Kansas City Jazz Tradition Hits Sour Note : Music: Kansas City once was known for nightclubs featuring the likes of Count Basie and Charlie Parker. Today, musicians are struggling.

When Little Willie Littlefield wrote the popular tune “Goin’ to Kansas City” in the early 1900s, jazz musicians flocked here for the the good life and plenty of gigs.

Nightclubs lined the streets and the joints were jumping from early evening to early morning seven days a week.

Today, hundreds of jazz musicians and half a dozen jazz organizations are struggling to keep Kansas City’s jazz tradition alive. About 400 jazz and blues soloists and more than 70 bands are competing for a shrinking share of the economic pie.

The money coming in from the city, corporations and the public isn’t enough to sustain a healthy jazz community in Kansas City, most musicians say.

“The city has a certain amount of money, and the jazz groups are fighting over it. They’re biting and clawing for money,” says Stan Kessler, 36, a Kansas City trumpet player who works part-time at a health food store.

Doug Alpert, director of the Kansas City Jazz Commission, which coordinates and finances jazz events and projects, says, “There’s just not enough money. We’ve like turned water into wine in the last year.”

In a good year, the commission will receive about $40,000 from the city, Alpert says. In an off year, that may dip to about $10,000 a year.

Recently, the city’s three major commercial jazz organizations--the Jazz Festival Committee, The 18th and Vine Heritage Festival and the Jazz Ambassadors--all agreed to unite under the commission.

The more coordinated the groups are, the more likely corporations and the city will financially support jazz, Alpert says.

“Unfortunately, it’s really easy to let your cultural amenities go by the wayside in hard times,” he says. “But culture is a vital cog to the economic growth of the city.”

Arthur Jackson, 70, a reed player who still tries to play as many gigs as he can, remembers the good old days.

“It was a happy time,” he says. “The musicians would play from 9 at night to 5 in the morning.”

The boom years for Kansas City and jazz started in the late 1920s, when Kansas City had as many as 100 nightclubs and cabarets. In the small 18th and Vine jazz district alone, there were more than 60 jazz clubs.

The permissive political climate under political boss Tom Pendergast allowed Kansas City to become a citadel of jazz in the 1920s.

“If you want to see some sin forget about Paris and go to Kansas City,” columnist Edward Morrow wrote in the Omaha World-Herald at the time.

Despite the 1929 stock market crash, Kansas City’s night life carried on, and employment for musicians reached its highest levels. It was then that the Kansas City jazz style blossomed.

Kansas City’s jazz style has its foundations in blues, ragtime and folk music and was developed through a combination of the swing era dance beats. The jam session was and still is a very important part of Kansas City jazz.

Kansas City’s bands managed to stay together in the early 1930s when theaters and nightclubs were folding nationwide.

A saxophone player named Charlie Parker began his ascent to fame here in his hometown in the ‘30s. Count Basie was a regular in the clubs here.

But with the end of Pendergast’s political career in 1938, after his indictment on tax evasion charges, came the end of the jazz heyday.

Reform elements took over, nightclubs and cabarets were shut down, jobs for musicians dried up and the Kansas City bands took to the road.