Kansas City
by Jeff Kaliss
"Musically, we were trying to capture the sound of the time as best we
could," Joshua Redman told me after his return to his New York City apartment
last year from the set of Robert Altman's film Kansas City, set
in 1934. "But they didn't make us feel restricted." Although the film premieres this fall, the spirit of the
soundtrack suggests that musical director Hal Wilner (who's also produced
tribute recordings to Kurt Weill, Walt Disney, and Nino Rota) has successfully
worked his magic again, and that we'd do well to join the jam at Altman's
fictional Hey Hey Club. Wilner has assembled a stellar selection of '90s
jazz performers and managed to keep them true to the compositional and
instrumental conceits of the '30s, while still allowing them space to
show off and have fun. The fun blasts out of the tenor sax of James Carter
from the opening measures of Count Basie's and Jimmy Rushing's "Blues
in the Dark" set over a wicked vamp by pianist Geri Allen.
While all the tracks are period pieces, most aren't as familiar
as "Moten Swing", (written by brothers Bennie and Buster Moten, who helped
bring New Orleans trad jazz into the prebop KC sound), in which Carter
and Jesse Davis are careful to limit their quotes to material no more
recent than the 1930 pop tune, "Exactly Like You".
But the panorama of Kansas City sound extends towards
the subsequent bop innovations of KC native Charlie Parker and visitors
Charlie Christian and Lester Young in the soundtrack's arrangement of
Hawk's "Queer Notions". The eccentric solos by David Murray, Russell Malone,
and Cyrus Chestnut here push the historical envelope just a bit.
Handy's tenor locks horns with Redman on "Yeah, Man". And
there's another spirited scrimmage between brassmen Nicholas Payton, James
Zollar, and Olu Dara, carried out as a New Orleans street march on Basie
and Durham's "Lafayette," with the sounds of the bystanding Hey Hey crowd
artfully engineered and mixed in by Eric Liljestrand. The enthusiastic
club clientele also participate in Kevin Mahogany's vocalized bluesy admission,
"I Left My Baby".
A more moody but equally apt effect is showcased in the
big band format of "Lullaby of the Leaves" and in two takes on the Duke
Ellington standard "Solitude", the first humidified by Redman's broadly
blown sax and the second quietly romanced by the basses of Christian McBride
and Ron Carter. A sweet but sassy Don Byron reminds us of the time when
clarinets still counted in Walter Page's "Pagin'
the Devil"  .
Here then is an intriguing and valuable musical experiment:
despite the historical restrictions on the players, their virtuosity comes
through, as does the ambience of that special time and place, so important
to the evolution of jazz.
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