The Count Basie Orchestra, nineteen-time Grammy winners, the band that helped invent swing, takes the stage at the Music Hall on April 30 at 6:30 PM, on the eve of International Jazz Day.
KC’s own Lonnie McFadden, vocalist Deborah Brown, and guitarist Charlton Johnson join them. The show is being presented by Creative City KC.
Count Basie, one of the most famous and prolific Kansas City musicians of all time, helped invent the swing and jazz language. The sound he built in Kansas City in 1935 traveled out from this city and shaped how the world understood swing, how it understood Black genius, how it understood American music itself.
Ninety-one years later, his orchestra is still touring the planet, still winning Grammys, still carrying his name into every great concert hall on earth. It is the second longest continuously performing Black-led jazz orchestra in the world, behind only Duke Ellington’s. Almost no Black institution in this country has lived that long. Even fewer have stayed Black-led the entire time. This one has.
Thursday’s homecoming is being brought to Kansas City by Creative City KC, the cultural organization co-founded by Jake Wagner and the late Mrs. Anita J. Dixon-Brown. Mrs. Dixon-Brown became an ancestor this past January after a lifetime of building the kind of cultural infrastructure most cities never get and most Black communities are denied. Thursday’s show is part of the work she set in motion. Her name belongs in the air of that hall.
What makes Thursday different from any other tour stop is that this is a homecoming. The Music Hall sits twenty blocks from where the Reno Club used to stand. The neighborhood Basie wrote into immortality has been ground down by urban renewal, redlining, highway construction, and the ongoing project of displacement this paper has been documenting for years.
And still, the music is coming home. Lonnie McFadden carries 18th and Vine in his feet and his horn. Deborah Brown has carried the Kansas City tradition into conservatories and concert halls across three continents. The horns will line up. Walter Page’s bassline will glide. Somebody in that room is going to hear “One O’Clock Jump” and feel time fold over on itself.
This show is a convergence between the ancestors and the future. I plan to be there and hope you will be too.
