Al Bartee (photo by Dan White)
Dan White’s “A Portrait of Kansas City Jazz: From Al Bartee to Lonnie’s Reno Club”
As cultural and technological changes transform our everyday lives, they leave in their linguistic wake a slew of retronyms. These are phrases we coin (often by adding a previously unnecessary modifier) to distinguish the old way of things from the new: “Store” becomes brick-and-mortar retail (as opposed to e-commerce), “airplane” becomes a prop-plane (rather than a jet). Our language about music is similarly rife with retronyms: acoustic guitar, analog recording and (perhaps most ubiquitously) live music. For most of human history, the music you heard was by necessity made by the people around you, meaning there was little need to specify that music as local, much less live. But in a world where AI-generated songs are increasingly common (even topping some charts), retronyms will no doubt proliferate, and another may increasingly find a space in our musical vocabularies: human music.
This was the retronym that came to mind as I spent time with Dan White’s “A Portrait of Kansas City Jazz: From Al Bartee to Lonnie’s Reno Club,” (recently the subject of an exhibition at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum). The book presents photographs of jazz musicians on the Kansas City scene spanning a nearly 40-year period from 1987 to 2025. While it contains its share of jazz legends and heavy-hitters, it never approaches hero worship, and it also goes far beyond tourism-board-approved local color. Instead, White’s photography shows an artist’s concern for art — a very human eye for fellow humans — and jazz historian Chuck Haddix provides background text for the captions and some fascinating (and equally humanizing) anecdotes from several musicians.
White’s approach to capturing these images shows certain affinities with the genre he documents. In an echo of the old jazz adage, “It’s the notes you don’t play,” White leaves strategic gaps in his portraits. The single eye gazing out as the other is obscured beneath a hat (Al “Delightful De” Bartee), a piano lid (Elbert “Coots” Dye), or a pair of glasses (Orville “Piggy” Minor) is a recurring motif. Absences like these establish a play of distance and proximity: Regardless of how a shot is framed, the photographs feel neither alienatingly standoffish nor overly intimate.
In a more fundamental resonance with jazz, White’s portraits combine careful preparation with responsiveness to the moment, especially evident in portraits of Daahoud Williams and Chloe McFadden. Despite longstanding clichés about jazz as “pure spontaneity,” the most transcendent improvisers come into the jam with a bevy of licks, countless hours logged in the woodshed, and a horn they know backwards and forwards. This is no frivolous freedom. Similarly, White notes in his opening artist statement that a freewheeling, spontaneous approach to photography in jazz clubs is simply inadequate, readily resulting in poor quality images that are “difficult for the viewer and unfair to the musicians.” To avoid this, White chooses to carefully set up the lighting and context for each portrait, but this is not about top-down control. More than anything, the good photographer (like the good improviser) has put in the work that allows them to be responsive, not just to the moment itself, but to the people sharing in it.
White’s artist statement concludes with a tinge of regret: “I only wish I had started sooner.” It’s a sentiment likely to be shared by many who pick up the book, whether longtime connoisseurs of Kansas City jazz or recent transplants with only a vague sense of jazz’s place in the city. But even if White’s book doesn’t send us running to the jazz clubs, it’s well worth our time to look at these musicians through his lens. Seeing them is no substitute for hearing them, but it should absolutely be part of the experience. Kansas City jazz is, after all, a profoundly human music.
For more information, www.kcjazzportraits.org/book.
–Dan Vanderhamm
