FINDING A COMMON GROOVE

By Christopher Porterfield

Outside the city's dozens of nightclubs and honky-tonks, violence and corruption ruled the streets. Inside, in the back rooms, there was illicit gambling and who knew what else. But up on the bandstands, the jazz musicians of Kansas City swung through it all. Absorbed, imperturbable, they played within a sort of bubble of purity: theirs were the only disinterested passions in town. Or so it seems in Robert Altman's new film, Kansas City, set in the 1930s heyday of "Boss" Tom Pendergast, when an extraordinary concentration of jazz talent flourished in the city (and a wide-eyed Altman was growing up there).

Altman's movie won't be released for two months, but the sound track is already here, on a just released Verve CD. As the jazzmen of yore might've said, it's a gas. The mix of 21 musicians includes veteran players whose stylistic roots go back to Kansas City and beyond--alto saxophonist David ("Fathead") Newman Jr., drummer Victor Lewis--and younger stars who actually seem to enjoy paying their respects to tradition--tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, guitarist Mark Whitfield, bassist Christian McBride. On track after track, soloists of different generations find a common groove. On Froggy Bottom, altoist Newman, 66, and guitarist Whitfield, 29, turn out to speak the same blues language, lyrical as well as funky. One of the CD's two versions of Solitude is a lovely duet for basses in which McBride, 24, and the nonpareil Ron Carter, 59, weave deep, brooding lines together. (Carter also provides a Gibraltar-like foundation for several other numbers.)

The set mostly avoids pastiche. The musicians don't try to impersonate their great historical counterparts, like Count Basie, Lester Young, Oran ("Hot Lips") Page and Mary Lou Williams, though in the film some correspondences are suggested. The spirit of the Kansas City scene is what they evoke, while remaining idiosyncratically and often exuberantly themselves.

Still, authenticity is served. All the numbers are built on the era's vintage tunes and formats--the loose, buoyant ensembles (Moten Swing and a hypnotically undulating Pagin' the Devil), the "cutting sessions" (Yeah, Man, a fiery face-off between the tenor saxes of Redman and Craig Handy), the crescendoing call-and-response riff patterns (I Left My Baby, whipped to a fervent pitch by Curtis Fowlkes' swaggering trombone), the galloping flag wavers (Lafayette, a raucous vehicle for trumpet soloists Nicholas Payton, James Zollar and Olu Dara) and the rococo after-hours ballads (I Surrender Dear, in which James Carter tricks up his solo with so many growl tones, glissandos, squeaking harmonics and feathery flutter-tonguings that it begins to seem his tenor sax can do everything but fetch the morning paper).

The drummer Jo Jones once reminisced that when he started jamming in Kansas City, it wasn't unusual for a single number to go on for an hour or more: "They didn't tell me at that time that they used to change drummers so I just sat there and played the whole time for pure joy." For the 63 minutes that this CD goes on, one can listen the same way.

--By Christopher Porterfield