kansas city

From the Archives: Jay McShann and the Kansas City Sound

Lockdown has meant a lot of paper-shuffling, organizing, and weeding out. Every now and then something pops out of a folder that makes me smile. I feel so lucky at times to have had a chance to meet and write about so many gifted writers, artists, and musicians in my newspaper years. There was a stretch in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, after my stint as a jazz DJ, when I wrote quite a bit about jazz. As I noted elsewhere recently, at the time I wrote under the influence of Whitney Balliett, the great jazz commentator for The New Yorker. Close readers might catch a whiff of that influence in this review of a club date by the Jay McShann Quintet in October 1984. This was first published in The Kansas City Star, Oct. 14, 1984, under the headline “McShann provides showcase for KC jazz.” Along with McShann’s voice and piano, the band, playing at the Signboard Bar at the Westin Crown Center, included Budd Johnson, tenor sax; Carmell Jones, who’d long lived as an ex-pat in Germany, on trumpet; Noble Samuels, bass; and drummer Paul Gunther. I regret some of the cringeworthy prose, but I stand by what I hope represents a sense of some vital musical history.

By Steve Paul

Jay McShann, a national jazz treasure who calls Kansas City home, is in the middle of a monthlong stint, his fist extended appearance here in a couple of decades.

The homecoming in such a comfortable setting was long overdue and it should not be missed by anyone who professes an affinity to the pleasures of jazz.

A couple of sets Friday at the Signboard were notnecessarily a breahtaking evening of electrifying performances.

Rather, Mr. McShann—he’s been saying for a while that he’s 68, other sources say 75—and his colleagues delivered a populist sermon on the hybrid, swinging music that began emerging from Kansas City and the region a half century ago.

The program, familiar to much of the adience, included compositions by Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Mr. McShann and others. The presentation was mostly predictable: Mr. McShann out front for a couple of choruses, then solos by Mr. Jones, Mr. Johnson and, frequently, Mr. Samuels, before returning to an ensemble chorus to close.

But the allure of this living and breathing Kansas City jazz is not in the fundamentals of form. That simplicity is merely the springboard for the bounce of the blues-based sound.

Mr. McShann’s keyboard echoes with diverse influences: the austere economy of Mr. Basie, the frolicking barrelhouse of Pete Johnson and others, and often the more sophisticated textures of Art Tatum. His round face tightens up around the mouth as he concentrates on a two-handed boogie-woogie and then rolls and beams with pleasure as he manufactures a particularly offbeat phrase.

And then he sings. Tehre is something about that cidery voice: Its natural element is the blues.

Budd Johnson of New HYork, another septuagenarian, has been in and out of Kandsas City jazz circles over the years. His career includes stopovers with Earl Hines (early on and again in the 1960s), Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine and Count Basie. he blows a sweet, sometimes delicate sax. On Friday, the intensity of his delivery expanded with each solo as he and his colleagues fed from the collective pool of energy and ideas that grew all night.

On a featured number such as “Body and Soul,” Mr. Johnson showcased a versatile range and a style so easily presented that it must be, after all these years, indelibly etched in that abstract interior where music lives.

On Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,: Mr. Johnson, like his colleagues, didn’t stray too far from familiar ground, but he showed he can surprise a listener with a towering yelp or a beefy incantation.

Kansas Citian Carmell Jones has an aggressive but lyrical style. His phrasing was understated and controlled. Some solos were simply gorgeous.

At one moment early in the second set Mr. Jones seemed almost in awe of his surroundings. Mr. Johnson had just finished a chorus of “Confessin’ the Blues.” Mr. Jones began his turn with a simple four-bar entrance. Then he paused and said to the saxophonist, “That was beautiful. I don’t know what I’ll do to follow you.” Of course, he re-entered without missing a beat and then reeled off an exquisite, driven blues. That was it. No problem.

Mr. McShann is a true ambassador of the Kansas City style. He and his cohorts, finely dressed in black suits and formal shirts, are appearing at the Signboard (in the Westin Crown Center hotel) Tuesdays through Saturdays through Oct. 27. All shows begin at 9 p.m.

From the archives: Let's toast Roger Angell

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Some FB chatter erupted today about the great Roger Angell, now 99, inspired by Joe Bonomo’s recent book about him (right) and a new Q&A posted this week at the New Yorker. All that sent me in search of a baseball column I wrote a few years ago as the Kansas City Royals were heading for the post-season (and ultimate victory in the World Series). I’d name-checked Angell, and I’m pretty sure I sent a copy to him, with thanks for a truly inspiring career, though I never got a response. In searching for the piece, I discovered that the NewsBank archive, accessed via the Mid-Continent Public Library, has an odd flaw—an apparent adversity to anything with embedded hyperlinks or fancy text coding. I think I’ve filled the resulting gaps accurately. In addition, I tripped over an earlier blog piece I wrote about Angell for The KC Star website, including a list of three of my favorite Angell pieces, and I’ve tacked on a copy of that at the end of this post. This first piece—yes, I can feel an Angellic tilt to some of the writing—appeared in print in the Kansas City Star on Sept. 27, 2015. If anyone finds it online, you’re a better sleuth than I am. The Star’s website often sucked.

A Fan’s Notes Emerge as the Anxious Season Peaks

By Steve Paul

I'll admit it: I left Wednesday night's Royals game at Kauffman Stadium before it was over.

It was the ninth inning. Relief pitcher Luke Hochevar had gone to a full count with three straight batters and let the third get on base. I had another one of those feelings that we've had so often in this crazy baseball September. Not tonight. It was already a given that the Royals wouldn't have clinched the division title that night, but still there was faint hope though not much optimism that the team would catch enough spark to get the job done.

On the way out of the stadium, I caught Hochevar on a monitor, luckily, closing out the top of the ninth with no further damage. On the drive home, we heard the Royals tie the game. Nevertheless the frustrating inability to get runners home — 14 batters stranded through nine innings — bode ill for this game. The agony lasted into the 10th.

It's hard to criticize the wussy people who had left the stadium even before my partner and I did. We'd sat in those hard plastic seats for four hours already. We're just real people with day jobs, and perhaps everyone else had an early appointment the next day, too.

Don't get me wrong. There were bits of exciting, scratch-it-out baseball; Yordano Ventura, the fiery and floppy hurler, looked fairly effective; and a big beer and a footlong brat helped fill the time and distract us from the goofy goings-on between innings on the giant scoreboard.

Even the newly minted fan in my house — to some faithful readers, that's the former She Who Is Not Easily Pleased — noticed the subtly intriguing dynamics of the game. "There was one moment when fans rattled Seattle," she texted to a friend. "Lots of drama. Guys talking behind gloves."

We got home just in time to turn on the radio broadcast and hear new closer Wade Davis shut down the Mariners in the top of the 10th and — at long last — the return of Royals ecstasy, when Lorenzo Cain drove home the long-legged Brazilian, Paulo Orlando, for the game-winning run.

In case you're wondering, I am not trying out for a spot on the sports page. But I am trying to get in touch with that thing about baseball that stirs in many of us even if our team weren't heading for another string of post-season battles.

I was glad that Wednesday night's game began with a moment of silence for Yogi Berra, whose death at 90 was reported that day. Sure he was one of those hated Yankees, but he was one of the very few who transcended that ancient rivalry to enjoy a kind of historic, heroic esteem. "That he triumphed on the diamond again and again in spite of his perceived shortcomings was certainly a source of his popularity," Bruce Weber wrote in The New York Times' lengthy obit.

My personal history with Yogi goes back to my ancient and brief days as a Little League catcher, like him, when all those Yankees were my heroes. This vivid passage last week from another hero, Roger Angell, The New Yorker's 95-year-old deep observer of baseball, stopped me in place: "I think of him behind the plate as well: a thinking bookend, a stump in charge."

Yogi's St. Louis heritage and school-dropout past meant nothing to me then or now, but I can't quite get over a sense memory that his visage always reminds me a bit of my grandfather, who hasn't been with us for 50 years now. He was something like a thinking bookend, too. Or at least that's how I remember him.

One thing we learned during the Royals' magical season last year was how intensely the game binds the generations. Will Salvador Perez endure behind the plate like a Yogi Berra for tomorrow?

I have watched or listened to almost every game this season, including the division clincher on Thursday. I'm ready to plan for October success. And to celebrate more baseball, which can make us anxious, break our hearts and, ultimately, lift our spirits.

There is that other thing about Yogi. I should've thought about it Wednesday night as we debated whether to stay or go. "It ain't over till it's over." One of the most classic Yogi-isms. And one of those Royals things we've been holding onto all season long.

—-

The following appeared online on Dec. 12, 2013, on the occasion of Angell’s receipt of a lifetime award from the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Roger Angell in the Hall: A real home run

BY STEVE PAUL

With drug scandals, end-of-season disappointments, and winter-meeting, team-building hiccups, the sport of baseball could seem like it’s in the doldrums.

But now comes news of a real grand slam: The Baseball Hall of Fame will honor Roger Angell with its J.G. Taylor Spink Award, which goes to those who chronicle the game in words.

Angell, who has long served as the fiction editor of The New Yorker, has also written classy, intelligent and deeply felt long-form pieces for the magazine over the last 50 years. Many of his pieces have been anthologized (see, for example, “Once More Around the Park.”)As his editor, David Remnick, opined the other day, “Roger Angell is the greatest of all baseball writers.”

Period. Underlined. No question about it.

Angell embodies two important passions in my life — baseball and writing — though I’m a relative newcomer to his work, given that I’ve only been reading him for three decades or so.

What makes Angell special is how he tells stories and how he always manages to find heart and humanity in the game.

For evidence, I’d offer up a triple-play of Angell’s classic pieces (and The New Yorker has helpfully posted one of them):

• “Down the Drain,” the aching tale, from 1975, of Steve Blass, a pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates who inexplicably went from top-of-the-game, World Series success to inexplicable oblivion (read it here).

• “Before the Fall,” another career-end story of a pitcher, the Kansas City phenom David Cone, then pitching for the Yankees (2001). “I was writing a book about Cone,” Angell writes, “but almost from the beginning he was aware that it wasn’t going to turn out the way we’d hoped.”

• “In the Country,” probably my all-time favorite Angell piece (I’ve used it in non-fiction writing classes). This one comes from 1981, and it starts with letters Angell receives from the girlfriend of a semi-pro pitcher named Ron Goble. Before you know it, you are witness to the pain and joy of these people, as baseball, cancer and sheer determination course through the lower levels, but entirely human stations of the game.

Landmark KC Sculpture by Kenneth Snelson is Scheduled for Repairs.

“Triple Crown” at rest, lowered to the grown this summer and awaiting repairs to connection joints. Photo by Steve Paul.

“Triple Crown” at rest, lowered to the grown this summer and awaiting repairs to connection joints. Photo by Steve Paul.

Here’s another recent piece for KC Studio magazine. We posted it online in early September because it seemed to have some newsworthiness. The article will also appear in the November-December issue in print. I’ve long been entertained by this landmark sculpture. Of course, I just noticed that the trolls came out in force when a lousy local web site ridiculed it when linking to the piece:

http://kcstudio.org/after-nearly-30-years-kcs-floating-sculpture-needs-a-fix-kenneth-snelson/

Flash Fiction: My First Noir

Fiction — writing fiction, that is — has never worked very well for me. This year I’ve been making another run at it. In the crevices around the larger project and a few smaller ones I’ve managed to turn out one story still in progress, one story that felt done enough to submit just recently, and a piece of flash fiction that editors at Akashic Books were kind enough to include the other day in their online series Mondays Are Murder. Akashic is the house that published Kansas City Noir, the fiction collection I edited featuring 14 writers, in 2012. My story here (follow the link) is in Akashic’s Noir anthology style, set in a specific place (Midtown Kansas City). Locals may well recognize the opening setting, daytime in Milton’s Tap Room. And squeamish readers might be aware there’s a NSFW moment near the, uh, climax.

http://www.akashicbooks.com/blue-is-the-color-of-night-by-steve-paul/

From the Archives: Checking Out of Reality TV and Into a Folk Alliance Weekend

The Folk Alliance International conference is coming up again in Kansas City. For four glorious days in February I plan to immerse myself in a mind-blowing kaleidoscope of musical experiences. This will be the fifth and last (for now) KC conference, and I can hardly wait. I was poking around in search for something this morning when I came across the following, a quasi-political column that I wrote on the verge of Folk Alliance in 2016 and as that horrendous presidential campaign year was unfolding. I don't think I knew at the time that I'd be retiring just a month or so later. This column first appeared at kansascity.com and The Kansas City Star on Feb. 19-20, 2016. Sorry if it takes you back to a scary place.

"Steve Paul: To quote a sage, this land is your land"

By the time you read this I expect to be in the midst of a lost weekend. Yes, I suffer from an uncontrollable addiction — to music — a condition that has been exacerbated by the annual influx of song slingers and guitar players who gather at the Crown Center hotels in Kansas City for the Folk Alliance International conference.

I’ll spare you some of the high points of lyrical heartbreak, dextrous finger-picking and free-form, nocturnal goings-on of the “folk tribe” to which I pay tribute.

But I will thank the organizers for providing a timely and immersive break from that other tribal ritual consuming so much air space these days. Most of the music-making has taken place out of range of any 24/7 news coverage of the presidential campaign, and I’m happy even to give up glancing at my Twitter feed for at least an hour or two at a time.

That’s not to say this presidential campaign has unfolded without a certain entertainment value. But, Donald Trump in a pissing match with the pope? Who could have seen that coming?

Speaking of torture, the results from two more contests will be flowing into our screens this weekend. It has been difficult to sense any shift from recent trends in momentum, which has the leading candidates of both parties locked in unexpectedly close and death-to-the-finish battles.

If we’re lucky, the Republicans could lose a candidate or two after this weekend’s results. (When exactly will Ben Carson get the message that, aside from not having a clue, he doesn’t have a chance?)

As the GOP field narrows, it won’t be quite so easy for Trump to dominate in the race for committed convention delegates. With fewer candidates in the mix, runners up will have a better chance to reach voting thresholds (often 15 or 20 percent) that will allow them to land apportioned delegates.

So the acid-drenched battle, primarily between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, for second and even third place will mean more as the race churns through the Super Tuesday contests (March 1), Michigan (March 8) and a group of meaningful primaries in the middle of March.

Among the Democrats, it’s fair to ask the Hillary Clinton camp exactly when and where did they miss the signal that Bernie Sanders was riding forth on an express train.

Did anyone expect that Nevada, with its large Latino and union factions, would wind up neck and neck? It’s quite reasonable to suggest that Sanders’ message of income inequality resonates in a place that is so much defined by the haves and have nots and so largely populated by those who toil to serve the wealthy.

Clinton’s baggage remains heavy, though a majority of Democrats still view her as the party’s best chance to defeat whichever contorted Republican survives his party’s offensive demolition derby because, of course, no candidate is ever perfect and no politician is ever an angel.

Sanders’ appeal to the idealism and rebellion of youth (and many of their feel-the-Bern elders) will be a strong storyline when the history of this presidential campaign is written. So will the utterly surreal and weirdly American story of Trump, no matter what happens in the coming months.

I’m looking forward to dropping out for a couple of days. It might feel something like having a real life, not a constant loop of polling updates, attack ads, verbal inanities and solemn dissection of all of the above. I’ll miss the Sunday morning shows. I’ll take the news in small doses.

Maybe I will think a bit about Nevada this weekend, given that I’ll be holed up inside a hotel where time will stand still and machinations of the outside world will hardly penetrate. Just like Vegas, that is. But for this weekend at least I’m hanging my hat with the music makers. And if there’s any justice in this world, they are the ones who will inherit the earth.

This food thing: A sweet and melancholy affair

I have a large appetite. Food is not just nutrition but celebration. And life is too short to eat boring food, just as it’s too short to drink unremarkable wine. So I splurge sometimes. I cook with focus, adventure and a kind of subdued passion. I go for new tastes.

Yet, lately, I tend to eat less. Call it diabetes discipline. That’s optimistic. The numbers are good, though my liver would tend to disagree. Still, if tempted with a whole roasted fish or an oozing burrata with smoked trout roe, I’m all over it, at least for a few bites. Turns out that a heaping plate of crispy beef from a local, old-reliable Chinese restaurant can remain the centerpiece of four leftover lunches. I mean, why stuff yourself?

These thoughts began arising as I read a new collection of the late Jim Harrison’s food-and-life essays. The book’s title, A Really Big Lunch, refers to a spectacularly excessive, 37-course feast (or was it 42?) put on by a French chef and friend of Harrison’s. Even Harrison, whose appetites clearly were larger than mine, felt overwhelmed, almost defeated at one point. Harrison holds nothing back as a writer, and some readers might be turned off by his lecherous confessions and old-school impropriety (the essays reach as far back as the 1970s). But looking past all that, which, in the current sexual-harassment environment, becomes admittedly harder to do, he has wise and entertaining things to say about food and wine. I plan to cherry-pick some of Harrison’s wine writing for a paper I’m planning to give at a Hemingway conference, in Paris, in 2018. And imagine my surprise when I realized recently that in my modest collection of bottles I’ve got a Domaine Tempier Bandol from a few years back, which apparently was Harrison’s favorite wine in the world.

So, food, wine and cooking. From time to time I pay attention to the appetites.

On a fall Saturday, with nothing much else going on, I turned some of the last of our yard tomatoes into a marinara. They were not lovely orbs. They weren’t even deeply red, but they would do for a kitchen improvisation. It took a while in boiling water to loosen their skins, but when that was done I set them aside to cool. Chopped onions and garlic and the last of some baby carrots in the fridge. I was hoping to add tomato paste to the simmering stew, to add some color and heft, but alas I could find none on the shelf. Here’s a suitable substitute: a small jar of prepared tapenade; hmm, red peppers, some kind of cheese, why not? The tapenade turned the marinara a bit orange, but with salt, pepper and dried herbs, it all tasted pretty fine nearly two hours later when I turned off the burner. I put some of the marinara in a bag to freeze, and held out a good portion to eat the next day.

One Sunday, we found some frozen lamb chops in the freezer. I chopped onion and garlic. I opened a red wine (a mass market red Zinfandel) and a jar of vegetable stock I’d made around Thanksgiving. Ta da: braised lamb, with little potatoes and carrots. We ate lamb chops for days.

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As a onetime restaurant critic, my radar remains fairly well tuned when we go out to eat. Yet, I failed myself on a recent trip to Toronto. Though I managed to sample a decent variety of tastes in a couple of days – pub food, tapas at a trendy Sherry bar -- I missed the hugely important world of alluring Asian cuisines that seem to define dining in that capital of cultural diversity. Next time, for sure. A recent trip to Atlanta gave us a sampling of that city’s burgeoning fine-dining scene, though we barely scratched the surface. In Boston this fall, at the Neptune Oyster Bar (pictured), I managed to consume some of the finest oysters on the half shell I’d ever met. In Kansas City, I’ve sampled a couple of promising new restaurants lately and always find pleasure and creativity when returning to old favorites (Novel, the Rieger, the Antler Room, to name just three). And I had one of the best meals of the year when birthday splurging in Corvino’s Tasting Room (details in a previous blog). But I always have to remind myself that some of the other best meals of the year occurred in domestic settings: A humbly generous and bustling family meal around an extended kitchen table at the Zia Pueblo in New Mexico; an intimate and poignant Thanksgiving tribute with family members of a close friend who had died just the week before.

With the holidays in full swing, I expect much feasting ahead, some of it happy, some, so it goes, melancholy. The warmth of the kitchen, the clink of glasses, all that love on our plates – sure, we can’t help but feel grateful for what we have.

What's that wine in your glass?

Doug Frost is a bona fide treasure in the wine world. As a Master of Wine and a Master Sommelier -- that's an extremely rare combination of achievements -- he's got highly developed senses and a brilliant way of teaching the intricacies and boosting the pleasures of this life-affirming liquid. On Monday he joined the Gang of Pour group of Kansas City somms and restaurateurs (and somewhat educated observer-participants such as me) for a session on blind tasting. In blind tastings, of course, wine bottles remain in brown paper bags or otherwise hidden and tasters try to figure out what's in the glass. It ain't easy, but Doug has a way of making it logical and breaking it down to the elements that help you learn your way.

The Gang of Pour sessions now meet every two weeks at the lovely Ca Va bubbles spot in Westport and are open to KC bar professionals. This one was illuminating, exhilarating and rather difficult. Future sessions, led by a variety of wine pros, promise to be equally enjoyable.

Doug follows a consistent procedure, tied to the grid sheets used in sommelier certification exams. So we go through a fairly specific list of wine characteristics (color, hue, intensity, aromas, tastes, structural qualities) in order to get to a logical place in identifying each wine. Describe the floral and vegetal notes. Is this a warm climate wine or a cool climate wine? And why? How do you describe the levels of acid, tannin, and alcohol -- low, moderate, moderate-plus or high?

Doug spent a good part of the first hour of the session walking through each incremental step as it applied to a certain white wine. Then my classmates (about 20 of us) and I blasted through five more wines -- a second white and four reds -- having about four minutes each to make our IDs. For the record, I was mostly humbled, though I felt fairly good about some of my sensory responses, especially in analyzing structure. In the end, I did nail two of the six wines: an Australian Shiraz and a New World Pinot Noir (it was from New Zealand, but I couldn't get past New World, though probably would have landed on Oregon instead).

I've been learning from Doug for more than 20 years. He is not only incredibly on top of everything, he's got a great sense of humor, he's brutally frank, and he's totally committed to making wine drinking both fun and rewarding.