Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone (review)

Current approaches to studying the history of jazz in the United States often focus on the stylistic and compositional nature of the music itself. The physical backdrop and spaces in which the musical scene developed and evolved are frequently subsumed in the story of “great men” who “did jazz”—Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, for instance. Worse yet, the historical canon reimagines and sanitizes the jazz scene for a variety of motives that speak to the preconceived expectations of scholars and their need to characterize scenes, such as those found in Kansas City, as wide-open and licentious. Such myopic practices ignore significant intersections of race, gender, class, non-normative sexuality, and spatial elements in the development of jazz scenes.

These are precisely the subjects unpacked by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone’s Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene. Clifford-Napoleone relies on a penetrative theoretical foundation, which includes works by Michel Foucault and José Esteban Muñoz, to resurrect Kansas City jazz scenes from the limited and misleading concentration on giant personalities from the 1930s and 1940s. Thanks to her efforts, readers visualize the convoluted nature of early-twentieth-century Kansas City politics, in which the Thomas J. Pendergast machine clashed with moral reformers who hoped to spatially compartmentalize vice. Rather than being just a place where the so-called Kansas City sound developed, the early-twentieth-century “Pendergast world” is exposed as one that also included prostitution, gender nonconformity, racial mixing, and displays of non-normative sexuality (p. 22). Scholars have ignored or downplayed them all, though this underworld shaped jazz in Kansas City. With her approach, lesser-known cabarets, clubs, and personalities fall into clearer focus. Institutions like Dante’s Inferno and the Spinning Wheel emerge as sites of gender nonconformity on the part of patrons and entertainers alike, and these venues’ significance rivaled that of canonical institutions like the Chesterfield Club, the Cherry Blossom, and the Subway Club. Clifford-Napoleone also highlights women in this creative maelstrom, not only as performers who enjoyed long but somewhat obscure careers, such as Edna Mae Jacobs, but also as conduits for female agency and resilience, such as madam Annie Chambers. The refusal of canonical literature to see Chambers’s efforts to protect prostitutes and working-class women from the corrective morality of middle-class reformers constitutes what Clifford-Napoleone terms the “deterritorialization and reterritorialization of space,” a process that ultimately distorted the creative structures of scene-making into discussions of the roles that “great men” played in the development of jazz in Kansas City (p. 15).

Clifford-Napoleone reframes the Kansas City jazz scene as one shaped by otherness, and she focuses on the nonmusical foundations of jazz. While that is one obvious strength of this slender volume, its greatest contribution entails the resurrection of the marginalized cultural pioneers of scene-making—the gender and sexual nonconformists, the working-class Kansas Citians, women, and the plethora of journeyman entertainers, all of whom nourished this scene. In that regard, Queering Kansas City Jazz is an example of the opportunities that intersectionality provides for the reimagination of cultural phenomena.