For your next trip to Kansas City, pack your saxophone
Monday evenings at the Blue Room, part of the American Jazz Museum, you can even sit in with veteran musicians
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City has a wide-open selection of bars to help the business traveller shake off that last meeting and down beverages poured from full-size bottles not found in the mini-bar.
There are also loads of taverns that aim to sully your gin and quiet with all kinds of music.
Then there is the Blue Room, when the need for good music pushes aside those lower-brain urges. You don’t go to the Blue Room just to have a drink.
You go to the Blue Room to listen — and not in a background-fill-in-the-gaps kind of way.
The Blue Room is a small twotiered space adjoining Kansas City’s American Jazz Museum in the Historic 18th & Vine Jazz District, a few miles from the hotels and convention locales of Crown Center. It’s dark, the bar is packed, the tables small.
On a recent Friday night, by 8.40 p.m., apart from a couple of bar stools, the place was standing-room-only. The draw was the James Ward Band, a six-piece contemporary jazz group that hushed the middle-aged skewing crowd and set one older gentleman dancing alone in front of the bar.
Most everyone else sat quietly, drinks before them, heads facing forward, soaking it in.
The Blue Room “is a working jazz club exhibit” that hosts veteran musicians and new bands, locals and the internationally known, said Christopher Burnett, marketing and communications manager for the American Jazz Museum. Ida McBeth makes regular appearances.
It’s open Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, with the last Monday of the month usually reserved for big bands, and the last Thursday for Latin Jazz and Salsa. The Blue Room also holds a free jam session on Monday evenings where musicians of all skill levels can sit in with veterans.
For the next trip to Kansas City, pack your sax.