Lip Service
It's nice that the ballroom of the big hotel downtown is named after jazz great Count Basie. There are also rooms named for Jay McShann, Charlie Parker and other Kansas City music legends. Across the street on Saturday night, the mayor's office delivered a "proclamation" heralding the performance of Count Basie's ghost band. Such well-intentioned lip service, however, doesn't really accomplish much. It's not unlike the people I know who invest a lot of energy into campaigns to get people like Ella Fitzgerald on postage stamps. These actions do little to address the music's accelerating unpopularity.
posted by Happy In Bag @ 5:15 PM
1 Comments:
At 7:02 PM,
Xavier Onassis said…
I'm not sure which hotel this is. But I'll betcha dollars to donuts that it's a hotel that wouldn't have allowed Count Basie, Jay McShann, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington or any other black musician of the day to stay in any of their rooms.
Oh, they can play in the bar until closing time. But come last call they need to go somewhere else too!
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