Smokey Bob’s Cafe

The setting is Kansas City’s rough-and-tumble Hey Hey Club. It’s 1934, and the Pendergast political machine has insulated the city from the Depression, supporting a string of taverns, bars and nightclubs and attracting some of the finest jazz musicians in the country. Kansas City, Mo., in 1934, is a city that never sleeps.

Poised on opposite sides of a bandstand inside the Hey Hey, horns brandished, tenor saxophonists Joshua Redman and Craig Handy have the look of reet-pleated, zoot-suited gladiators, fully prepared for jam session combat.

As the rhythm section begins to churn and the energy rises, they toss riffs back and forth, propelling each phrase with a cool, top-that-one-if-you-can attitude. After a few exchanges, Handy pauses, eyes his opponent carefully and, as if to take the game up a notch, slowly removes his jacket. He kicks into another driving, virtuosic set of choruses that is instantly answered by Redman.

The other musicians cheer encouragement as the back and forth continues, the solos building into rich-textured mixtures of sound and style and feeling, resonating with the spunk and spirit of the ‘30s, alive with the nervous tensions of the ‘90s.

Redman and Handy are offering their impressions of legendary jazz stars Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins in an atmospheric heart-of-the-movie scene from Robert Altman’s new film “Kansas City,” scheduled to open nationally on Friday. As admired as he is controversial, Altman has been challenging the film establishment since 1970 with a genre-altering approach to almost everything he touches, from war movies (“MASH”) and westerns (“McCabe and Mrs. Miller”) to detective stories (“The Long Goodbye”) and his own trademark multi-plotted ensemble productions (“Nashville,” “A Wedding,” “Short Cuts,” “Ready to Wear”).

The encounter between Redman and Handy is the picture’s musical counterpoint to the complex relationship of the two female leads, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Miranda Richardson. And the parallel between music and drama is what provides “Kansas City” with the dramatic kernel that allowed Altman, with 30 films under his belt, to make the jazz movie he has long had in mind.

“The problem,” Altman explains in a telephone interview, “is that most jazz is very hard to use as background music in film, because it has such an insistent voice. I’m a jazz fan, obviously, myself; it was the first music I ever heard. But I didn’t want to do a film where the characters are jazz players. Which makes it very hard. How do you do it?”

The answer, for Altman, was to transform the whole movie into jazz by constructing the story--a dark tale of Depression-era politics, love, drugs and murder--like a song.

“And the song goes like this,” he continues. “ ‘They Took My Man, So I Kidnapped This Girl, and I’m Going to Get Him Back, but in the End It Didn’t Work Out Blues.’ That’s the song, and it’s three minutes long. And then, when people start doing their improvs, and their takeoffs on that--when the band gets finished jamming through that--the song’s complete.”

Altman sees Leigh and Richardson as “two tenor saxes in all their scenes,” replete with the contradictions of challenge and attachment typical of the jam session encounters between saxophonists.

“I looked at Harry Belafonte [who plays the role of Seldom Seen, the tough gangster owner of the Hey Hey Club] as the brass, as the trumpet,” he says, “and the Johnny O’Hara character [played by Dermot Mulroney] as the trombone in his one solo thing. And if you think about the film this way, all the characters have some sort of musical quality. The story’s just this little story, detailed all the way through with fairly truthful events. But the whole film is jazz.”

Why Kansas City, instead of Chicago, New Orleans or New York City? In part because, in the early ‘30s, its wide-open night life made it a magnet for musicians. As a further attraction for ambitious young jazzmen, the big bands that toured the Southwest--bands led by Bennie Moten, Count Basie, Alphonse Trent, Andy Kirk, George E. Lee and others--often used Kansas City as a launch pad. The city, as a result, was usually brimful of first-rate players, and the clubs, many of which never seemed to close, played host to free-floating, perpetual jam sessions.

But equally important, Kansas City is the 71-year-old Altman’s hometown.

“It’s where I was born and grew up,” he says. “And almost every character in every situation, except for the main story, was truthful. Not quite factual but truthful. Belafonte’s character, for example--Seldom Seen--was a real guy. He went to prison, I think, three times for murder and died when he was 97.”

Most of all, Altman remembers the jazz--the nonstop jam sessions, the loose-swinging big bands, hearing a youthful Charlie Parker playing with Jay McShann’s group.

“I didn’t know who he was at the time, of course,” Altman recalls. “I was just a kid at the time myself, but I knew he was good.” (The memory, in fact, affects the script of “Kansas City,” which includes a role for a teenage Charlie Parker, carrying his horn from session to session.)

When the time came to focus on the music for the picture, Altman and Hal Willner, the film’s music director, decided not only that jazz should be an intrinsic presence but that it should be performed by the best young players available. The result is a lineup that reads like an assemblage of all-stars. Among the more prominent names: trumpeter Nicholas Payton; saxophonists Redman, Handy, James Carter and David Murray; clarinetist Don Byron, pianists Geri Allen and Cyrus Chestnut; bassists Ron Carter and Christian McBride; percussionist Victor Lewis; and singer Kevin Mahogany.

To further spice up the mix, Altman provided each player with a famous jazz figure to use as a model. Redman and Handy as Young and Hawkins are almost immediately apparent visually. Redman wears Young’s trademark porkpie hat, and Handy is dressed in Hawkins’ characteristically elegant style. There are echoes of the brusque muscular saxophone sounds of Ben Webster and Herschel Evans in the performances of Carter and Murray. Allen has the look and touch of Mary Lou Williams (a superb pianist and arranger for the Andy Kirk band), and Mahogany projects his own image of blues great Joe Turner.

The music they play is a rich blend of early swing-era gems such as “Queer Notions,” “Tickle Toe” and “Moten Swing,” standard tunes such as “Indiana” and “Solitude” and a few originals. Without exception, the tunes are performed with a feeling of joy and an urgent sense of swing typical of the ‘30s.

But Altman was careful not to push the musicians into note-by-note efforts at direct simulation ofthe originals. And some of the models served only as vague reference points. Nicholas Payton’s prototype, for example, was Oran “Hot Lips” Page, star trumpeter with the Basie band of the ‘30s. But Payton didn’t feel that the association quite fit his own playing style.

“It was OK, though, because the character names were not by any means intended to stifle the musicians,” Payton says. “So what we tried to do was have a respect for people like ‘Hot Lips’ and tried to play in the style while still being free to be creative.”

“I didn’t want to inundate the audience with, ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so,’ ” Altman says. “And also I didn’t want these guys to feel they had to imitate the characters. Because we weren’t doing imitations, we were doing impressions.”

James Carter says Altman laid out the general characterizations, then allowed the musicians to interpret them freely.

“He was very loose, a very nice fellow,” Carter recalls. “The way he worked was to basically say, ‘Do what you guys normally do,’ and that was about it. The result was that the music was really happening, and it was a hip experience for the individuals that took part in it.”

Redman agrees, while noting that the musicians, in addition to staying in touch with their model characterizations, had another responsibility: finding a balance between their contemporary playing styles and the styles of the ‘30s.

As if to underscore the subtlety of that task, Redman found it awkward to perform effectively while holding his tenor saxophone raised to one side in the stance usually employed by Young.

“He was willing to go ahead with it,” Altman says. “It wasn’t so much difficult for him as it was uncomfortable. So I said, ‘Don’t do it.’ I was much more interested in having the players be themselves within the style of the period.”

Which the musicians managed to do, with a surprisingly wide range of creative latitude. The vigor that Allen and Chestnut bring to their renderings of Mary Lou Williams and Count Basie has a ring of musical authenticity.

And Murray expands upon Altman’s desire to have the players “be themselves” with an envelope-stretching solo on “Queer Notions,” explaining his approach by pointing out that the young stars of the ‘30s were the cutting-edge musicians of their era.

“Herschel Evans and Ben Webster and Lester Young, I think, were as avant-garde as anything I could attempt to do,” Murray says. “I’m just following in their footsteps.”

Not only do the musicians play well, but they portray their parts with talent and enthusiasm, and Altman worked with them in the same fashion with which he deals with actors.

“They got it,” he says. “They got what we were doing, they said, ‘OK,’ and they came in and did it. They played in the idiom they should be playing in, and yet they didn’t erase their own individuality from it. Like most good actors, they put on the costumes, and that’s 75% of their acting role.”

The choice to use jazz musicians as actors is consistent with Altman’s longtime filmmaking technique, which incorporates many procedural methods similar to the production of jazz. Like Duke Ellington putting together a composition for an orchestra of unique players, Altman gives his actors extraordinary license to express their own creativity.

His delineation of “Kansas City” as a “little story,” detailed with “truthful events” and the spirit of improvisation, could serve as a description for many of the director’s multileveled ensemble films.

“So long as I know what the ‘song’ is, within the structure as I’m doing the film,” he says, “I do that an awful lot. It’s really up to how much the actors want to do and how skilled they are at doing it--how good can they be?”

When Altman gave Harry Belafonte his script, the actor took one look at it and said, “Christ, Bob, you haven’t got any words here for me.”

“And I told him,” Altman says, “ ‘Well, you write ‘em. Why should I tell you about your rap?’ And Harry did that. He did those monologues. And they came out of his own experience. Nobody else could have written them the same way, because the information that he was bringing to it was character information, not plot information.”

Asked whether giving an actor such an uncommon degree of freedom doesn’t require a considerable leap of directorial trust, Altman simply chuckles.

“Sure, but I see what’s happening,” he says. “I’m sitting there with the camera. And if he goes off someplace and suddenly he’s playing with Lawrence Welk, I say, ‘OK, something’s wrong here.’ ”

In his familiar quest for documentary-like reality, Altman shot the musical segments live-to-film with three cameras. The method is particularly valuable for jazz performances, which--even in much-praised documentaries in the past--have suffered from the credibility problems endemic to productions in which musicians must perform to playback, pretending to articulate the fingering of passages created in prior, spontaneous solo improvisations. Not so in “Kansas City,” where every note is performed live, the product of individual talent and the spontaneity of the moment.

Altman has been recording his musicals using the technique since before “Nashville,” he says, and he swears by it.

“Nobody else would do it, but I did,” he says. “It’s the only way to do it. And the only reason it isn’t done on most pictures, I think, is that most directors or producers have to take their advice about what can or can’t be done from technical people. And the technical people want everything done the easy way.

“So they say, ‘Oh, you can’t edit it properly unless you shoot it and do it to playback, blah, blah, blah.’ And it just isn’t true. You have to be a little more skilled, you have to get to know the limitations and the problems that [doing music live] will present, and you have to be clear about how important the music and the visuals that go with it are.”

The musical results, at least for “Kansas City,” are a stunning achievement--so good that Altman has extracted a separate 55-minute film titled “Robert Altman’s Jazz ‘34: Remembrances of Kansas City Swing” that is a milestone in the production of jazz documentaries. The film--narrated by Belafonte, with added recollections of residents who recall Kansas City’s wide-open Depression years--contextualizes the music while permitting it to speak for itself (a characteristic Altman accomplishment). It is scheduled for showing on PBS in January and may be released--assuming clearances can be completed--as a commercial video.

It will, in any case, stand as a jazz document comparable to CBS’ black-and-white television classic “The Sound of Jazz” (with Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan and others) from the ‘50s.

Despite the jazz successes of “Kansas City” (the original soundtrack album on Verve has been on the charts since it was issued several months ago), it has had a somewhat rocky path to its release date.

“It’s been hard,” Altman says. “We had a lot of problems. My producer had a very serious aneurysm; she survived, but I lost her for the shoot. That was tough. Then the French company I made it for cracked down because I went over budget because of the music. They didn’t know what I was doing, and they didn’t understand it at all. When I went a little over budget, they brought the insurance company in, so I finished the picture with a bunch of accountants hanging around all the time.”

Nor has the initial critical response been all upbeat--which is no surprise to Altman, a perennial Hollywood maverick.

“Movies are so bland and banal and predictable,” he says. “And the critics are all pretty much the same way. They’ve all gotten--unwittingly, I trust--into the hands of these major studio promotions. And that’s what films are. Everything’s ‘Forrest Gump’ and ‘Star Wars.’

“So when they see this film, they don’t quite get it. It’s a little strange. We either get, ‘This is the best film I’ve ever seen’ kind of responses and reviews, where it gets them and they really go. Or they’re a little distrustful of their own reactions, because they haven’t seen this form before, and we get a little negative stuff. But the thing I want to be sure about is that we reach all the people who dig the music. They’re the ones who like the picture, because they understand it.”

But Altman has been doing what he does far too long to second-guess his work.

“The baby’s born when it’s born,” he says. “But you don’t think about changing it. It’s exactly like a child. It’s finished. If it’s too tall, it’s too tall. If it’s too short, it’s too short. But that’s what it is.”

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Hear ‘Kansas City’

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