Jazz

It is generally agreed that in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s there were important developments in jazz centered in City. City had been the home of the Bennie Moten orchestra since the early 1920s; it gave us the Count Basie orchestra with Lester Young in the mid-1930s; and it nurtured Charlie Parker before he came to national prominence in the 1940s. Such a city, such a musical environment, obviously warrants our attention. So far it has been given not nearly enough. Among the reliable sources, there is a highly provocative interlude, From City, a Musician's town . in Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (1955), a collection of excerpts from interviews edited by Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff. This section offers then-new quotations from pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams, pianist Sammy Price, drummer Jo Jones, and excerpts from earlier interviews with other participants. The pioneering effort at a history is Frank Driggs's chapter Kansas City and the Southwest, in Jazz (1959), edited by Hentoff and McCarthy, a chapter that Driggs is scheduled to expand into a book to which we can all look forward

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