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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone Robin C. Henry Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone, Queering Kansas City Jazz: Gender, Performance, and the History of a Scene. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. 212 pp. $45.00 (cloth). The examination of queer spaces in U.S. history has led to a greater understanding of the relationship between marginalized people and public space. Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone’s Queering Kansas City Jazz expands this understanding, moving beyond the identification of queer space and people in the famous Missouri Midwest jazz city. Indeed, she argues that Kansas City jazz has a fluid and intersectional identity; it originated, she stresses, in brothels and working-class bars frequented by immigrants and Black people. She further argues that the relatively unknown nature of the connection between jazz and gender nonconformity can be traced to jazz histories that have systemically erased queerness and gender experimentation, including gender nonconforming dress and presentation, in jazz performances and spaces. The reclaiming of these voices, personalities, and spaces forms the heart of her project. Clifford-Napoleone’s book is divided into two parts. The first provides a history of Kansas City, focusing especially on the rise of the Pendergast family. That family not only ruled the city’s political scene, but also shaped the nightlife of saloons, clubs, and brothels in its West Bottom section. This is well-trod history, but Clifford-Napoleone shows the ways in which people of color, working-class people, and gender nonconforming people were always part of the city’s fabric. Kansas City, she explains, rested at the edge of the much-mythologized American frontier, whose diverse residents—reformers and temperance activists on the one hand and individuals who wanted to keep the city’s entertainment district as open to new acts and people as possible on the other—found space. Kansas Citians’ conflicting agendas, however, led city leaders and planners to make strategic choices that, over time, narrowed spaces for experimentation. This analysis in the section of her book lays the foundation for later chapters by emphasizing [End Page 169] that these happenings were choices, not inevitabilities. As the city developed, discordant messages caused conflict over whose city and whose jazz and entertainment scene it really was. At every turn, marginalized people, especially those who experimented with gender, lost their connection to and place within jazz. It is Clifford-Napoleone’s presentation of this conflict within the oft-told history of Kansas City that reminds readers that the city’s origin stories did not conform to a standard rhythm. Rather, they resembled the experiments in syncopated time that made the city’s music so famous. Clifford-Napoleone’s argument develops most fully and her major contribution is most clear in the second half of her book. She examines two tracks: first, the historical record and, second, how that record was created. In her analysis, the historical record continues to show more evidence of queerness in the jazz scene than previous historians of jazz and of Kansas City have identified. It is here that Clifford-Napoleone’s work truly moves into new spaces. For her, queerness is not limited to same-sex acts or homosexual identifications. Instead, she opens up queerness to also encompass race and class identities that lie beyond White middle-class norms, as well as to include nonconforming professions, such as prostitution. The result is a portrait of Kansas City’s jazz scene that is truly intersectional and much queerer than previously known. In Clifford-Napoleone’s study, that scene becomes a space where understandings of gender experimentation, class, and race cannot be separated from one another or removed from the whole. Throughout the book’s second section, Clifford-Napoleone points out that much of this intersectional, queer space is not only neglected in standard jazz and Kansas City histories but also missing in jazz archives. She argues that the process of collecting some types of archival material but not others has effectively erased the existence of queer performers and places. The former include Mr. Half and Half; the latter include Dante’s Inferno and the Paradise Club. Possibly worse, Clifford...