Plastic Sax

An uncommon occurrence was almost as impressive as the elegant music rendered by pianist Randy Porter, bassist Tom Wakeling and drummer Todd Strait at The 1905 in Portland, Oregon, on Tuesday, August 22. Not a single member of the capacity audience of 40 uttered a peep during the first 65-minute set.

Three elements contributed to the blissful absence of chatter: a $15 cover charge, a stern advisory not to talk before the first note was played and a requirement to order all food and drinks on a phone app.

Thanks in no small part to Strait, the music was worthy of rapt attention. Even though he spends much of his time in Portland, Strait is still recognized as one of Kansas City’s most outstanding musicians.

The joy-infused, straight-ahead swing he guided at the 1905 sounded a lot like PBT, Strait’s storied trio with Paul Smith and Bob Bowman. Alarmingly, the pristine Portland experience seems to be endangered.

Pat Metheny’s 1976 debut album Bright Size Life is so magical that listeners would be forgiven for thinking the music materialized out of nowhere. Carolyn Glenn Brewer’s illuminating new study Beneath Missouri Skies: Pat Metheny in Kansas City 1964-1972 provides a detailed accounting of the origins of the Lee’s Summit native’s sound.

Brewer, the author of the excellent Changing the Tune: The Kansas City Women’s Jazz Festival, 1978-1985, exhaustively traces Metheny’s formative musical endeavors. Her story opens with The Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and closes during the summer following Metheny’s graduation from high school.

Not only is Brewer a contemporary of Metheny, she was a fellow musician and sister of one of Metheny’s primary teen collaborators. She bolsters her eyewitness impressions of many of the key events of Beneath Missouri Skies with extensive research and interviews.

Beneath Missouri Skies will delight Metheny enthusiasts eager to learn even the most minute details of his musical development, but it’s even more crucial as a history of a previously underdocumented era of jazz in Kansas City. The scarcity of recordings and videos of the scene Brewer describes makes her work necessary.

The colorful antics of Gary Sivils, the business acumen of Warren Durrett and the influential theories of John Elliott loom large. Musicians such as Herman Bell, Rod Fleeman, Russ Long, Bettye Miller, Dave Scott and Paul Smith also play key roles in Beneath Missouri Skies. While she clearly has great personal and professional affection for her subjects, Brewer doesn’t romanticize the setting.

She recounts the demeaning musical compromises musicians were obligated to make at the majority of gigs in Kansas City. Metheny and his colleagues were regularly compelled to cover shopworn pop hits like “Proud Mary.” The inference that these artistic constraints would contribute to Metheny’s crossover success is among the multitude of insights provided by the invaluable Beneath Missouri Skies.