is only natural;

5) there is too much emphasis in jazz and blues circles these days on garnering great respect for the music and presenting it like a fine porcelain statue in a holy shrine, with a great lack of emphasis on having fun. Since most people want to have fun (and if their brain matter is stimulated along the way, it's an added bonus), the artificial solemnity with which jazz in particular is presented is a real turn-off for casual or beginning listeners who might come out to a festival and make a difference in whether the attendance figures are acceptable;

6) the "X" factor. Why is it trendy or "the thing to do" for a lot of people to go to a jazz and blues festival or concert series for a few years, and then all of a sudden it is not the thing to do? I have seen this in other cities I have lived in. For example, there seems to be no reason why the citizens of Ann Arbor, Michigan couldn't buy enough jazz concert and festival tickets from 1977-79, even for avant garde acts, but then starting in 1980 have almost no interest in jazz for some period of years. Why is this? I have no idea.
If a credible study could be done on why audience peaks and valleys occur, you would probably have the secret to live jazz and blues attendance.

Bill DeBauche
Prairie Village, KS

"Nearly" a Geezer?
Mike Metheny's "autobiography" at the end of "Another Festival That Once Was" (June/July 2002) was great. But, as nearly an old geezer, is he sure the puddle he was standing in was his own "boiling sweat"? Someone should fill him in on what 15 beers will do to a geezer!

"Young enough to care" was the important part, however. Keep caring. At some point it will make a difference, because it will cause people to think.

We all need to take responsibility instead of finding excuses.

Janice Flowers Buckhold
St. Louis, MO

15 Years of Quality
I have been wanting to send you this note of thanks for your mention and sentiments on the loss of KC's wonderful summer jazz events ("First Take," April/May 2002). I was particularly touched by your inclusion of the 18th and Vine Heritage Jazz Festival in the list of losses to the community, feeling for so long that I was alone in my appreciation and pride in the high-quality event that hundreds of volunteers created and helped to develop over the festival's 15-year run. (The event had a paid staff of only one; it was truly volunteer driven.)

I literally teared up when I read your words. And I often think about how the entire Kansas City community, from Independence and Grain Valley to Kansas City's Hispanic Westside, and from North Kansas City to Johnson County, circled its wagons around that event turning it into a high-quality, arts-focused, family-oriented event that, in its final three years, attracted visitors from China, Morocco and Japan, not to mention its regional and local audience loyalty.

As we now enter year four of the festival's demise, the Black Economic Union still receives out-of-state inquiries about the event. And I have the tough job of saying, "Thank you for your interest in the 18th & Vine Heritage Jazz Festival, however..."

Thanks for remembering us.

Pat Jacobs-Macdonald
Director of Cultural Development
The Black Economic Union
Kansas City, MO

Thank You
I would like to thank everyone in the music community for their support on June 11 ("Jazz Snaps," June/July 2002). It is a shame I had to damn near die before realizing how many friends love me.

The light seems to be dimming on jazz again. This too will pass. Quality music has never been popular. As long as there are young minds with imagination, it will endure.

Again, thanks.
A whole bunch of love never hurt anybody.

John Albertson
Kansas City, MO

A Classy Farewell
Dear JAM,

As my family and I make the move to Portland, I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you for all the wonderful experiences Kansas City has brought to my life. I am so much richer for all the great friendships I've made here.

Our move is based on immediate family circumstances (all good) -- most of our family is now either on the west coast or easily accessible from Portland.

These last 13 years in Kansas City have been so vital to me. I moved here
from New York in late '89, thinking I'd stay a minute and move on; but thankfully, that wasn't meant to be.

The beginnings of some of the most important relationships I have in my life are rooted here. One of my first calls upon arriving in KC was to Bob Bowman to go to lunch. Later, I met Kim Park at a big band rehearsal which, at that time, was led by both Mike McGraw and Bill Crain. I played an outdoor gig with Paul Smith, where a huge bird flew over and dumped on the piano in the middle of Paul's solo on "My Shining Hour." (Without missing a beat, Paul said, "What a critic!") In that first year, I met friends that I now consider family. And my "family" has continued to grow ever since.

I think of it this way: while in New York I honed the tools; in Kansas City I began learning how to use them. I think music is a way to express our emotions, our understanding of things, our love for what is important to us. Through my friends Bob Bowman, Paul Smith, Kim Park, Danny Embrey, Rod Fleeman, Karrin Allyson, Kevin Mahogany, Tim Davis, Claude Williams, Jay McShann, and the late Richard Ross, among so many others, I've been able to hear and see what that really means.

That's what it's all about! I hear that element of living what you believe in in so many young players and newcomers to our scene. The heartbeat of KC is definitely healthy and in good hands. I consider Kansas City my home base, even though I grew up in Topeka. If I had the entire JAM magazine, I might be able to squeeze in all that I have to say to the players as well as those who are equally important -- the listeners... the people who really make it possible to survive in this world as a musician.

I think what it all comes down to is this: those who feel the music (players and nonplayers alike) are blessed. No other language can so poignantly express our lives.

The musical voices here in KC are strong and I'm sorry to go. I will not disappear, however! I can come home again, and I certainly plan to return for many visits.

"Goodbye" sucks. I prefer a different phrase which, if you think about it, is much more appropriate:

"See ya in a minute."
I love you, Kansas City. And I will take you with me everywhere I go.

Todd Strait
Portland, OR
(& always KC)

(See "Jazz Snaps." -- Ed.)






	Search our site:		An Open Letter... ...To the KC Jazz Ambassadors, Jazz Lovers, Music Lovers, and All Who Profess to Support Jazz, Some of you know me. I am the Artistic Director for the Topeka Jazz Festival, and I book the artists for the Kansas City Jazz Workshop series. I live in Topeka, some 60 miles west of Kansas City, and Virginia and I come to KC many times during each year to hear live jazz. On June 2, we attended the Don McCoy Memorial Scholarship jazz jam where the music was wonderful. Kansas City is so blessed with literally dozens of wonderful musicians. Thank you KC musicians, for giving of your time for a great cause. You are the best! However, after reading the June/July issue of JAM with the articles about the apathy of Kansas City jazz fans who profess to support live jazz, I am very much concerned. Three major KC jazz festivals, the Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival, the Kansas City International Jazz Festival, and the Eighteenth & Vine Heritage Jazz Festival, have folded and are gone, all because they were not supported by the people who profess to support jazz. Virginia and I attended all of these festivals many times. We drive the 60 miles to hear jazz in Kansas City numerous times each year. I have a great passion for this art form and want very much to share it with everyone. The level of musicianship at this year's Topeka Jazz Festival was as high as could be found anywhere on the planet. And please do not take my word for that! Ask Ginney Coleman, Bill Fogarty, Barb and Don Mathewson, Joe and Jac Gradinger, Carol Smith, the Kansas City musicians who played the festival, and the few KC fans who were there. I will absolutely cry if this festival goes down the drain for lack of support. And we are very near that point of having to fold as did the three KC festivals! At our nearest count, there were six members of the Kansas City Jazz Ambassadors in attendance this time, and each year, more people come from California than come from Kansas City. These people pay for air fare, four nights in a hotel, plus the music! This is shocking! People say they can't afford to pay to hear jazz. We offered a three hour concert with four bands, plus the Sunday morning Gospel session (which was dynamite!) with six of the world's best musicians... FREE! Yet, very few came. What's the answer? It appears that nobody cares if this festival also folds. Where can you hear the Jeff Hamilton Trio, the Clayton Brothers Quintet, the Bill Charlap Trio, Rebecca Parris, Lynn Roberts, and on and on for some 30 hours, for only $205 -- or $6.83 per hour -- to hear the world's greatest jazz artists! It's the same price of a movie! I just can't believe that people who profess to love and support this art form, will let this festival die. I plead with you -- I beg you -- to be here Memorial Day weekend 2003. Come for just a single session -- three hours! -- for only $25! Please help us to keep this festival in existence! A city like Kansas City, of a million population, surely should have a couple hundred people who want to keep the world's best jazz in the area. Forget that it's in Topeka. Please, just come! Jim Monroe Artistic Director Topeka Jazz Festival Topeka, KS p.s. It's the same distance from Topeka to Kansas City as it is from Kansas City to Topeka! Remember: Have Fun I hope to use this forum to extend the thanks of the McCoy family to all the musicians, technical people, Kansas City Jazz Workshop members and fans for their participation in the Don McCoy Memorial Benefit Concert on June 2. Dad would have enjoyed every minute of the event, and he would have been honored by your talents, efforts and generosity. I think he'd be very pleased to know that aspiring jazz musicians will benefit from the scholarship fund you have supported in his name. When we were younger, Dad would often use one of his precious Saturday or Sunday afternoons to take us to a ski slope or pull us around behind a boat for hours on "surfboards" or water skis. No doubt it was a good way for a country doctor to get away from the telephone for a few hours; but I sometimes wondered what "fun" he got out of the experience. I know now that he really enjoyed watching us having fun together. And I think that's what he truly loved about being part of the Kansas City jazz community. To be sure, he and Mom loved listening to the music, but I was interested to learn that they made special efforts to attend live performances whenever possible, traveling several hundred miles at night to hear Count Basie in some out-of-the-way venue, or venturing into some pretty questionable neighborhoods to hear an up-and-coming artist in a basement bar. To hear the music and watch the musicians having fun together was their ultimate pleasure. Although it was emotionally difficult for Dad to stay involved with the jazz community after Mom died (all those songs bring back all those memories), you all were truly his "family" these last few years; we can't thank you enough for all the kindness you've shown. So, as you continue to play or listen to that special Kansas City Jazz, remember to have fun. Dad'll be there watching! Sincerely, Judy McCoy Krohn Stockholm, WI Some Provocative Theories I found Mike Metheny's column "Another Festival That Once Was" (June/July 2002) to ring very true. It seems that there is something different about people these days. They just don't want to come out and hear live jazz and blues like they did even five years ago. I have a few theories; 1) the internet and cable TV have created a group of people who rarely leave their homes for entertainment; 2) young people who attend live music events as part of their social rituals and partying scene only want to hear rap, punk-based rock, or light dance pop, which are types of music that provide no frame of reference to even approach jazz or blues. Without this segment of the population, you have to rely on older people with families and careers to come out en masse, which is a real stretch; 3) global warming -- and I'm not kidding! The heat at the 2001 Kansas City Blues & Jazz Festival felt like the surface of Venus to me. The air was shimmering with heat. In the early 1990s it was hot, but you could grin and bear it. I went to the two International Jazz Festivals under the white tent at Crown Center, and when the heat was trapped under there, it was like a torture chamber. The audience had to be so dedicated to music that they were willing to withstand considerable discomfort, or they had to be young and so intoxicated that they did not care about the heat or anything else about their general surroundings (see #2, lack of young party people); 4) many of the great national musicians in jazz and blues -- including the ones who were either originators of the music or played with those originators -- have been dying out or retiring, and the young ones coming up are not as exciting and compelling. There is a particular lack of younger jazz and blues artists who can creatively speak to the 15-25 year olds of today while maintaining credibility in blues and jazz music. There are exceptions to this, of course (see Pat Metheny, for one), but there is a grain of truth to it. If the programming of acts is not done with great care, a dull lineup can easily be assembled these days. With the lack of exciting, unique younger musicians comes a lack of young audience members who want to hear someone their own age, which is only natural; 5) there is too much emphasis in jazz and blues circles these days on garnering great respect for the music and presenting it like a fine porcelain statue in a holy shrine, with a great lack of emphasis on having fun. Since most people want to have fun (and if their brain matter is stimulated along the way, it's an added bonus), the artificial solemnity with which jazz in particular is presented is a real turn-off for casual or beginning listeners who might come out to a festival and make a difference in whether the attendance figures are acceptable; 6) the "X" factor. Why is it trendy or "the thing to do" for a lot of people to go to a jazz and blues festival or concert series for a few years, and then all of a sudden it is not the thing to do? I have seen this in other cities I have lived in. For example, there seems to be no reason why the citizens of Ann Arbor, Michigan couldn't buy enough jazz concert and festival tickets from 1977-79, even for avant garde acts, but then starting in 1980 have almost no interest in jazz for some period of years. Why is this? I have no idea. If a credible study could be done on why audience peaks and valleys occur, you would probably have the secret to live jazz and blues attendance. Bill DeBauche Prairie Village, KS "Nearly" a Geezer? Mike Metheny's "autobiography" at the end of "Another Festival That Once Was" (June/July 2002) was great. But, as nearly an old geezer, is he sure the puddle he was standing in was his own "boiling sweat"? Someone should fill him in on what 15 beers will do to a geezer! "Young enough to care" was the important part, however. Keep caring. At some point it will make a difference, because it will cause people to think. We all need to take responsibility instead of finding excuses. Janice Flowers Buckhold St. Louis, MO 15 Years of Quality I have been wanting to send you this note of thanks for your mention and sentiments on the loss of KC's wonderful summer jazz events ("First Take," April/May 2002). I was particularly touched by your inclusion of the 18th and Vine Heritage Jazz Festival in the list of losses to the community, feeling for so long that I was alone in my appreciation and pride in the high-quality event that hundreds of volunteers created and helped to develop over the festival's 15-year run. (The event had a paid staff of only one; it was truly volunteer driven.) I literally teared up when I read your words. And I often think about how the entire Kansas City community, from Independence and Grain Valley to Kansas City's Hispanic Westside, and from North Kansas City to Johnson County, circled its wagons around that event turning it into a high-quality, arts-focused, family-oriented event that, in its final three years, attracted visitors from China, Morocco and Japan, not to mention its regional and local audience loyalty. As we now enter year four of the festival's demise, the Black Economic Union still receives out-of-state inquiries about the event. And I have the tough job of saying, "Thank you for your interest in the 18th & Vine Heritage Jazz Festival, however..." Thanks for remembering us. Pat Jacobs-Macdonald Director of Cultural Development The Black Economic Union Kansas City, MO Thank You I would like to thank everyone in the music community for their support on June 11 ("Jazz Snaps," June/July 2002). It is a shame I had to damn near die before realizing how many friends love me. The light seems to be dimming on jazz again. This too will pass. Quality music has never been popular. As long as there are young minds with imagination, it will endure. Again, thanks. A whole bunch of love never hurt anybody. John Albertson Kansas City, MO A Classy Farewell Dear JAM, As my family and I make the move to Portland, I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you for all the wonderful experiences Kansas City has brought to my life. I am so much richer for all the great friendships I've made here. Our move is based on immediate family circumstances (all good) -- most of our family is now either on the west coast or easily accessible from Portland. These last 13 years in Kansas City have been so vital to me. I moved here from New York in late '89, thinking I'd stay a minute and move on; but thankfully, that wasn't meant to be. The beginnings of some of the most important relationships I have in my life are rooted here. One of my first calls upon arriving in KC was to Bob Bowman to go to lunch. Later, I met Kim Park at a big band rehearsal which, at that time, was led by both Mike McGraw and Bill Crain. I played an outdoor gig with Paul Smith, where a huge bird flew over and dumped on the piano in the middle of Paul's solo on "My Shining Hour." (Without missing a beat, Paul said, "What a critic!") In that first year, I met friends that I now consider family. And my "family" has continued to grow ever since. I think of it this way: while in New York I honed the tools; in Kansas City I began learning how to use them. I think music is a way to express our emotions, our understanding of things, our love for what is important to us. Through my friends Bob Bowman, Paul Smith, Kim Park, Danny Embrey, Rod Fleeman, Karrin Allyson, Kevin Mahogany, Tim Davis, Claude Williams, Jay McShann, and the late Richard Ross, among so many others, I've been able to hear and see what that really means. That's what it's all about! I hear that element of living what you believe in in so many young players and newcomers to our scene. The heartbeat of KC is definitely healthy and in good hands. I consider Kansas City my home base, even though I grew up in Topeka. If I had the entire JAM magazine, I might be able to squeeze in all that I have to say to the players as well as those who are equally important -- the listeners... the people who really make it possible to survive in this world as a musician. I think what it all comes down to is this: those who feel the music (players and nonplayers alike) are blessed. No other language can so poignantly express our lives. The musical voices here in KC are strong and I'm sorry to go. I will not disappear, however! I can come home again, and I certainly plan to return for many visits. "Goodbye" sucks. I prefer a different phrase which, if you think about it, is much more appropriate: "See ya in a minute." I love you, Kansas City. And I will take you with me everywhere I go. Todd Strait Portland, OR (& always KC) (See "Jazz Snaps." -- Ed.) RETURN TO AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2002 MAIN INDEX © Kansas City Jazz Ambassadors 1996-2002. All rights reserved.